Potion Crush

Board games take their inspiration from a variety of places, and it's only natural that games from other mediums would be one of those places. Still, I was a bit amused to recently come across a game with a principle mechanic that felt cribbed from Candy Crush Saga: Potion Explosion.

Players are each trying to brew a series of potions for the most points possible. Potions all require combinations of ingredients, with more ingredients being worth more points. Each potion also has one of five special powers once completed, which the player can then "drink" to cheat the basic rules of the game one time. A bonus for brewing three of the same power (or one of each of the five) provides another axis for you to care about.

The novelty is in how the potion ingredients are acquired. The four ingredient types are all represented by differently colored marbles, which are randomly arrayed in a five column tray. The "funnel"-type mechanism at the top loosely splits the marbles into the columns, and also covers the top third-or-so of the tray so that you can't tell the exact order of what's up there. On your turn, you pull one marble out of one of the columns, claiming it for yourself. If, when the marbles slide downward to fill the gap, two identically colored marbles are made to touch by what you just removed, then you take ALL the adjacent marbles of that color. If pulling THOSE marbles brings identical colors into contact again, you keep going, chaining the process as long as it will go. The marbles you acquired are then allocated to your two potions in progress, while up to three leftover ingredients can be held on standby for your next turn.

It's a bit of a fickle game. Certainly, you can plan, and you can recognize when a particular move is going to be better than others. But that's not quite strategy so much as pattern recognition. And it's very possible, through no fault of your own, to not have a good move on your turn -- which is particularly painful when you just watched your opponent cascade four matches together and haul off a dozen marbles.

The fact that you can only brew two potions at a time (and that you can't work on a new potion during the same turn you acquired it) does help balance the randomness -- there may be only so much you can do with a windfall. The composition of the potions themselves helps too; they typically require multiples of just two or three ingredients, rather than all four. This means that sometimes, the play on the board that might give you the most marbles won't actually give you a lot of the colors you need at the moment. (That in turn means you might leave a great play for the next player.)

Still, if you struggle to get going early on, that seems to be a problem that will snowball as the game progresses. Completing potions gives you access to special powers, remember, and those powers can set up some pretty major turns. That's great when one special move opens up an opportunity you wouldn't have had; it's not so great when opponents already shined on by luck get more abilities while you are struggling to complete your first potions.

There's a quirky cleverness here that I appreciate, but overall I don't think I enjoyed Potion Explosion quite as much as some other games I've been fortunate to try recently. I'd grade it a B. If you're up for a cute theme and novel mechanic in a fairly quick-to-play wrapper, it might be a good one for you. It's hardly the first "four-player game" where circumstances inevitably conspire against one of the four players. (I'm looking at you, Settlers of Catan.)