Alchemists - Playthrough & Review

hi everyone my name is monique and i'm naveen from before you play and today we have another one for you that is also just in time for halloween it is the other alchemy game called alchemists yeah this one's for two to four players plays in about two hours and it's published by cge came out in i believe 2014 and we are going to play it today yes this one is very different from the other one that we just did which is trust me justice this has an app this is a lot of deduction and worker placement yeah it's work replacement it's been a long time since we've done a true work replacement it's one of our favorite mechanisms so today per usual we're going to do the teach the play through and the review there will be time stamps down below if you want to skip around but before we get started if you guys can do some big favor turn on your klingon subtitles just in case we make any errors we can correct them there and if you like videos like this please consider subscribing all right and with that we're gonna get started so if you please direct your attention to the center of the table we are all set up for our two player game of alchemists there's a lot going on we have two boards here and we have our own uh player screens we do so this is one of those games it's a game that has hidden information a lot of it some dnd that's right so in this game we are playing as alchemists and we are doing everything that alchemists do we are trying to gather materials from our environment we are mixing them together to create potions we're selling these potions off for money acquiring cards that'll help us in the long run and of course we're publishing theories we're also debugging them and doing all sorts of stuff it is uh mainly a deduction-based game with worker placement of course but there is a very strong deduction component and so we are going to do our best to explain that aspect to you and to try to demonstrate it in our playthrough we'll try yeah now this game does have an apprentice and a master variant the apprentice variant is the one that we are going to show off today because the master variant is um it is quite a bit more complicated but just know that that exists and in this game a lot of the deduction does rely on an app for your phone now you don't have to use an app but you if you don't use the app you need to have an additional player who is not playing at the table to kind of control those aspects for you right yeah but dexter can't do it but at least it's an option so in this game there are eight different ingredients and these are the ingredient cards they all have the different ingredient symbols on them this is a chicken's foot we have a feather we have a flower a toad there's a mushroom and there are you know three other ones they're all laid out over here oh yeah there you go in addition each ingredient is assigned a specific alchemical token that represents what it is think of it as like their dna and these are what the alchemical tokens look like they all have very similar features there are three different aspects on each of them and they are of three different colors so we have a red a green and a blue aspect and each aspect is either big or small and plus or minus that's literally what all of these look like over the course of the game we are trying to figure out which alchemical token each of these ingredients is assigned to and we're going to be doing that by mixing two different ingredients together to create potions that we're going to have to use in deduction with yep so to be clear there's eight ingredients in eight specific alchemical tokens and the app is going to decide which ones go where so we don't have any clue right now right and so this is what the app looks like when do you go to test ingredients just for demonstration sake so say we're going to mix together these two ingredients the chicken foot and the feather if i were to put them in just like this the app recognizes which cards they are you hit confirm and it'll give you a potion now the potion that it gives you is going to be of one of the three colors and one of the two symbols so this is a blue positive potion the way that it determines that is if you look at both alchemical tokens i'm not saying that these are the ones that are assigned to this but what it does is it looks for the aspect that they both have in common that are the same symbol so in this case blue symbols are positives but they also have to be of opposite sizes so in this example we have a big blue positive here and a small blue positive so if i were to mix these two ingredients together then it would turn out to be a blue positive potion i hope that makes sense the thing about this game though is we are going to have this information we're not going to know this so we have to think backwards and so we're going to be doing this by way of our sheet here that we're going to kind of keep track think like clue where we're taking notes on a piece of paper and so if i were to scan the chicken foot and the feather and i'd get a blue positive potion then what i would do is i would look at my notes here to where the chicken foot is and i would cross off all of the blue negative symbols right all of the all chemical tokens that have blue negative symbols because i know that the blue part is positive so with this deduction you know that 50 of the alchemical tokens are not those ingredients all right you can just cross them all off right the other way that we kind of keep track of our deduction is by our player boards this is what it looks like on the inside there are a lot of these uh circle spots in kind of like a triangular pyramid shape and at the very bottom of our pyramid are all eight ingredients and so when i mixed the foot and the feather together and it made a blue positive potion what i would do is i would take a blue positive token from the supply and i would look at my player screen in the direction of where those two ingredients intersect and i would go ahead and place that blue positive token right there so now i know for the rest of the game that me combining these two ingredients gave me a blue positive potion so that'll help my note taking right so in summary when you mix two ingredients together the aspect that is the same color and symbol but different size is what's going to form the potion now there is one big exception and that is say in this example where we have all three pluses that are all big circles and the other alchemical token is the same thing except they're all three minuses so in this example we do not have a an aspect that is two different sizes that also share the same symbol right and so if i were to mix these two ingredients together it would give me a neutral potion neutral potions will look like this with like a circle with a line through it and that's what it'll show up on the app as well and so those are not as helpful but they still give you information about the two uh ingredients that you're that you're mixing they are basically the exact opposite so they neutralize each other yeah exactly and so if you can get past that whole deduction stage that we just described then the rest of the game is a standard worker placement game yes so we are going to teach this game a little bit differently um this is going to be more of a of an overview where we leave the specifics for the different actions for the gameplay because it is it can be quite complicated to absorb all at once and so the majority of the game is really played on this board the deduction part of it helps us when taking actions on this board but this is the main point of the game and so the game is played over six rounds and each round we're going to pass this first player marker around but this person is not the person who's truly gonna go first you're gonna start each round by actually determining turn order on this turn order track and so if i um the blue player if i'm the one who's first player what we're gonna do is i'm going to place my flask on one of these spots not the last spot here because this is reserved for a three-player game but any of these spots up here and whatever is next to it is the benefit that i get immediately so if i go to either of these spots here that have this pink person then it will allow me to draw favor cards which are from this deck and favorite cards just let you do bonus things they help you they do different things and they tell you when to play them brownish bag to the right are the ingredients and so if i were to place my token right there i would get one favorite card and one ingredient from the top of the deck and i would get that immediately the higher up the track you place your token the sooner in turn order you go so if i want to make sure that i am going to go first this round i can go to the very top here but it would require me to pay a coin and money is very tight in this game so that is like i really need to go first you don't want to do that yeah and you don't get any benefits that's right so then whoever has the first player marker chooses their spot first and then in clockwise order everybody else would choose their spots so say naveen went here got his ingredient card and once everybody's placed then starting with the person who's going last so whoever is further down on this track you must place all of your workers out onto the board at once so that everybody who's going to be going ahead of you can see where you're going you can react accordingly so these are the workers they are cubes cubes in a two-player game we're gonna have six of these but no matter what player count uh for the first round you only get three cubes that's right and so these are the different um action spaces that you can go to for the very first round three of them are going to be unavailable to us and the three are this space this space and this space so for those spaces i'm just going to briefly discuss what you do in those spaces but we're not going to we're going to leave the specifics to the game clearly