There are games that make my hands sweat and games that make me take notes, but Alchemists is the only game that makes me take notes with sweaty hands. A modern masterpiece that combines deduction, worker placement, and bluffing in equal measure, Alchemists mixes a multitude of mechanisms into an intoxicating send up of publish-or-perish academia. Upon first glance the game may seem like a whimsical take on Potions class at Hogwarts (and in a way it is), but underneath that boiling cauldron is a fire stoked by the heat of deeply burning brains. It’s no secret that Alchemists can be a somewhat intimidating learn, but many of the best games are. It’s not that the game is particularly opaque or unintuitive. It’s just that there’s so much going on. But there is a hefty reward for taking the time to familiarize yourself with its vast systems and idiosyncrasies: the enjoyment of playing one of the most exciting, unique Euros ever made.
Stripped to its absolute core, Alchemists is a worker placement game played over 6 rounds. Players take on the roles of struggling researchers vying for reputation in the field of alchemy. Each round starts with players selecting different places in turn order which determines whose actions will activate first. Lower places in turn order earn you bonuses for selecting them in the form of “Ingredient” and “Favor” cards. Ingredient cards come in 8 different varieties and are combined to make potions, while Favor cards are used for various one time abilities such as extra actions or cheaper purchases. After turn order selection, in reverse player order (so the first player has the advantage of seeing the actions other players choose), players lay out their action cubes across the available action spaces. While there is technically no “blocking” actions in the game, there are still plenty of consequences to the player order of each individual action which we’ll get to later. Once all players have chosen their actions for the round, the spaces activate one at a time (somewhat similar to Dominant Species), and any players that selected the activated action perform it in player order.
Actions vary from the simple — draw an Ingredient card, transform an ingredient into a gold coin, purchase an “Artifact” card (artifacts grant a variety of persistent effects and even victory points) — to the alchemical — sell a potion, test a potion, drink a potion — to the academic — publish or debunk an alchemical theory. One of the players’ goals each game is to figure out the alchemical makeup of each of the 8 ingredients, and thusly which of the 7 potion types will be made upon combining them. There are positive and negative potions in three different colors, red, green, and blue (representing health, stamina, and wisdom respectively), and also plain good ol’ hydratin’ water. This potion brewing is accomplished with the help of a companion app (yes, the game uses technology, get over it) which helps you mix the ingredients to see what potions they result in. That’s all well and good, but what in the heck is an alchemical? Strap in. Alchemicals are combinations of positive and negative values for all three potion colors that are also parameterized by size. That sentence probably just sounded like gobbledygook, so here’s an example: big red plus, small green plus, small blue minus. Got it? Great, so the way these alchemical combinations determine the resulting potion type is (relatively) simple: it’s all about the matching symbol-color pairs of different sizes. Mixing one ingredient with a large red plus and another with a small red plus will always result in a red plus potion. It’s kinda hard to visualize until you see it in practice, so don’t worry about understanding this system too deeply for the context of this review.
Because the only way to get information on the alchemical makeup of any particular ingredient is to brew a potion with it, you will find yourself doing that a LOT in Alchemists. Typically, you have the choice of testing your potions on yourself or a hapless student of the local alchemy academy. The student doesn’t much like ingesting poisonous liquids however, so if a player earlier in turn order than you happens to serve him a negative potion he will charge any further players a fee of a golden coin for his trouble (little mechanical flourishes like this really help the theme of the game come alive). Testing your potions on yourself ain’t particularly safe either, as negative potions have a variety of detrimental affects to deal with. Red minus potions reduce the number of actions you can take next round, green minus potions force you to go last in turn order, and blue minus potions hurt your reputation score (which is the main way of winning in Alchemists and where points are earned when you successfully publish or debunk theories). However, even when you end up poisoning yourself (or your student), you still gain something very valuable in the game: information. As an example, let’s say you just combined a toad and a feather and it made a red minus potion. You now know that neither ingredient can be made up of any alchemical that includes red pluses (which is half of them). Testing a variety of potions in this way is one of the core deductive elements of the game, and due to the game’s excellent production design and components — information tables, note pads, card stands, privacy screens, etc. — you really do get immersed in the feeling of being an academic researcher in an intensely competitive field.
It ain’t all about the research, though. Knowing something don’t mean crap if no one KNOWS you know it. That’s where publishing comes in. When a player takes the publish action, they declare to the table what they believe the alchemical make up of one of the 8 ingredients is and mark their deduction with a publication seal, earning them reputation points in the process. The brilliance of this system is that you don’t actually have to know what you’re talking about when you do this. You can just lie and claim all sorts of wild things with no basis in reality (though you will almost certainly lose if you go too crazy with this), but what’s a more viable path to victory is the hedge. You see, not all publication seals are created equal. There are 5-point seals and 3-point seals which score either positively or negatively at the end of the game depending on if they were placed on the correct alchemical/ingredient combinations, but also seals that aren’t worth points on their own that allow you to be wrong without being penalized. Publishing with these seals is called “Hedging”, and it’s awesome. Each hedge seal is colored either red, blue, or green and allows you to publish a mistake without penalty as long as the color you are incorrect about matches the color of the seal. Know that the scorpion is red plus, blue minus, but not which green it is? No worries! Hedge green and publish anyways!
