Potion Explosion Digital First Impressions

Potion Explosion mixes Bejeweled with resource management to make potions.

But how does it play digitally?

Dear students, it’s time for the final exams of the Potions class! The rules are always the same: Take an ingredient marble from the dispenser and watch the others fall. If you connect marbles of the same colour, they explode and you can take them, too! Complete your potions using the marbles you collect, and drink them to unleash their magical power. Remember, though, that to win the Student of the Year award, being quick won’t be enough: you’ll also need to brew the most valuable potions in Potion Explosion!

Potion Explosion Gameplay

A playthrough of the tutorial game for Potion Explosion. This demo will teach you the rules then let you finish the game off on your own.

In short, players are collecting gems to create potions that not only provide points but also abilities to help make further potions.

Theme

I’m on board with this being magic students taking an exam, that’s all good.

But I don’t understand the gem thing and why you can claim connecting ingredients? I’m not sure this is explained anywhere.

Components & Artwork

The physical game looks really good. The digital version obviously misses this great looking gem arrangement to play with. Getting your hands on those marbles and adding them to your dual-layer indented potion boards will be more fun than just clicking.

Potion Explosion Summary

Positives

Playing the gem game to get those ingredients is a nice little mini-game in itself. Checking out what you need vs what you can get vs what you can store, then making a good play is satisfying.

Completing potions then using their abilities to combo gaining ingredients for more potions is also very satisfying. You can pull off some really great turns and score big.

The engine building is fun but you also need to select the potions you’ll fill next carefully. You don’t want to have too much of one colour requirement so you need to diversify there. But you also need to take the potion type (for bonus points) and point value into consideration.

Negatives

Obviously, the digital game loses out on not having the physical marble game there. I have played Gizmos which has a similar marble deployment system and it is obviously much more fun in the real world.

There enough to this game to be interesting.

Summary

I used the word ‘satisfying’ a couple of times and that’s exactly what it is. These light game with a bit of an engine-building element always have that feeling.

But the issue here is that digitally, it doesn’t really give you much to do. You click a thing, your storage flasks fill up, you can automatically add them to potions and cash them in… That’s it. It would be more interesting physically.

But not that much more I would think. I’ll probably give this one a miss.

Jesta ThaRogue