a gist of what those do yeah and so certain spaces only require you to put one cube out to take the action so like in this first spot here these are singular action spaces if i want to take an ingredient which is what this action space does then i can place one cube there and i can do it up to three times so each player actually gets their own row so in a two player game whoever is going to go second must place all of the cubes in the in the bottom most row because you resolve from top to bottom so say naveen wanted to take three ingredients during the first round which he probably wouldn't do he would put all three of his cubes there we would resolve the first column and then the next column and so on so forth and so this space allows you to take an ingredient either from the face up here or from the top of the ingredient deck and so this is a little bit more of a desperate spot because this basically allows you to discard an ingredient from your hand for one coin and ingredients are really really valuable in this game so you really only want to do them if you are desperate for that coin yeah it won't be something you're going to be regularly doing right so the first spot here only uses one cube but if i want to do it again then that spot requires two cubes for the second action that's why they're kind of combined like that we're going to skip this area for now this spot allows you to purchase an artifact from the artifact store and so there are three different phases of artifacts in this game and each phase consists of three cards you always see all of them so you're not able to see it because the other two um phase artifacts are off screen but the price of the artifact is at the top left hand corner of the card the number of points it's worth is listed at the top right hand corner and whatever it says in the middle is what it does for you artifacts are usually super powerful but also very expensive very effective so you can take this action up to twice but it's the same thing as transmuting the first is one cube and the second is two cubes and because in the first round these two are um not in play we're going to skip them for now and go straight to the last two actions over here which is where you do a majority of your testing of your mixing of ingredients and so the only difference between the two is that in this space here you're testing on a student a poor soul who is learning from you and drinking the potions that you're making and in this space you're testing on yourself for both spaces you can take the action up to twice and it only costs one cube per time that you want to take it and so when you go to this space you're going to take the app that is when the app comes into play and you're going to select test on a student afterwards you're going to secretly behind your screen test two different ingredients it's going to pop up with a potion just like we were showing you earlier and you take all your notes and that's it the thing about the student though is um negative symbol potions are bad and so once somebody tests on the student with a negative potion that student will no longer do it for free because they're like okay i'm gonna continue doing this but you have to pay me paid intern paid intern starting with the player who's gonna who goes after that negative potion they must pay one coin to test exactly now whenever you take these actions if ever you decide you don't actually want to take the action that's fine you can decline it and you can always put your cube into the unhappy face here at the end of the round you will get a benefit for having two of those at least two of those in there which we'll discuss later and so the last space here like we're mentioning is where you can test a an experiment or a potion on yourself and so this is always free to do you would just select drink potion and it's the exact same thing it will show you exactly what we're showing you earlier but if you make a negative potion then you will suffer a consequence if you make a negative blue potion you will lose a reputation point and that's what that anytime you see a red thumbs down that means you're losing reputation points on this track on the score track and that is your score for the end of the game essentially if you make a negative green potion i believe that paralyzes you and so for the next round you will be required to select this bottommost green space which means you don't get as good of a benefit and you must go last no matter what and if you make a negative uh red potion i think that's like poison because it sends one of your cubes to the hospital the sick bay and so you will be down one cube for the next round and those are all the actions that you can take for your first round uh the first round is kind of where you go to try to gather ingredients to try to get more information before you have to do you know bigger and more important things in later rounds at the end of the round you do everything that is shown here so if anybody has the most number of seals on the theory board which we haven't discussed yet and that person or persons get a point of reputation if somebody has at least two cubes in this spot here because you did not use the cubes then for every two you get to draw one favorite card afterwards if anybody is in the sickbay that cube gets moved up here to be not used for a whole round and then we flip over the adventurer tile this is where we get into the actions that you that'll be available to you for the rest of the game because after this you kind of just clean up for the next round and you begin a new this gets moved to the next player and you start anew and so starting with the second round each round we are going to have an adventurer we're first going to get all of our cubes so now we're going to have six cubes at our disposal in a two player game and then we're going to flip over the topmost adventure tile and so this spot here allows you to sell potions to these adventurers this is a good way for you to make a lot of money at once because in this game four coins is a lot of money in a nutshell each round a different adventure is going to come out and each adventurer wants a different combination of potions so if i know how to make any of the potions that this adventure is offering or any kind of like combination of that then i could potentially try to sell a potion to this adventurer i need to have the ingredients on hand and i'm going to lose the ingredients when i go there but it'll give me money and so this is space that we're definitely going to be explaining during the play through because it is quite complicated there's a little bit of a bidding process in terms of who can sell because in a two-player game only one person can ever sell to an adventurer per round so just know that that is what this space does and we'll explain that later and the other two spots that were not available to us in the first round are these two and these two spots have to do with publishing theories which is a big portion of how you earn your points in this game i'm going to kind of explain them out of order but this what here is where you actually go to publish a theory your first theory is one cube your second theory costs two cubes when you go here you're basically going to say that i potentially know the alchemical token for one of these ingredients i've figured out its dna again the alchemical token are one of these yes first thing that happens is i have to pay one coin to the bank anytime you publish a theory you must have at least one coin to pay and then i will find the alchemical token from the supply say say i think i think that the chicken foot is this alchemical token i'll take it from the supply as long as it's there i'll place it there and then behind our clear screens we have a number of different uh seals and they just look like ribbons like you would see it like a fair and on the opposite side of the seals are either values of numbers like three or five points or there are question marks with colors and so when i publish a theory i need to secretly choose one of these to endorse my theory with so i would put my seal there that shows i think that it is that i have my seal of approval and it's going to give me a certain number of points at the end of the game right if i at the end of the game i am correct in this theory and i placed a um a seal that has a certain number of points on it then that's the number of points i'm going to get for being correct the other types of seals that have the color with the question mark these seals are specifically for hedging your bets there's going to come a time in the game where you're going to feel pressured to publish a theory and so if you don't exactly know if your theory is correct then you can guess and as long as you place the proper seal on that theory you won't get docked any points for being wrong so for example if i if i am so close to figuring out one of the alchemical tokens but i'm not quite sure if just that blue aspect is right then i can still publish this theory and i'll put the blue question mark on this spot right here and so in the future if this ingredient gets debunked by somebody going to this space and we flip it over and it was the blue aspect that was wrong i won't lose any points right because i hedge that bet properly hence the question mark on blue so that's what we see at the top here the other thing you can do is endorse somebody else's publication and that would be this bottom portion here um i would place an action cube there and when it's time for me to take this action if there's a theory that's already been published so like this one monique's chicken foot over here and let's say i agree on it i can go ahead and endorse her theory and the way i do that is first thing i do is i pay one gold to the bank one gold to the person that i'm endorsing so that would be monique it's actually one gold for every seal that's already on here correct so like in a three player game if there were two people on here he would