hi welcome to watch it played my name is Rodney Smith in this video we're going to learn the two to four player game potion explosion designed by Stephano Castelli Andrea Crespi and lorenzo silva and published by cool mini or not final exams are upon you but this is no ordinary school you're a student at the horrible Orem sorcery Academy for witty witches and wizards you have all the ingredients in front of you but now you just have remember how to put together these concoctions to impress the professor and prove that you're the greatest magic user in the graduating class so join me at the table and let's learn how to play to set up you'll place this dispenser in the middle of the table and you'll need to assemble it the first time you play but then it will go back into the box hole at the end of your games now you take the ingredient marbles and you dump them here into the tag now this could be a bit noisy so I'll stop talking while I do this you'll need to ensure they all roll down until these five tracks are full if marbles get stuck at the top of a row because that row is full just really push it towards the next closest row that needs to be filled so in this case we're done the game also comes with a small bag of additional marbles in case you lose any so you can put these back in the box I should point out during this video it may seem like some of the marbles are magically moving around the tray but that's just me making adjustments to set things up for examples that I want to show you now give each player a desk board to put in front of themselves in this video I'll be setting up for a two-player game then you give the player who most recently prepare to drink the first player token these are the potion tiles you'll notice they are double-sided with one side showing the potions ingredients and this great banner and the other side showing it completed with a green banner ensure they are all ingredients side up and separate them into the eight different potion types which you can distinguish by the style of their toppers and the symbol found here you'll now remove two of the potion stacks either randomly or by choice but for your first game it recommends you remove these two potions known as the bomb of uttermost stickiness and the filter of lava Manson from the stacks that remain you'll find two potions in each that show this star symbol collect and shuffle these and then place a number of them on the table equal to two times the number of players so in this two-player game we'll put out four starting with the first player and going clockwise around the table each will choose one of these potions then everyone will take a second one starting with the last player and going counterclockwise around the table the two potions you've collected are then dropped into the Bunsen burners found on your desk now collect all the remaining potions that were not chosen by players and shuffle them together then divide them into five stacks as evenly split up as possible again ensuring their recipe side up finally put out these little help and skill tokens from the skills take a number of them to separate into a pile known as a countdown stack with four players put six into the stack or five with three players or four with two players and that's the setup in potion explosion players will be trying to gather the necessary ingredients to complete the potions on their desk which will then be worth points at the end of the game and even more points if you can collect them into certain sets the game is played over a series of turns taken in clockwise order starting with the first player on your turn you must take any one visible ingredient marble from this area of the dispenser the only restriction is that it cannot be one of these partially visible marbles here at the top of each row we'll see that there are other ways to claim additional ingredients on your turn but taking one this way is known as your regular pick this is very important because only during your regular pick can you trigger explosions when you take a marble the row will slide down to close the gap and if this causes two ingredients to click together that share the same color an explosion happens and then you take those marbles and any connected to it that share the same color once those exploded marbles are removed if that creates a new collision between two matching marbles you take those in any matching adjacent ones sharing the same color as well and you continue like this until no more matching collisions occur in this case the red marbles here just rolled down and hit the edge they didn't clack together so no explosion occurred marbles you're collecting should just be kept in your hand once returned before or after collecting all the marbles from your regular pick a player may ask the professor for a little help by taking one of these tokens from the supply which will subtract two points from your final score but then allows you to grab any single marble from the dispenser keep in mind because this is not your regular pick it will not trigger any explosions even if matching ingredients collide so from this you will only ever gain one new ingredient either way on your turn you'll hopefully end up with marbles in hand that you can use first you must place ingredients from your hand onto any matching colored holes of your potions keeping in mind that once placed an ingredient may not be moved sometimes you'll have more than one option for example with these two blue marbles I could put both them here or put one here and one onto this potion I mean in this case I will split them up putting one here and one here and with the two red potions again I could put one here and one over here but I think I'll do this in order to complete this potion and we'll see how that works in just a moment if you have any ingredients left over that you can't put into your potions then you must place them onto the flask here these marbles are known as your ingredient pool you may freely move ingredients between your flask and your hand but at most the flask can hold three marbles at any one time for example if I had also collected these marbles then I could place one here but I would have a left over and we'll see what happens to those a little bit later I should also mention you can freely move ingredients from your flask to your potions when the ingredients match if during your turn all the holes to a potion have been filled in it is complete and its marbles are dumped back into the dispenser