We’re big Harry Potter fans in this house, so when a game comes along that lets you brew magical potions we had to give it a go.
In Potion explosion, players are trying to gather ingredients to complete magical potions. Each potion had a different level of difficulty based on which ingredients it needs, and the harder it is to complete the more points it’s worth. Whichever player has the most points at the end wins.
Getting ingredients doesn’t involve opening dusty bottles full of weird smells. Instead you you have a dispenser full of glass marbles that randomly fall into five rows. Each marble represents an ingredient and on your turn you get to remove one. If that makes two or more others of the same colour touch, you get to take those as well, and so on. They make a satisfying ‘clink’ when they smack together and it’s a lot of fun when you manage to set off a chain of collisions and collect a pile of ingredients in one go.
Let’s say that you need blue and black marbles to complete your potion. If you took the black one from the middle row the three blue would touch and you’d get those too, and you can see there’s a black just at the top of the dispenser as well that would roll down and touch the three black marbles at the bottom as well, giving you five black and three marbles from that go. Kaboom! Ingredients galore!
You may not need that many, but you might be able to store them for later or if the other players are working on potions that need them you have just denied them the easy move.
You can work on two potions at a time in your little laboratory, and you can store some extra ingredients for later in case you need them. There’s a total of eight different types of potion, and even within the same type they need different ingredients so you need to keep an eye on what is coming up on the stack and plan your collecting around that as well as on what’s in front of you now..
Once you’ve completed a potion you can ‘drink’ it. The game is a whole lot more fun if this involves you picking it up, taking a swig and making the appropriate sound effects, but basically it just means you activate it’s special effect.
Each of the eight types have a different effect. One lets you take a marble of each colour from the bottom of the dispenser, one lets you use any colour of ingredient in your flask in a potion, another lets you steal all items from another players flask. You can chain these together as well to help you complete more potions. Once that’s done you turn them around to show that they have been used, but the points from them still count at the end of the game.
We’d had our eye on this game for a while, but there were reports of the cardboard dispenser in the first edition breaking so we held off until we heard that they were releasing a new version. The only change in the second edition is that the dispenser has been replaced by a plastic one.
The game pieces are made of thick cardboard and there are no printing errors that I’ve noticed. The artwork is fun and consistent and fits the theme perfectly and the addition of proper old school glass marbles really adds something to the game that plastic marbles wouldn’t have. There’s even a bag of spare marbles included in case you lose some. The box is solid and the rule book is clear and helpful.
We did find an issue and I’m not sure if it’s a problem with the overall manufacturing or just our copy, but the new dispenser has a drawer at the back that is meant to let you store the marbles when not in use. There seems to be some additional plastic on ours that means that you can’t open it. I’ll try and fix it at some point but it’s a bit disappointing that it was shipped out like this.
Another issue is that the box insert isn’t great. The potions are an odd shape and even though the rule book shows you how to store them we find that they tend to fall out and end up loose in the box even when stored horizontally. We ended up putting them into ziplock bags which does solve the issue but I’d have liked to have seen some more effort go into the design here.
Setup is a pain too. You’re only meant to play with six of the eight potions at a time so some sort of clever dividers to keep them separate would have greatly helped. Even if you’re careful to separate them out when packing up, they all get mixed up by the time you want to play again because of the insert problem. Because the dispenser takes up a lot of space they seem to have crowded everything else together without too much thought.
Once you get past the few issues mentioned above, you’ll find that there’s a really fun game here. While it does look like a kids game, and I’m sure that older kids could play with no problem, it has enough depth that we really enjoy it ourselves. In some respects you will get out what you put in – get into the spirit of things and add your own sound effects to the action and it’s far more entertaining than without them.
We’ve played multiple times with two players and it works really well. Most of the time you’re working on your own potions and not interacting with the other player that much so there’s no hint that anything is missing from the lack of more players. More players should be fun though, as it gives you more flasks to steal from and a higher turnover in the dispenser. The game is not so heavy that it discourages conversation and it only takes about half an hour to play with two.
I’d rate it 3.5/5, with points lost due to the design and manufacturing issues.
Stacking the deck 