have to pay one gold to each of us plus one to the bank yes so in this case it would just be one to monique and then i would then take one of the ribbons of my choice and then place it onto that particular location yes it's not gonna get him the point for publishing a theory because we i don't think we mentioned when you publish a theory for the first time you get a point but it'll get him on the board so that at the end of the game he has the opportunity to earn points for that theory this space here if you haven't gathered is a spot where you can debunk a theory and that's also slightly complicated we'll we'll kind of just describe that during gameplay but just know that if you know that there's a theory on the board that's incorrect you can go here and you can debunk it and you would get two points if you're right and minus five points to the person with the persons who have seals on that uh ingredient that are not properly healthy and you can debunk your own theory yes so if you hedged your own theory and then later on find out oh i was wrong but now i know i'm wrong you can go there debunk it gain the two points but not lose the five points for being wrong it's true it all sounds very complicated it'll make more sense during the gameplay the last couple bits are at the end of the third and fifth round we are going to have a conference because that's what we do as as alchemists right and so they call the conference tile just kind of goes in this spot right here at the end of the third round if you have at least one seal on the theory board you get one point if you don't you lose a point yes so this is a pressure factor that i was kind of mentioning earlier that kind of forces you to publish a theory when you might not be quite yet ready right so that's what happens at the end of the third round and this is also the time where our phase one artifacts get switched over to the two and then finally at the end of the sixth round we go into final scoring and so uh you get points at the end of the game for your artifacts you get points for your grants which we didn't discuss yet probably talk about last you also turn in all of your unused favorite favorite cards in your hand for two coins each and for all of your money it's one point for every three so it's not the best exchange rate especially in a money tight kind of game and then finally we're going to have the big revelation where we find out all of the solutions for all of these ingredients and we're going to look at everybody's ribbons to see if things are properly hedged and people will get points that way these grants there are five grants in the middle here if you have a seal on at least two of the the ingredients that are on one gram so for example this one oh there you go for example if the bean has a seal on this one and this one so it's the chicken foot and the fern looking thing then he will automatically get that that grant as his first grant it's gonna be worth two points at the end of the game and it'll immediately give him two coins to use he would flip it over and then it would go onto his little scientist table here that we have for our public information and so on the back of the grant shows a number three that means from here on out he has to have seals on all three of the ingredients on the grounds to to take them so in this case i have this one i could do this one and then maybe this flower over here so that's one two three matching up all three of the ingredients here right okay yeah so that is how the grants work they're just kind of a nice way to get you some in-game money when you need it right and there are additional points at the end of the game so just a heads up you can hedge and you can also be wrong at the time of taking these grants oh totally you just have to have seals on those those ingredients it's sneaky um and finally the scoreboard is interesting because the scoreboard is kind of divided into three different sections and so this is we believe that this is the game slight catch-up mechanism yeah their way of doing that and so if you are in the six points or less area of the the player board whenever you lose a point you lose one point less it just kind of makes it a little bit easier for you to not snowball downwards yeah so if you lose one point you lose one point less than one point so you lose no points but one of the bad things about it is whenever you sell to the adventurer you have to sell for a coin less a discount and in this game you can never go below zero points so you don't have to worry about that we start the game actually at 10 points which is this neutral area but once you get to i believe it's 14 points you go into this green zone where whenever you lose a point you must lose one more point yes so it does kind of um punish you a little bit more right in addition when you go to sell to the adventure you have one additional smiley face on your bidding cards we didn't go over that but it'll make sense later as well and the last section is for the 18 and up which is the blue area of the scoreboard and that says that if whenever you lose one point you must lose two additional points yes so something got you to just lose one point you're losing three total points but the plus side about being on that in that area in addition to just being higher in points in the game is whenever you do sell to the adventurer you get an additional coin thematically what's going on here is this is called your renowned tracks so the more renown you are the more valuable those potions you are going to be selling yeah it's your reputation reputation yep it's how much people trust you yeah your scientific fame yes yes and that is pretty much the entire game so we are going to do a little bit of cleanup and then we are going to uh do some player setup and get started with the playthrough okay so we have reset uh what we basically did was we drew three ingredients card randomly from the deck we both got two favor cards and then chose just one of them discarded the other one we have three cubes in play and we have our flasks so now we have to figure out who is going to go first at determining which spot they want to go to okay who's going to get this who's going to get better ready ready oh it's me it's you which one you got to switch up the scissors hey sometimes i gotta switch off my brows i'd like to see okay also in order to try to make this an easier experience to understand i'm actually going to be filming my side of the player board so whenever i test ingredients and whenever i take notes i'm going to have a little shaky cam forgive me if it's shaky but i'm going to have i'm going to give you basically a behind-the-scenes look at it you're basically playing as monique yes in this game i hope it makes sense i will try to to talk you through it as well you're in good hands without giving away any information to naveen definitely in good hands with her you don't want to be following me i don't know we'll see all right so to start round one we're going to determine our turn order so i get to put my my little flask out here somewhere i think i'm gonna go here okay this is a nice kind of middle ground spot and it gives me one favor card and one ingredient from the top of the deck so i'm gonna take one from here okay and my one ingredient oh i didn't see it don't look at my notes i'm not okay now naveen gets to decide where to go all right i'm just gonna go right in front of you i'll take two ingredients from the top of the deck wow yo sorry you're gonna probably have to over the course of the game help me with these ingredients just because i'm gonna occupy your airspace if not okay i see things that i probably shouldn't all right so since i'm out in front monique is going to be going second this entire round so she's going to place out all three of her cubes first yes i must declare my actions what she's doing where she's going before i declare i would like to play a favorite card which is the assistant and this says that i play it when i declare actions which is now for this round i have one extra action cube that's nice to start the first round with because we only get three so i'm going to take i'm going to borrow that's real fourth one from there um and then clip okay i'm gonna go let's go here okay i'm gonna go get right into so i go to the bottom most row i have an entire row to myself uh and then i'm gonna go one to the student and one to myself okay because i'm okay with losing one coin but not two yeah uh so that's all my those are all my cubes now it's naveen's turn okay i certainly know i'm gonna go here i'm gonna definitely want to test okay on the student so whether there's a negative outcome there i i'm safe yes as of right now get it for free uh i will get an ingredient and i think i will i think i'll test on myself also data points here we're taking some risks yeah what is life without taking some risks yeah all right let's do it so now we're going to resolve yep so starting with this spot we always go in this order starting with foraging four ingredients naveen which ingredient would you like yeah i'm gonna take the or perhaps you'd want to take from the top of the deck you know i'm going to take this feather over here okay okay so that does not fill in nope and so that's my cube yeah that goes away now it goes to me and i'm going to take this mushroom okay and for my second ingredient i'm going to top deck it top deck yeah if you don't like what you see there well we want to add an element of secrecy sure all right and that is my cube these get discarded they go out yep they go out because we're gonna have a whole new set of five um to start the next round right okay so nobody went here nobody went here either so now we're gonna go to test on a student okay so this is here it is starting with naveen okay um and we're not going to be able to see the only thing that we are going to be able to see is what kind of potion he made he needs to not show us his ingredients but uh the type of potion he made is going to be