The new Quetzal is here!

What is Quetzal?

It is a digital board game originally inspired by the famous Pictionary and Taboo, that gradually evolved and grew into a mature project with its own personality.

The first version of Quetzal was born from my personal need and from the one of my friend Marco Perna to have a board game we could play with our families and friends.
A game that also had enough flexibility to allow future expansions and new game modes.

In a few weeks Quetzal became an Android app. Play tests followed shortly after, with consequential improvements to the game system.

Over the years Quetzal became a mature project, with more than 15 expansion packages and many quality improvements that only a digital game can offer compared to a physical one inside a box.

The new version

In 2020 the game went through a redesign process: the whole process has been rewritten from scratch using modern and more maintainable technologies.

Today the new Quetzal is finally publicly available with many new features and improvements. Game experience is now smoother and graphics are fresher and lighter to the eye.

The interface is more user-friendly and has been amended to solve small usability issues present in the old version.

There are three game modes:

• Classic mode: Each team plays a limited number of turns. In this mode it is really important to score as many points as possible each turn, choosing words’ categories very carefully and estimating how much time will be needed.
• Time attack: Each team has an overall amount of time for the whole match to guess as many words as possible. Every second spent during a turn is subtracted from the total amount of time at your team’s disposal. It is important to be strategic, play fast and decide if a word is really worth the time you’ll spend or if it’s better to just skip the turn and save the time.
• Taboo: Each turn, a member of your team will play as the Cluegiver: their job is to verbally describe as many words as possible avoiding the use of the listed taboo words.

For those who are interested in the technical aspect, Quetzal was built entirely using React Native, an open-source framework that allows to create native apps for Android and iOS using Javascript code. The result is a modular code that is easy to maintain yet well-performing at the same time.

As said above, Quetzal can be download for free from Google Play by clicking the button below: