Potion Explosion Review

boardgamequest.com:

This game has been out for a while but much to my surprise we have yet to publish a formal tabletop review for Potion Explosion here at BGQ! I have had a lot of gameplay time with this over the years and I’m so happy to say that I finally have my own copy for all the good marble action. Gone are the days when I needed to go to someone’s game night to play a game that, in my opinion, continues to hold its own.

Potion Explosion is a puzzle and set collection game for 2-4 players that takes about 45 minutes to play. The best experience is with four players for more variability in the marble dispenser patterns and additional potion chaos.

Players take turns choosing one ingredient marble from the dispenser, which can trigger one or more explosions. An explosion is defined as two ingredient marbles of the same color colliding, which enables the player to take all the same-color ingredients connected in that collision. If additional explosions take place after taking the initial ingredients from the first collision, those are also taken by the player, and so on until there are no valid collisions left.

At any point, once per turn, the player can ask for a Little Help from the professor to take one ingredient marble from the dispenser without triggering explosions. However, each of these tokens is a 2-point deduction at the end of the game. Players can also augment their turn by drinking a completed potion for its corresponding effect.

Ingredients from explosions can be placed in the player’s Ingredient Pool or on a corresponding color of a Potion tile, with the goal of completing the potion for both its effect and the set collection scoring. Players are trying to complete their third potion of a kind and/or fifth potion of a different kind to collect skill tokens, and each potion is also worth a varying number of points at the end of the game.

In a world of cards, cubes, and dice, it’s exciting to find more games that like to use fun components like marbles! It also adds