public public knowledge yes exactly and i will denote that here if you see there's a little ghost figures of them so then monique will know in the future that i'm able to make xyz whatever that may be right okay so i'm gonna do this okay and i'm going to not look okay i have found out what this does okay what kind of you can show the potion it does this ah you made a noise i made it neutral that's kind of something that's something it's hard to work with neutral as your first first question oh boy oh boy but now he's going to take his notes and he's also going to put a neutral token on his public desk so that we know that naveen knows how to make a neutral potion you know how to make it so now i have to remember to discard the two ingredients so this is super secret yes so let's make a face down discard yeah you're absolutely supposed to all right and now i'm gonna take notes over here and that's naveen's action yes because uh it was a neutral potion and not a negative one i can now test on the student for free so and you are going to come along on this journey with me all right so we are here and we are going to test on a student i have my two ingredients right there and naveen's not looking there you go and i'm going to hit confirm oh we made a blue positive potion so then i will take my blue positive uh token thank you and where those two ingredients intersected on my player board as a reminder it's these two i'm going to look for it on my player board it's like this one and this one and they intersect at the very top right here so i'm going to put a blue positive right there and so i can actually get rid of these now and take notes so because that was a blue positive we know that i can basically cross off all the blue negatives for both of those ingredients so the first ingredient is here so i can basically say it's not that not that it's not these and the other ones right here i can essentially do the same thing so that and that and that is pretty much everything i know for now so then i discard these two ingredients and i remove my cube and now we're going into dangerous territory we have to test on ourselves okay starting with naveen so i netted a neutral so i need to know more information so i'm gonna go ahead and test on myself and i will test these two ingredients so i'm gonna need the app once again okay so naveen is testing i'm kind of exploring my notes here doing my thing okay so i made a blue positive so i get no penalty that's the scary thing about here if you get any negative there's some sort of penalty here so i gotta be positive and let me just i'm gonna declare publicly i can make a blue positive and then money don't look i won't i'm actually going to start testing um myself now so this goes back to you okay and now i'm going to take the risk and i'm going to test on myself okay so here we are i'm going to drink the potion myself and here we go so right there and then i'm going to go ahead and hit confirm oh no problem i made a negative potion negative green negative wow that is so unfortunate so because of that uh on my next turn i need to place my flask to go last so no that's that's not good because now in a two-player game naveen gets to go wherever he wants and he knows he's gonna go first that's true so can you please pass me the negative uh the negative token yes what color was it again green green there you go green negative thank you you need any green negative there i'll put one on your so now that we made a negative green potion i'm going to place this where these two intersect so it looks like here and here following up that way and it's right there so now in the future i know that the combination of those two make a green negative and at the same time i'm also going to take notes on my player sheet so i'm going to cross off all of the green positives that are on both of these ingredients looks like this one this one the other one is this so this this now we know that those can't possibly be the ones so i do need to discard these ingredients any time you test it's like you actually physically used up those ingredients so they're out i'm also discarding mine and i just need a second to consult my notes i'm actually going to take it a step further just a little bit just to show you a little bit more of my deduction process here so we know that making mixing this ingredient and this one together made a green negative so that also means one is gonna be bigger one is gonna be a big circle the other other one's gonna be a small circle so these are our options for this ingredient which should tell you one thing about it which would eliminate from this area here so i'm going to actually cross off this one and this one because they have to be opposite sizes all right and that was that was it that was the last one i am paralyzed which is unfortunate but now hopefully we've all learned a little bit some valuable lessons yes okay neutral to start huh yes so that is the end of the round we're gonna do a little clean up so over here nobody has any seals on the theory board so nobody gets that point uh we've no nobody has cubes in the unspent cube section here nobody was hospitalized and now we reveal our adventurer for the next round so i'm gonna we're gonna get all of our cubes six cubes we now have six cubes each and i'm gonna pass this to naveen who's going to be the new uh start player yeah and we're going to reveal our adventurer for the second round so this adventurer is looking to buy negative green negative blue and positive red potions so um looks like monique yeah and the only one who has the ability to sell unless naveen wants to take a chance okay he could maybe but uh yeah that's that and now we're going to reveal the five ingredients that we're going to be working with uh as public knowledge second round and that's pretty much it we are going to now start with you okay so i think i'm gonna stay in that two ingredient spot right over there okay so then you get two ingredients your hand um i have to stay in this spot because i've paralyzed so i take one favorite card and one ingredient i do appreciate that they give me a favorite card though that is nice yeah that's that's friendly hmm okay so you have six cubes to litter all over the board yes so now i have to declare my actions all six of them and because we haven't discussed them yet these are the three artifacts uh for the first phase i suppose the boots of speed cost four coins and this says on an action space where you have at least one cube you could perform that action again after everyone is done and this is limit once per round and it cannot be used to sell potions the printing press is cost four four coins as well and this says you do not have to pay one gold to the bank when you publish or endorse a theory so that's a nice like ongoing discount and then the actual discount card says your next artifact costs two gold less after that artifacts cost you one gold less so if you're kind of you know planning on purchasing multiple artifacts that may not be a bad one yeah it's pretty good okay before i declare my actions i have another assistant in my hand so i get one extra action cube nice and because we only have six cubes per color uh i actually have to take one uh cube of a of a neutral player's colors and i have seven for the round wow so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna take three ingredients oops one two three just like that i'm going to go to the uh adventurer here we're gonna attempt to sell then i have two more ingredients or sorry two more cubes so i think i will try to purchase an artifact and don't want to test on myself again that's scary i'm going to test on a student let's just try let's just hope naveen doesn't make anything negative here testing on a student huh yes so that's that that's that's that's where i'm going all right i will litter this also let's go get a bunch of ingredients okay i will certainly test on a student and now i have these two cubes so i'll test on myself and with one cube i'll go ahead and test on another student oh we are taking a risk all right so that's that so starting with you over here naveen what are you going to forage uh let's go ahead and take that red scorpion please red scorpion for you yeah all right i'm going to take this mushroom right here okay so that's this one and that one yep oops that's me back to you i will take the i'll take the blue flower i'll take the flower okay that's this one uh i'm gonna top deck it let's see what i get okay uh back to you naveen yeah so i will take the i'll take the chicken's foot let's do chickens chicken foot for naveen chicken not quite sure what kind of chicken that is or just i'm going to top deck it for the the last one let's not give you any information here okay sure okay and then now it's to me so the way that the adventurer works is if there are multiple people who are on this spot we must compete to see who can sell to the adventurer first in a two-player game there's only one spot down here for somebody to actually sell a potion to so if there was somebody else on the spot if naveen were also here then one of us would not be able to sell it would be just a total loss of two action cubes yeah the way that that works is we each have these cards here that show how much of a discount we are willing to give the adventurer all the way up to minus three coins so you only get four coins max and so minus three coins would be quite a bit of a of a discount and there are certain number of happy faces that you see on each card the way that it works is we would each secretly pick one and reveal at the same time and whoever revealed the most happy faces or otherwise gave the biggest discount gets to sell first don't forget depending on where you are on the score track you also get an inherent happy face in this case nothing because i'm unopposed then i don't have to do any of that bidding and i can just go and try to sell so what cube is going to be placed here because i'm going to try to sell any one of these