With some big box board games taking five to six hours to play, the best practice is to have the game set up and ready to go before your board game buddies arrive, but I prefer another approach. My go-to move is to start with a warm-up game, which you whip out and play a few rounds of before getting stuck into a longer experience. Think of this kind of game as an appetiser before the main course. One such game that fits into this category is Potion Explosion, a pick-up-and-play resource-gathering game with an added puzzle element and a fun primary gimmick. In fact, Potion Explosion is such a tasty appetiser that you might forget all about the bigger meal and stick with the finger food instead.
Designed by Lorenzo Silva, Andrea Crespi and Stefano Castelli, and published by Horrible Guild, Potion Explosion is a two-to-four-player game that sees you embody witches and wizards during their final exams. Taking a range of volatile ingredients and brewing an array of powerful potions, the player who concocted the most, or most difficult, potions will be named the Student of the Year, walking away with a magical masters and the win.
Potion Explosion’s gameplay is brilliantly simple, meaning you’ll spend very little time reading the rules and far more time actually playing the game. The aim is to brew potions that are worth victory points at the end of the game; the more complex the potion, the higher the VP value. To do this, you’ll need to collect the required ingredients, which, thematically, are Unicorn Tears, Dragon Smoke, Ogre Mucus and Fairy Dandruff, but, in practice, are different coloured marbles. You’ll take one marble from the communal Dispenser and add it to a slot on one of your potions that matches the colour, completing the potion once all of the slots are filled.
Set up in five minutes and back in the box within 30
So far, so simple. The aforementioned puzzle element comes into play when selecting which marble to take. While, you can only take one marble per turn, if by taking that marble you cause two others of the same colour to collide, it causes an explosion. If an explosion occurs, you collect all marbles of that colour that are touching. If removing those marbles causes another explosion, you take those as well until two different coloured marbles hit, and everything calms back down.
At the beginning of the game, you pour all of the coloured marbles into the top of the Dispenser, which filters them down into five rows, ensuring that there’s always an explosion waiting to happen. Once you fill all of the slots on a potion and complete it, you return all of the ingredients to the Dispenser, returning them to the pool. The physical component is so satisfying, but it demands that you play on a flat surface, otherwise, you’ll constantly be moving marbles from one row into another, which can be a bit of a drag.
As a student, you need to prioritise, you can’t just be brewing every potion at once. To keep things tidy, each player is given a Desk board with two Bunsen burners set up, ready to brew. This means that at any given time you can only have two potions on the go. The Desk board also comes complete with a retort flask that can be used to store up to three marbles separate from your current potions. This allows you to keep ingredients for future use if you’ve already met the colour requirements for your current potions. If you’ve filled your retort flask and can’t use the remaining ingredients on your turn, back into the Dispenser they go.
Like a true student, you’re working area will be a mess of potions and marbles by the end
If you’re fingertips away from completing a potion but can’t quite create an explosion big enough to grab the ingredients you need, you can always ask for a Little Help. In taking a Little Help token, you can grab one more marble from the Dispenser to finish off a potion, however this pull cannot create an explosion – they’re one and done. Like any exam, accepting help lessens your grade, so each Little Help token is worth -2 victory points at the end of the game.
The potions you create aren’t just for show either, you can drink them to give you a mystical edge. Each of the eight different potion types has a different effect that can swing momentum into your favour. The Potion of Prismatic Joy allows you to place ingredients into an incomplete potion regardless of its colour, the Sands of Time potion lets you activate another potion that you’ve already drunk, and the Elixir of Blind Love enables you to steal all of the ingredients in another player’s retort flask. Not all potions are as helpful as others, but these one-time-use buffs are fun and add a bit of jeopardy to the game.
At the start of the game, depending on how many players there are, you’ll form a Countdown Stack of Skill tokens, each worth four victory points at the end of the game. Skill tokens are earned when a player brews three of the same potion, or if they can make five different kinds. The end of the game is triggered when all Skill tokens from the Countdown Stack have been collected, prompting one final round of play.
Returning the ingredients to the Dispenser is satisfying…if they roll in correctly
Once this has happened, all of the budding witches and wizards add up the point values on their potions, any points scored from Skill tokens and, of course, minus points for accepting a Little Help. The potion-making pupil with the highest score wins the professor’s affection and the game.
Final Thoughts
I’m a huge fan of games that can be taught and played within an hour. Of course, I’ll always love the afternoon epics that take hours upon hours to get through, but there’s something special about a game that can go from shelf to table and back again without caffeine and determination. Potion Explosion is simple, colourful fun that’s made all the more enjoyable by an added puzzle element that makes you feel like a true wizard when you have a great turn. While the gravity-fed Dispenser is a pain if your table is on a lean, what it brings to the whimsical theme more than makes up for the slight frustration.
Review copy supplied by the publisher
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