varingblaarAlchemists
Spoiler warning: If you haven't played Alchemists, I suggest you do so before going any further. If this spoils it for you, it's not my fault.You have been warned.
I've played this a bunch of times, but we just finished our first online game on Board Game Arena.
The first thing to note, the game needs an app. Unless you're planning on passing one phone around, everyone needs to input the same code on their apps so they have the same answers. It takes a few minutes to sort out before the game can start. Technically it can be played without the app, but the person with the answer sheet can't play, or shouldn't even be at the table. Playing on BGA avoids this problem, at the cost of a tangibility that makes it difficult for some people to grok the game.
So anyway...
Layers on Layers
So there are 8 ingredients. They each match one of 8 alchemicals (we call it a compounds). Mixing any two ingredients produces a potion which is either positive or negative and one of three colours. This tells you the polarity for that colour on both ingredients, one is big and the other small. Start crossing out options.
So you're basically playing Cluedo, trying to interpret any information about ingredients to eliminate options. But there's only one of each compound that only maps to one ingredient, so you can also eliminate options horizontally. So Cluedo meets Sudoku?
Then we publish research about our findings. You pay money to publish research. You can also endorse someone's research and pay them a fee (license? commission?). But if you think they're wrong, you can debunk their published research but you must be able to prove why it's wrong. The scientific method works!
Wait There's More
But we can't just mix ingredients to see what potions they make to deduce compounds, we still have a whole game to play!
- First pick whether you want to go first or get more stuff.
- Last player gets to place their action cubes first, so the first player can see what everyone else is doing before picking actions.
- Go around the board clockwise, doing each action if a player chose that action. Get ingredients, turn them into gold, sell potions to adventurers, buy stuff that helps, publish research, debunk someone's research to publish corrections, test potions on students, test potions on yourself...
- Every couple rounds there's an extra step where players get rewards for keeping up, or punished for falling behind, so the game pushes you to publish half-arsed theories.
Selling potions is an entire mini-game on its own, with players blindly bidding a discount to jump the queue and sell first.
The Flow is Weird
Maybe it's just my group. It feels like the game is trying to push towards publishing research, so other players have things to debunk, so reputation moves around more. It's impossible to have perfect information before publishing, because it would take too many turns. But also there are items that help but they cost money, and it also costs money to publish research. Also the action cubes require a certain level of action economy because you can't do everything every round. And there's only 6 rounds...
The detail that bugs me the most, is that Transmute happens before Sell a Potion. Transmute is a guaranteed 1 or 2 Gold (sometimes more with the right items). If you risk selling a potion it could pay 5 or 6 Gold, but there are several ways this can be messed with. Players can outbid you and make the potion you planned. And if after this you don't have money, you can basically scrap the rest of the round, because buying something or publishing research or sometimes even testing on students costs money.
But there's a consolation prize! If two cubes fail to do their job, you get a card that helps! Half the time the Favour card doesn't actually help.
But Here's the Things
It's actually fun! I know reading through this it seems the game is overly complicated, and requires everyone to get their app sorted , and every time someone uses the app they get distracted by notifications in the middle of their own turn, and if there's even one new player it takes half an hour to explain the alchemical stuff, and every time potions sell the whole game stops for a separate bluffing game... But it's actually fun!
We're all struggling to understand the same underlying system, we're all rushing to get research published that we're only half sure about, we're all trying to sell the potion to get the money to buy the thing that helps with the other thing. It's frantic and confusing and a lot of fun! There's a communal feeling of "I don't know what I'm doing" and that's OK! The game is deliberately a little confusing. The game is balanced that it's highly unlikely to get all the compounds right, and then not enough turns to do anything with that information. That's the point. It's all educated guessing.
If you're unsure, watch a couple videos that explain the game and then get your friends to try it online. It's in beta so standard free accounts can play. Also, it's in beta so there might be a weird edge-case rule that's misinterpreted but I've had no issues with beta games on BGA so if it's just a vibe check for the game you'll be fine.