potions basically there's like a little ropey arrow that shows the direction and the other cube is for this area over here so before you declare in this area here you have to actually announce what kind of potion you're going to make of the three that are available so if i'm going here i might say i'm going to try to make this minus green potion then with my other cube i would put it in one of these four areas here that would tell you how close i'm going to get to that actual potion if i put my cube up here i'm telling you that i'm going to make an exact match on that screen must show a minus green potion and if so then i get four coins if maybe i don't know the specific color but i know that it is going to make a positive or negative then i can go here for a coin less and just get a positive or minus sign only the symbol matters the color doesn't matter right if i say i don't i can't make that but i can make a neutral potion then i can just go here for two coins and if i say that i don't know at all if it's gonna be the same at all then i can just go here for one coin if i choose either of these bottom two spaces then i also lose a point so that's that um i may or may not have the right ingredients for this so i'm potentially in trouble but we're taking chances oh really really that's good to know big chances and um at least we're gonna get some information out of this no matter what this is just another way for me to be able to test i'm gonna say that i can try to make the same symbol okay i'm gonna say i'm gonna do this bet right here okay and i'm gonna say i don't actually know but i'm gonna say green negative just because as evidenced by my board here that's what i'm allowed that's what i know how to make sure um here's to me this is potentially gonna be very bad okay so in the app there's an area here for selling potions so i'm gonna tap that and i'm gonna say i'm going to make a negative cream uh all right so i'm gonna try with these two ingredients all right so moment of truth come on all right so pulled it off i made uh something completely incorrect oh yeah um so this is not only gonna not give me money i'm gonna lose a point gambled all right so that was absolute um worst case scenario so i'm gonna go ahead and lose a point here i'm at nine points i don't get the money so i can't even buy an artifact now but i do have some information if i mix the information that i have is if i mix those two ingredients together they did not make a green negative it did not make a green negative so that is some information yeah yeah it is some information so i am taking some notes yeah because that doesn't give me something that does give you information it does all right and now these two ingredients get discarded because you failed to make the recipe that this traveler wanted i've never failed before at the adventure adventure that didn't feel very good okay so those cubes come back will you be buying you cannot physically buy an artifact because the cheapest one this is going to go into the sad face that's true that's true i gambled yeah okay so now naveen gets to go and test on a student okay so i will test on a student using the app so just give me one second monique all right don't look now not looking test on student oh we made a negative blue wow this is not going well for me okay because now i have to pay a coin same with me though if i do it but you can always uh put your cube into that spot there i'm dreaming of which negative potion i want you to have let me let me put this together real quick okay um okay so then now i'm going to test on a student i have to pay a coin to do so because the student is now weary of us he no longer wants to be poisoned so he will do it for a fee my ingredients go out of course okay uh so let's try it let's see which two ingredients i want to use this time i have a coin for this huh okay we are going to test on a student so let's go ahead and do that and then let's see hopefully this works okay give us some good info all right i made a red positive potion red positive okay yeah here's your red positive there thank you can i have the one in hand thank you so much which means for these two ingredients i'm gonna go find where they intersect over here i'm gonna put a red positive right there so that i know i know that that's what they make and then on my sheet let's get rid of these here i'm going to take some notes and so because it's a red positive then none of them are red negatives right so let's do this one these two that one and for this these are some notes i took earlier but for this we're going to get rid of those and here and that was my test action so now in navin you can test on a student again but you have to pay a coin yeah okay since you paid it i'll pay it all right so i'm gonna get rid of your yellow so we don't accidentally make a mistake yeah and give you an extra action okay we're gonna test on a student payday paid the fee the intern fee okay we made a green positive here okay green positive so let me go ahead and grab two of those so now i know how to make quite a bit of things you know green positive i wish i did that for my test on myself because now i might face a penalty okay and my two ingredients are gonna go out of my hand and then i'm the last cube out here so i'm gonna test on myself so i'm gonna go again do it yeah yeah hopefully i won't poison myself or hurt myself i really hope you do please expect a coin you did uh okay so i'll take these two ingredients and i'm gonna use the app to say drink potion here and i'm going to test on myself no looking now not looking oh we've made another neutral here wow wow well i hope that this you know late in the the game i guess in the second round i hope that gives you a little bit more information than you had uh maybe maybe maybe hold on hold the phone okay i have taken my notes i have discarded my ingredients for my testings the good thing it was not a negative so it didn't give me a penalty but it was a neutral so that's it okay so nobody has a seal yet so nobody gets that point i only have one cube in here so i don't get the paper uh card i just take that back and then uh nobody's here we now reveal the next adventurer okay this is gonna get passed to me and we are going to discard this put out a new set of five set of five for the next round so this guy goes out going into the third round because we're in the third round we are going to have a conference at the end of the round which means that if you don't have at least one theory on the board then you're going to lose a point which i guess isn't so bad for me since i'm already losing so many points here so this is our our adventure positive adventure they want positive stuff yes they do so we take these back yeah and now that we are in round three um oh oh run away flasks here you go so i must select my turn order first and now i'm not paralyzed so i don't have to go there so this is the last time we're gonna see these three artifacts as well right right yes yes it's the last last chance at that i blew it i know you wanted it i'm gonna go here okay two ingredients two ingredients which i will take immediately one and two are you gonna go you know i'm just gonna go right above you i'll take one ingredient do you mind just putting it out there you guys want to go first naveen yeah it's expensive there you go things are expensive things are expensive okay well i definitely know that i need to publish so i'm going to publish a theory for sure today right and i have to make sure i have one coin for that which i do i might as well get some ingredients and might as well test some more but i am assuming i'm not going to have any more money okay so i need to take chances that way uh let's see what two more cubes i do you know i am going to try i'm going to try again again i'm going to try again little boy we're trying all right okay well i need to also conduct a theory publish a theory i will test on the student why not yes and then let's get some ingredients shall we one two do i want to test on myself probably not i'll get three and one more cube where are you going ah money is tight do i transmute here that's the question yeah transmuting is it does earn you a quick buck it is a quick buck it would basically take an ingredient and just get rid of it yeah for a buck for a buck you must really need that buck you know i'm gonna test on myself i like the sound of that all right so starting with uh the foraging for ingredient spot which ingredient are you gonna take uh you know what i will take the i'll take the frog please yep frog for you here goes your cube back uh for my ingredient i'm gonna take this purple mushroom okay taking my cube back as well i'll take the scorpion please oh scorpion okay scorpion there you go so here's your cube for me oh i guess i'll take one of these might as well they're in abundance i'll take the top deck top deck there you go make sure you give the only one one card okay very nice there goes that and then now this gets discarded we are skipping transmuting because naveen decided not to do that and we're going back to the adventure where i'm gonna try again i gotta get this right um so i you are slipping in here yeah i'm not gonna do any of that bidding stuff because i'm unopposed but i slip it in here and i'm going to say i'm making a blue potion and i am going to do it exact wow exactly really are you testing a theory here is that what you're doing i i'm just trying to redeem myself for the wrong that i've done to myself so all right and we're back i'm going to attempt to sell a potion and i declared that i would sell a positive blue right so we're going to try the positive blue and we're going to use all right okay i'm going to hit confirm haha success yeah yes okay all right so this symbol means that i did it perfectly um i did produce a blue positive potion i don't need to take any notes because i probably already knew that that was gonna happen and if you're following along then um you probably know that as well but what it