It's a very unusual game, in part because it uses an app. Each of the game's six ingredients have a corresponding 'alchemical' comprised of three parts: red, blue and green circles. A circle may be large or small, and each contains a symbol of either positive or negative. During the game, you mix these ingredients together to make potions (or soup) and at the start the app randomly (and secretly) assigns each ingredient its alchemical.
The game itself at first seems like a worker placement thing: you use actions to gather ingredients, turn them into gold, combine them to sell potions to adventurers, use gold to buy artefacts, and test potions - on either a willing (sometimes more willing than others) student, or yourself. Each potion has a symbol, and you keep track of how you made things behind your individual screen.
And then you realise it's a deduction game. As it goes on, you use the information you're gathering about how the various ingredients interact to figure out what each ones alchemical is. If, for instance, scorpions and frogs combine to make a potion of speed, this is defined by a blue plus. You don't know yet what eithers' alchemical is, but you do know that scorpions and frogs alchemical won't have a blue minus on them, so these can be eliminated on your secret pad.
And as the game continues further, and you gather more knowledge on how the ingredients interact, you can announce the theories to the world you've developed in you secret lab/pad, by placing the alchemical and ingredient together with a seal that represents your theory. You gain reputation by doing so - but theories can be debunked (even by yourself) later, so there's room for a little shenanigan-ing here.
There's more to it than that, but basically the app comes into it for combining ingredients to make potions, selling them and testing them, and checking everyone's theories at the end of the game. In the final round there's even an opportunity to show off your potion-making to the wider world and gain - or lose - reputation. Inevitably, you ultimately live or die by how good an alchemist you are - if your theories are lousy, you lose rep. And - though the game doesn't mention it in the rules - if you make a mistake on your secret pad, you also lose rep: both in the game (can't really have a theory about scorpions if you've managed to cross every alchemical off) and in real life, as you realise in your foolishness you've eliminated every single alchemical for mangrove root.
Stanley joined me halfway through a playthrough and afterwards announced "It's a brain-burner". And it is. Not only the deduction, which has the get-there-first tension reminiscent of Mystery of the Abbey, but how the actions play out. Turn order is really important, as there's a Fresco-style benefit to getting up early and taking actions first. There's also a fight (in the two-player game) to sell potions to adventurers, with some blind-bidding thrown in to decide the winning vendor. It's one I definitely want to play again (maybe with three), but I think we'd need three hours for a first play, so it might not be one for a Tuesday...
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