Little Alchemists Review

boardgamequest.com:

“Why are there three toads and a container of chicken feet in the kitchen?” my ever-so-patient wife asked me the other day.

“I’m working on something,” I responded as I walked back into the kitchen carrying a blender and a book with a brown paper cover and “Alchemy” scrawled on the front.

“Is that my cookbook?”

I looked at her only glancing down once at the book in my arms before responding, “Maybe.”

“Qwark” a toad, helpfully, chimed in.

“NO!” my wife said as her maternal instincts kicked in. “Isn’t there a board game that can do this for you?”

There is and it’s the subject of today’s review of Little Alchemists which is an app-assisted game of mixing items to brew potions for two to four players aged eight and up. No blending of live frogs required.

The goal of the Little Alchemists is to brew potions to learn what components can make which types of potions. The game is played over several sessions as you start to unlock boxes with additional content that adds various wrinkles to the game. To avoid spoilers, I’m only going to cover the basics but even then, the spoilers would be like telling what happens near the end of the movie Titanic (apologies to the three people who didn’t already know).

On your turn, you can brew a potion and buy ingredients. Ingredients can be purchased from the market for one coin each but the spaces in the market are not filled back in until the end of your turn. There is also a rule that allows you to reshuffle the market if 4 or 5 of the tiles are the same component.

To brew a potion place two tiles on your ingredient holders, without telling anyone what you used, and use the app to take a look at them. The app will tell you what potion you made and you’ll announce it and then place a token on the corresponding slot on tracker behind your screen. This seems to be randomized so the same two ingredients may brew different potions game to game. If you mix two identical ingredients, you’ll get to draw an ingredient from the market but won’t