It’s important to publish as often as possible in Alchemists for a variety of reasons. The player with the most publications gets a reputation boost at the end of each round, certain combinations of publications earn government grants which pay out additional bonus points and gold, and of course correct seals are worth a ton of end-game victory points. This pressure to publish creates a truly interesting (and often hilarious) meta where no one knows if anyone else around the table actually knows what they are talking about when publishing or if they are merely making guesses. This is made even more interesting by the ability to endorse OTHER players’ publications by placing your seals next to theirs, creating a lot of room for bluffing and sometimes outright lying. It’s great fun to convince the others around the table that your hedged publication is sound in the hopes that they will endorse it incorrectly and pay the price. Mind games abound in your average session of Alchemists. There is a point almost every game where to avoid falling behind you have to start believing some of your opponents’ findings, so you can complete your research and focus on other things. These combined social and logical natures of the deduction in Alchemists is what truly makes it outstanding, and it’s one of the few modern systems that’s managed to make Sleuth feel dated.
Another way to flex your academic chops and earn reputation is by debunking other players’ incorrect theories. This is one of the best and most intriguing aspects of the game, because its function is not arbitrarily bound by the game’s mechanics in any way. What I mean is that to debunk a publication you actually have to logically disprove it using any method you can think of. For instance, you could show the table that you can make a type of potion with it that would be impossible if its alchemical were correct. Or you can prove that there is a discrepancy between two publications by showing that mixing them together doesn’t make the potion it should if they were both correct. This portion of the game is nothing short of magical, in short because it’s real. When a player takes this action, the artificial boundaries of the game cease to exist and the table enters a collective logical sphere operating 100% naturally and outside of designed systems. There is a simplified version of the debunking action available for groups intimidated by such open possibilities, but I highly recommend not using it and going for the whole shebang. It’s a highlight amongst highlights in Alchemists‘ endlessly exquisite design.
There are yet more praises to be sung, because an exceptional amount of detail is also applied to Alchemists‘ narrative. New adventurers come to town every round looking to purchase potions but will only buy one of each requested type, incentivizing alchemists to offer discounts or use their esteemed reputations to subvert the turn order. Alchemy conferences are held at specific times to judge the players based on their number of publications, rewarding additional reputation to players that meet the conference’s requirements and docking points from those who don’t. The artifacts available for purchase are refreshed periodically and do all sorts of interesting things that I will leave for you to explore on your own. Every game also ends with a grand finale potion exhibition where the players have a chance to put their money where their mouth is and prove once and for all their mastery of certain recipes. All of these mechanics and events combine to create an experience that is truly thematic. Admittedly, maybe not in the fantastical elements as much as the academic ones, but hot DARN does this game get my blood pumping. The emotional turmoil of publish or perish has never before been so viscerally expressed in ANY art form. I love it!
The only significant criticism of Alchemists I consider to hold water is that the games can feel very similar after a half-dozen plays or so. I don’t entirely disagree with this, but I also don’t really care. The games I’ve played have all been somewhat alike, yes, but they’ve also all been thrilling. Many of my favorite video games stay virtually identical across multiple play-throughs. Heck, I’ve seen some of my favorite movies dozens of times, and those don’t change at all! I know these comparisons aren’t exactly one-to-one, but the point I’m trying to make is that there’s more to great game design than modularity and breadth of possibilities. People often use the term “replayability” as a synonym for those things, but I find it to be an overly vague word that doesn’t really communicate much. I find Alchemists to be very replayable despite its sameyness, because I enjoy the experience so much that I want to keep returning to it. It’s even partially due to its sameyness that I keep returning to it, because I know I’m going to get a fantastic game out of it every time! I think someone needs to push back a little on this idea that modularity = replayability. There’s nothing wrong with modularity, of course, but there are plenty of other design elements that contribute to the sort of rich experiences that players want to return to over and over again.
Alchemists is great. Truly great. Don’t be put off by the seemingly gimmicky nature of the app as it’s really just a means to an end. The box even includes components that allow it to be played with a moderator instead, so rest assured that if CGE stops supporting the app — or the globe becomes enshrouded in nuclear winter — you will still be able to play the game. In the mean time, why do that when the conveniences of modern technology make it a non-issue? Consider it just one of the many ways Matúš Kotry thinks about games a little differently than your average Euro designer. It’s astonishing that this is his only published design, even if he did work closely with the wonderful Vlaada Chvátil while developing it, and I wait with great enthusiasm to see the next title he ties his name to. If it ends up being only half as good as Alchemists well… heck, it might still be a masterpiece.
Alchemists gets a rating of FIVE out of FIVE, indicating it is ESSENTIAL.