any time you return marbles to the tray make sure you follow a couple of guidelines first of all randomly roll them in don't purposely direct them to a certain area then if any gets stuck on the top of the tray because that row is full just slide them to the nearest one that has space for more when a potion has been completed flip it over to the completed side take it from the burner and place it into an area that you'll reserved for your completed potions these will be worth points based on the values shown here on its green banner you're also reminded of this value on the other side before the potion is actually completed completed potions also have an additional benefit at any point during your turn you may drink one or more of them each has a one use special power represented by a symbol found here and to show that you've used it you spin it upside down and resolve its effect but don't worry used potions are still worth their points at the end of the game I'm you can use any number of potions on your turn just make sure that you fully resolve the effects of one before you use another you can even use a potion that you just completed but right now let's take a look at the different abilities the potions provide and we'll see how they work this is the potion of wisdom it simply allows you to take any one ingredient of your choice from the dispenser keep in mind potion effects never cause explosions so you don't collect additional marbles even if matching ones would collide here's the potion of magnetical attraction with this you take any two adjacent differently colored ingredients from the same track this bomb of uttermost stickiness causes you to take two or more adjacent ingredients of the same color from a single track the abyssal draught lets you take up to one ingredient of each color from the bottom positions of the slide track but at most you can only take one marble from a single track so looking here I could take a black a blue and any one of these three yellows let's say for example I take this one this one and this one here I wasn't able to take red because there wasn't a red on the bottom track and although there's one here now this is from a row I already took a marble from this is the filter of lava man seing it lets you pick a single ingredient from a track and then remove up to five of those same marbles from that track and then you drop them back into the dispenser so perhaps I'll take yellow from this row here once they're removed if any other yellows roll down I don't take those as well because they weren't available when I started the action after drinking the elixir of blind love you take into your hand all of the ingredients from an opponent's flask the potion of prismatic joy lets you place all the ingredients from your flask into any incomplete spaces on potions but their colors don't have to match the holes they go into finally we have the sands of time which after drinking allows you to activate the ability of another potion that you already drank so maybe I target this one and then take two new marbles so those are all the different potion effects remember on your turn you must take a single marble from the dispensary that's known as your regular pick then you can get help from the professor if you want and drink as many different potions as you'd like to you can perform these actions in any order but you may only get help and take a regular pick during your turn now you must discard into the tray any marbles you still have in your hand that can't go on to your potions or can't be placed into your flask or swapped with it so I'll dump these in here like this now for any empty burners you might have on your desk one at a time take a new potion from the top of any of these stacks to fill it in for example I might choose to take this potion because it requires yellow and black ingredients and I already have those in my flask but it's important to note you cannot place any more ingredients during this turn so you'll have to wait until your next turn to start moving ingredients from your flask to your potions let's pretend we're farther into the game and one of the players has completed all of these potions that we see here once you've filled in your empty burners you then check to see if you've completed a set of three of the same type of potion these would all share the same tops as well as the same abilities if so you then gain a skill token from the countdown stack keep in mind once you've scored a set of three from a particular potion type you can't gain another skill token from completing three more of that same type however if we later completed these as well that we'd have a new set of three and could then take a skill token you also gain a token if you've completed five different potions but when a potion has been included in a set to give you a token it can't be included in a different set for example I have four different potions here I couldn't then use this potion to create the fifth however if at the end of my turn I also had this completed potion I would have gained the skill token for this set and then for this one as well after gaining skills if a player has taken the last skill from the count down stack or if there are no more potions left to take from these stacks the end of the game is triggered the game will now continue in clockwise order until the player to the right of the player holding the first player token completes their next turn ensuring that everyone has taken an equal number of turns well this is happening if other players would be eligible to gain new skill tokens they simply take them from this pool then all players add up their points from the potions they've collected the skill tokens they've gained and then subtract the points on the helper tokens they took the player with the most points wins in the case of a tie the tied players starting with first player in turn order each take one from the dispenser to try to trigger an explosion the player takes the most marbles in this way is then declared the winner however if some of those tied players end up tying again for the most marbles taken those remaining tied players will continue to draw one ingredient from a track until one of them is broken a tie for the most marbles taken and that's everything you need to know to play potion explosion if you have any questions at all don't hesitate to put them in the comments below and I'll gladly answer them as soon as I get a chance but until the next episode thanks for watching