Potion Explosion
Review

Potion Explosion (2015) is a collecting game where you study potion-making and compete to be crowned the best student in the class. You collect Ingredient marbles to complete Potion cards that enable special abilities. It is like a board game version of Bejewelled, where you hunt for that one move to trigger a chain reaction that explodes you towards victory.

You play as a student in a Potions class, tasked with completing the most potions in one lesson. You take Ingredient marbles from the shared dispenser and match them with the coloured spaces on your Potion cards. The fun and the challenge centre around the novel Ingredient marble dispenser. As you take marbles from the track the others roll down and if the same colours touch you get them too. Think ahead and you can create chain reactions that get you loads of marble Ingredients for your Potions.

As you play, you complete more Potions, which enable special actions that create more opportunities for longer chain reactions. If you get stuck, you can ask the professor for help, losing victory points, but also potentially setting up a bigger chain reaction resulting in you getting more Ingredient marbles to use. So, each turn, you must choose which marble to take, always aiming to gain the most possible marbles.

It seems super simple while you are just adding a few marbles to your potions. But the real action is in the scenarios you set up that trigger a huge chain reaction giving you a whole hand full of marbles to use. So even if you feel like you are losing, suddenly you can rush past your opponents to victory.

Our examiner, Rob Prior, first checked Potion Explosion 15 months ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 9 months ago.