does do is it gives me four coins so i am gonna get some money i'm also gonna play the barmaid because it says play when it is your turn to sell a potion and it's just gonna get me because i mix an exact match i gained one point of reputation so i'm getting that point back the point that i lost last time so four coins please four coins thank you and i'm just gonna leave those cubes there but now i have some money yeah you do all right quite a bit so now we are going to publish our theories starting with naveen so these go out you're done with these cubes right yeah okay so i'm gonna publish and i'm going to pay one goal to the bank because that's what's required of me and i am going to publish that the blue flower is this theory right here all right confirm yep that's right well that's that's the that's his bet but he has actually published the theory so you have to figure out you have to assign it all chemical tokens i do all right this is the one are you sure this is the one all right so naveen thinks that it is the big positive red small positive green and small negative blue alchemical symbol uh for that blue flower i don't just think it oh he knows it apparently and so because he published a theory he gets a point i do so you get to go up on that track here's your cube back there and for me i'm also going to publish a theory so here's my endorse my theory coin i'm not endorsing your theory quite yet um but okay i'm going to publish a theory for the mushroom the purple mushroom okay and i'm going to say that it's this alchemical token which is the big negative red small negative green and small positive blue and i'm going to go ahead and put that right there i'm going to put my medal right there and i also get a point because i have now published a theory and we have met our minimum requirement for this rounds conference so my cube goes away and now naveen you can test on a student uh yes let's go ahead and do that okay we're gonna test on the student here okay so i know it sounds like we're confident about our theories here but usually by the third round um it's like you're very pressured to publish a theory and so you may or may not think be confident about it but we'll see how it plays out okay i made a green positive with my combination here so ah too bad you didn't test on a student twice i know i know so he doesn't get a second green positive on this board because we already know he knows how to make a green positive it would be redundant to put another one there so this goes to yeah and then whenever you're ready you can test on yourself this tells me a lot all right give me a second here these are those two ingredients that i had used up okay so now i'm gonna test on myself here yes i'm a little nervous here you go do you know what you're doing uh good luck to me good luck drink something positive ooh negative oh okay so i lose a point because that's the penalty yeah i'll take a point loss that's okay um and i take a negative blue uh but i will give this back to you and now it is my turn to test on myself and i'll discard my ingredients in just a second sure okay so we are back and we are going to test on ourselves so we're drinking a potion and i'm going to there you go all right moment of truth oh interesting what'd you do i made a neutral potion neutral potion okay that is very interesting okay so now they have a neutral token yes just one of them or you need two of them i need two of them it's the first time i'm making a neutral neutral potion so let's look for the area where these two intersect i'll put the neutron on your board thank you it looks like up there so i'll go ahead and slip that in right there and then i can discard these so that i can take my notes speaking of which i'm going to discard my two from my turn so getting a neutral potion doesn't tell you a whole lot unless you have something to work with because i know the possibilities for this ingredient which are these then i can kind of assume that only the opposites would be the possibilities for this ingredient so i'm just going to go ahead and cross them off i'm going to do it off camera but i'm going to cross off which ones are not a possibility for this version this ingredient all right we should both discard our ingredients yes yes discarding all right you're in a second so i'm gonna take some nuts i'm pulling your cube down for you thank you gosh i'm really bummed that that was a neutral because uh i was hoping to have more information for the next round but unfortunately um you don't i don't so that is the game uh we are gonna go and have our conference now which just means that if you have at least one uh seal on the theory board you get one point so both of us do one for you if it's a tie all parties or i guess there's no tie yep yeah we just all get it um and then now we do underground stuff whoever has the most seals on the board gets one point that is where if it's a tie then we each get it so one up one up okay great nobody has unused cubes nobody's in the sick bay we're going to reveal our new adventure but first let's kind of set up a little bit yes for the next round you get this player mark right now thank you and then i'm going to set out the five ingredients okay these three are going to go out now we don't have these artifacts anymore yes that's right the phase two artifacts are now going to get stocked in the store so the first one is the amulet of rhetoric this costs four coins and it immediately just gives you five points wow straight five points there you go the thinking cap costs four coins also is worth one point and immediately lets you test up to two separate pairs of ingredients in your hand and you do not have to discard them wow oh it's cool the silver chalice is uh four coins but it's worth six points and that's all it does it's just straight up six points this gives you six points at the end of the game so these are just these are straight victory points they're not going to change your points right now so uh the adventurer for the next round is oh this person and the wow this person looks like they mean business so this person wants a green positive blue positive or a red negative potion okay so if you could provide maybe help this guy out uh then you'll be in good shape and then now starting with naveen okay i'm gonna take the spot urine which is get two ingredients okay there you are and then here you go take these two i am gonna go [Music] up top because i have not gone first one ingredient the entire game take this one ingredient oh that is interesting okay so now it is you you have to put up all six of your cubes yeah yeah well i'm gonna grab some ingredients that's for sure okay okay ready two as of right now all right i will visit with this traveler adventurer person okay hmm this is the hard part okay i will get another ingredient let's do it okay and i will test on myself all right i'm going hard um how many ingredients do i have okay i'm gonna go [Music] let's get some ingredients sure of course then i'm going to actually go up here to purchase something and then i'm going to [Music] go publish a theory which i realize i'm supposed to be in the second row here and do i want to battle naveen [Music] i think i will transmute and i'm going to take a third ingredient i'm going ingredient heavy this time ingredient heavy huh yep all right so starting with me let's go i'm gonna top deck this okay for my first one oh interesting okay i'll take the uh the foot foot foot for you foot for me uh i am going to top deck again because i'm not a fan of navy knowing which ingredients i'm getting i will take the frog okay sandy bean has a foot and a frog there you go foot frog i'm going to take my third ingredient i'm going to top that kid again okay i will also topdeck it please okay that worked out really well actually and i'm going to give this back to you these get discarded because we are no longer pulling from these ingredients okay so now i'm going to go to this space and i have one cube there because i'm going to transmute an ingredient which just means i'm discarding ingredient and taking a coin so there's the one i'm discarding because i have to do it secretly and navin if you could please pass me a coin yes thank you and that is that spot now we're going to go to the traveler naveen is going to sell to the traveler i am so you don't we're not going to do any bidding because we're not competing to sell but now you have to place one cube there and you have to kind of decide if you're going to make an exact match what are you gonna do i think i'm going to make an exact sign okay so not necessarily the exact potion but he thinks he can get the sign correct good luck to you which uh which of the three potions are gonna be making i will be making the green positive green positive okay here you go cell so pick your green positive you okay naveen i think we broke naveen okay i said a green positive okay success nice so you get three coins three coins so it was a success meaning he made what i said he made the same he made a positive yes uh it probably a different color is what that means so he can actually use that information to his advantage okay and kind of finagle his sheet so okay so that was it that's it now it's on to me i'm going to purchase the i'm actually going to purchase the thinking cap okay these other two um artifacts give you points but up to this point i'm not satisfied with where i am with the logic i'm usually further further than this yeah yeah so i'm going to purchase this the thinking cap costs four coins so that is a very expensive arctic artifact all your money no i have five oh yeah five so that's why i transmuted and then the immediate effect is i can test up to two separate pairs of ingredients in my hand and i get to keep them i don't have to discard them so that's nice and it's gonna be worth a point at the end of the game does it play immediately yeah it's an immediate effect so i'm going to test so we're gonna do what we've already been doing and i'm going to test