Potion Explosion: The Fifth Ingredient

Board Game Geek Reviews

1. 5 out of 10

   crusador84

   This is a fairly good expansion to potion explosion and it does give you new potions to play around with. The addition of professors does change the strategy a little but it does slow the game down slightly with the additional bonus tokens.

2. 6.5 out of 10

   Abdul

   Good expansion that adds some rule changing powers. Fairly easy to integrate with the base game, though the wild marbles can be a bit fiddly.

3. 9 out of 10

   Darkholyone

   Makes the base game more interesting. It introduces a new ingredient, seven teachers, and four more potions. The new ingredient serves as a wild card, letting you put them anywhere in your potions. They start in the bubbling cauldron, and you must use the effects of the new potions or teachers to bring them into play. The teachers changes the basic rules of the game depending who is being used. The changes range from penalties for dropping marbles on the table, to positive effects such as being able to erase a help penalty by using two of the same color ingredient from your hand. The new potions are both familiar and new. The familiar potions change up familiar abilities from the base game such as grabbing matching potions from the same row instead of the column, or changing a single color in your hand into another color. The other two potions make use of the cauldron. One switches out an ingredient from your hand with one in the cauldron, while the other steals an ingredient from another player and then switches it out. Overall it adds to the game, but with more potions and a wide arrange of rule changes the teachers can bring, it can be a little overwhelming. I highly suggest using a method such as rolling a dice to determine which potions and teachers you use. Personally I like to shuffle the teachers and change them every complete round (when it becomes first player) so that strategies change constantly.