I am super excited to start progress on Thoughts of the Flock. This is going to be reviews and thoughts from my friends and fellow gamers. They have all levels of gaming experience. Today we are going to have an actual review by one of the flock! Mars is a great friend and you may know him as Voices of Mars or Mats by Mars. I hope you enjoy!
-WarBird signing off.
Potion Explosion Review by Mars
Over at GAMA 2016 (Las Vegas, Nevada) I overheard about this “Candy Crush”-like game called Potion Explosion that is going to be published by CoolMiniOrNot (CMON). Sadly I didn’t have time to demo the game and all I saw was the box. The one thing that intrigued me was “Candy Crush”. I know my wife is a big fan of the mobile game and I thought she would love to play Potion Explosion. I waited, and waited, until GenCon 2016 hits and I was able to secure a copy!
Since I had a demo copy that was already built, my initial reaction was “OOHHHH that’s a cool mechanic”. The tray holds the “ingredients” in place and they will slide down when one of them is picked up. Here’s a picture of the tray:
The goal of the game is to create potions by using the ingredients on the tray. Each potion has a special effect that you could use to help you pick more ingredients, thus creating other potions faster. Each potion also has a set of random victory points assigned to them. Potion Explosion supports 2 to 4 wizards who are up for the challenge. The wizard with the highest victory point total wins the game!
The main mechanic of the game is fairly simple; you grab a colored ingredient as part of your “Regular Pick” and add it to you pool or straight to the one of the potions you are brewing. They are color coded so it is very easy to figure out which ingredients you need. Now after you pick an ingredient, the other ingredients will roll down and bump another ingredient. If they are of the same colors, this will create an EXPLOSION, and you get to pick those ingredients as well. Once you pick those, and more ingredient rolls down and matches the color of the one they bump, more explosions are created. Rinse and repeat until you cannot pick up any more ingredients.
You can get “A Little Help” by picking up a -2 token (will be deducted at the final phase), and pick up 1 more ingredient but if you pick up an ingredient this way, you cannot create explosions. Also, like I have mentioned, each potion has their own abilities like stealing from your opponent’s pool, pick up 2 different colored potions that are touching, etc.
Potion Explosion is a very easy to learn and like I predicted, the wife loved it! We both love the new mechanic that is being introduced here and seeing strings of “explosions” is an awesome sight! We can’t help to OOHH and AAAHH as a player manage to grab 10 ingredients in successions of explosions due to careful planning and a little bit of luck. My next goal is to teach this to my mom because she loves puzzle games.
Potion Explosion is MSRP’d at $50 and plays for roughly 20 minutes per player. You can order at Amazon here: http://amzn.to/2b9YJGr
WarBird Gaming 