i'm gonna test these two which i don't think we've done yet no we haven't okay perfect so moment of truth oh i made a negative red negative red negative red so i believe this is a number and i'll see you then right no penalty because it was uh it was a uh it was a artifact that allowed me to do that and i get to keep these two which is nice that is very nice but i need to take some notes so we're going to find the intersection which is there i'm going to put my negative red right there and let's just kind of move these aside for now and take some notes before we do our second test that was a perfect amount of information because for this ingredient we were thinking and since we know that it made that we know that it can't possibly be this so now we know maybe and we also know each alchemical token is unique to its ingredient i know my paper is getting very messy here but uh hopefully this makes sense um in addition we know that it made this simple and it is this size so we know that this ingredient must be the opposite size which means and and with the same kind of knowledge i can go back to all of my other notes and kind of backwards deduce on some of the other ingredients which i'm going to do in a minute all right and so now we get to do our second test this is for free because of the artifact i'm doing these two all right we made a green positive potion green positive so you can make pretty much anything i can make lots of stuff and so now we're going to place it right there where these two intersect okay i'm going to pull down your positive and now for this i do not have to discard these but just so you know where i am with my sheet i did a lot of off-camera deduction this is gonna look like a mess all right so that was my artifact and now that we're like kind of halfway through the fourth round i i feel like testing is gonna happen a lot less and it's going to be more about trying to get those points i'm assuming thank you so um we're over here i am going to publish a theory so it's going to cost me one coin to do so okay and i am going to publish so i have a theory on this purple mushroom if i can get a second theory either uh the on one of these two grants then i can have one of the grounds so which one you i'm gambling i think i'll do the fern okay i'm gonna do the fern thank you you say the fern well the green fern also this one right here okay so i'm gonna go there you go i'm gonna go with this one okay this is the uh small negative red aspect small positive green aspect and large negative blue aspect so i'm gonna go ahead and put that there and i'm going to place one of my seals on there so of course we know that this is true right so i'm gonna go ahead and put that right there because we know for a fact that that is that alchemical token really um and because i published a theory i get a point so can you move me up on the on the scoreboard yes oh you're in the next threshold oh don't make boo-boos i'm in the is this the green one that's the green one so now i get an additional smiley face but there's a little bit more risk when i lose a point i lose an additional point right i'm going to remove this and that's it for me so now it goes to you for testing on yourself okay we will drink a potion okay okay let me test on myself here good luck good luck to me no oh you did get a negative already okay so we're not going to wish any ill will oh negative blue oh okay well negative what can you do so you just go down a point i do so it's not too bad because she's too big he doesn't lose any cubes or going down a point is not horrible i guess let me just figure out what i just did to myself okay all right so while naveen takes his notes we're going to do end of round stuff because that is the end of round four whoever has the most seals on the board gets a point and it's looking like me right now so i'm gonna go ahead and get a point can you move me up on the track actually sure i have to discard these two ingredients as well thank you what do you get sorry one point one point because i have the most and also i totally forgot but i get a grant because i have two of the three ingredients shown on one of the grants i have the mushroom and the fern so i take this grant it's gonna come to me immediately it's gonna be worth two points at the end of the game but i get two coins now nice so that is nice that's nice may please have two coins and so now in the future if i want to get any more of these grams i have to have all of the ingredients all three sorry of the ingredients shown so back to underground stuff nobody has unused cubes nobody got sick and now we're going to reveal all the stuff for the next round so here here are our ingredients for five and then i'm going to toss this adventurer and we're going to reveal the next one so we're entering the fifth round which means we're gonna have a conference at the end of this round okay so here is our adventure our adventurer wants a red positive potion green positive and blue negative uh any of those three so that is a combination that this that this person wants okay did we wipe the cards i didn't see if you did which cards the ingredients oh yeah yeah these are these are a whole fresh new and i'm going to take this uh first player token where would you like to go uh and also as a reminder at the end of this round for the conference you have to have two seals on the board to score a reputation point seals if you have one only one seal there then you lose a point if you have none then you lose two points so we're looking okay here naveen's got to get another seal on the board i'm going for it you're going for it yeah so i get to go first i'm gonna go with the very top here yeah so i'm not paying but i'm going to go out to this spot i'm not going to get any uh benefits except for potentially going before naveen unless naveen wants to pay to take that top spot it's up to him hmm yeah okay i'll pay i'm gonna pay a coin to take the top spot all right there you go so put me out there okay so david paid a coin so that he'd go first yes all right go ahead and do your thing so i am going to hmm this is interesting lay it all out i'm going to publish twice okay there you go and then i'm also going you're selling i'm selling sale i'm selling and one more i'm gonna go to the artifact store well that's why yeah i'm trying all right well i am going to publish twice as well one one one okay uh i'll transmute i will transmute here so you're in the second row and then let's pick up an ingredient to transmute and i will you know what let's just pick up another ingredient for the future okay there we go so starting with you grab your ingredients okay so i will take you can take two in a row because i'm not uh i'm not there i'll take the blue flower and i will take so that's my first one okay and then the next one i will take is let me just make sure i have this right i will take a scorpion all right perfect so that is all of the foraging that we're going to be doing naveen now you may discard an ingredient to take a coin i'm going to discard this ingredient okay to take one point ingredient has been transferred so i could go first all right go ahead do all your things so i am unopposed unfortunately we haven't been you know showing off the bidding version of this because we're too scared to oppose each other yeah these two cubes so i'm gonna say i'm going to make a perfect match here okay and um i'm going to make a green positive potion because that is what this traveler wants at this point we have shown a lot of the background camera you already know what a lot of my notes look like yeah so i'm just going to forgo showing you this one just go for it and i'm going to show you the final answer we're going to sell a potion and we're going to say green positive okay so green positive all right we made a perfect match all right that's four coins then so that is four coins that's a lot of money thank you uh yeah that's nice yeah we need that and so these two ingredients get discarded fortunately i don't get to keep them okay and so i'm done with the adventurer with your four coins are you gonna buy the artifact that gets you six points i am yes that makes sense well if i see that's the thing if i take this artifact it's gonna get me five points right now and so how many points am i at you are at uh 15 so it'll take you to 20. it'll take to the end of the game it'll take you technically to 21. so this will take me to 20 which will get me into the next threshold which means anytime i go to sell to the adventure it's going to give me an additional coin now am i going to be selling i might and it's only one point less so let's do this now okay let's do the amulet of rhetoric for four coins and so this is just immediately gonna get me five points of reputation it's not going to do anything for me at the end of the game it happens now and i'm doing this so that i can get into that next threshold so that things can be a little bit sweeter so you're gonna have five points please uh yes five points so we set to 20. nice and that's me so now starting with naveen you can so i will not be endorsing yours but i will be okay paying to the bank and i'm gonna publish a theory for which one i will publish the scorpion okay and so i'm gonna say the scorpion is all negatives big negatives okay okay so i'm gonna put that one right over there all big negatives yep interesting and that's that for me all right and unfortunately that does not grant me a grant yet so you have to put a seal on there for its account let me put this seal right over here good call okay and that's your five pointer right maybe maybe not maybe not maybe i'm fooling you okay now i'm going to publish a theory because i have to pay a coin here okay and i think i will i'm going to publish the root i think that's a root yeah android maybe madrik root yeah uh so we have the chemical token please sure there's only a couple left here i'll just hand you the whole thing i'm going to say that it's this one which is the small red positive aspect small green negative aspect and a large blue positive aspect so it's going to go right here on the route and i have to put one of my my my big money uh seals on there so hold on you know something i know something okay so that's gonna go right there so so that's this cube now it's my turn yep back to you so these i'm gonna pay i'm not gonna endorse you i will do this one right over here the feather the feather let me make sure this is my super top secret one okay okay and we're gonna say all positive all right all positive for that one all positive and that's me and so now uh i did satisfy one where did it go it's this one right over here so you have the feather and feather and blue flowers so that's going to come over here it's going to get me two points at the end of game and two coins immediately nice if i needed so now the only two uh ingredients left that need to be published are the bull frog and the foot you know i'm actually gonna forgo um you did your second publish i did all right so i'm gonna forgo publishing again you're not publishing i'm not publishing i'm going to um i'm going to put these in the unhappy face nice it's going to get me a favorite token so that's okay so now we're going to go into our conference do we each have we actually each have three okay so we both get a point so one for you and one for me yep here we go and then now we're gonna do end of round stuff these are gonna flush and we're gonna go into the third phase artifacts but whoever has the most seals on the board which we're now tied so you go up one i go up one mm-hmm okay um these two are going to get removed and i get to draw a favorite card nice yes so not playing immediately nope okay uh nobody is in the medic area and then we're going to prepare for the this is the sixth round this is the last round it's the last round wow okay so then we're going to remove this and our final artifacts are going to get placed into the store we're going to put out five ingredients here two three four five and then we're going to toss this okay and we're gonna have our sixth and final this last adventurer doesn't get played yeah okay let me card count it yes this adventurer wants a red negative a green negative and a blue positive potion any of those and this is gonna be passed to naveen so you're going first okay yeah our final artifacts before we talk about the final round is the bronze cup which just gets you four points you pay four coins for four points the feather in the cap which costs three coins and this says during the exhibition which we will discuss in a second you set aside ingredients from potions that you demonstrate successfully then when you score artifacts this cap is worth one point for each type of ingredient that you had set aside okay and finally the magic mirror which costs four coins says when scoring artifacts which are these this is worth one victory point for every five reputation points you had at the end of the final round so this might be a good one for me because um i'm kind of further ahead during the in-game stuff and so the way that the final round works is we are no longer going to be testing either on the student or ourselves we're going to have an exhibition so there's no conference either we're just going to have this exhibition and so this is where we go to show off our work we did all this work testing ingredients publishing theories even though there's still two missing and so this is our chance to show off what we can do as alchemists so if you put a cube here you can do this area up to four times that's why there are four areas here and so this allows you to make any of these six types of ingredients so any of the three colors in any of the symbols if you are the so say i say i'm going to make the red positive potion if i'm the first one to do that then i will score one reputation point if i am also able to make the red negative potion then i get two points for doing both essentially and so if i'm the first one to make the red positive potion and the first one to make a red negative potion that is a total of four points so it's two points for making the pair and one point each for being the first and you can do that for all three of the colors of potions if ever you do not make what you're supposed to make then you lose a point right so it's a little a little bit of risk there uh we can still debunk as normal although we haven't debunked at all this game and so if it doesn't happen we'll just explain how that works at the end and of course you can still publish theories but this is the final round this is it huh this is it boy well i will take i will take the spot that you are currently in right here just go right there yeah okay which means you are making me pay a coin pay a coin if you want to go first which is your last coin okay i will go here getting stuff i'm getting some ingredients yeah might as well might as well so one two ingredients okay so now i have to put out all of my stuff yeah so so i'm definitely going to transmute okay get some money um i'm definitely going to do that let's see what else can i do here probably going to go here twice okay let's get one ingredient and then maybe go here a third time okay you know what i'm just going to go hard there publish no publish twice yeah yep that's me okay uh so now i two will publish twice okay and then i will okay i'm gonna take an ingredient i need to sell to the the traveler this adventure and it takes one more cube than i'm willing to give up to do this davina's debating between uh pleasing this cloak individual individual or uh doing something else over there this is this last digit so okay so if i put two here then that means i won't have enough to buy this artifact oh forget the artifact they're worth points they're expensive like we're not rolling in dough here four points but i could put something out there okay you're right you sold me all right so i could then instead of doing all that nonsense i could do this i could go one cube here if i transmuted oh i'm still gonna be short all these people need to know what this means you should have taken one of these i know i know it gave you that one next see so what happens when you try to rush to the top shame i'll just do that for a coin and then i literally have no use for this coin or this uh this thing so i'll just uh i'll just tuck it over here maybe you can make another one now with three ingredients in hand you can get an ingredient all right well then if that's is that your final answer unfortunately yes all right nobody is working for ingredients we're gonna go straight to transmuting navin would you care to discard your ingredient sure i will discard this ingredient for a coin all right this is for you i'm transmitting as well i'm discarding this ingredient but i'm also playing my favorite card that says play when you transmute an ingredient it's sage i gain one extra gold piece during transmutation coins yeah so that was worth that favorite card whenever i got it and then we go straight to publishing okay what are you gonna do uh i think you're gonna endorse me i knew it wow that was a very certain strong i want to get this thing right here in the middle so i have feather i have scorpion i don't have mandrake but i do see this foot is available so i'm going to take foot and let's see what alchemical token it is it's going to be this one right over here so small red negative big positive green and big positive i'm sorry small positive blue that's gonna go there and i'm gonna put this seal of approval right there and because i have three um what are these called uh seals seals or theories that match three of the four here i take this so i'm gonna get two coins right away and then one point at the end of the game nice so you're rolling in dough i do have dough now and that goes away so now i can publish the last theory if i agree with naveen [Laughter] uh am i wrong you know i will publish you're gonna say yay i'm gonna say yay i'm paying my coin okay it's gonna be the final alchemical token whatever is left just go ahead and place it on the coast okay and then i'm gonna place my seal of approval okay right there yeah what are you doing there oh look at it trying to sneaky sneaky me and i get a one point uh why do you get one point huh because i published a theory oh do i get a point also didn't you already do it i didn't okay yes you do okay all right so now back to you which one are you gonna endorse uh well i can't endorse myself right no you can only have one seal okay on each ingredient well can i get any of these other things so this one requires frog mushroom you know i can't get this one right here this one i don't think i can get either wrong combination can you get this oh yeah oh you can i can get either one no i mean if you're if you're doing this you're definitely endorsing all of the ali chemical tokens are on the board um yeah well i'm endorsing yeah so one to the bank one to monique here you go thank you three coins is a point at the end of the game uh i'm gonna end up spending two of them because i'm definitely endorsing that's true oh you'll give it right back right i'm gonna give it right back so then i will put this one on this purple one you seem to be working out with from the very get-go of the game so i'm gonna put that one right here so that's actually a bad thing right if it's the first if it's the first ingredient that i publish a theory on we don't know if that's correct well i'm hoping you were right because i based a lot of my information on thinking you were right [Laughter] so my kids go away okay so that i am going to pay the bank and i'm going to pay you because i'm endorsing you neither of us get a point for endorsing yes but i'm going to put this on the flower that one yeah my my one and only guess in this whole game is that a guess oh i've been basing stuff off that too well we'll have to see and so because i have a seal on the fern the mandrake root and the flower i get this grand shoot which is gonna give me two coins immediately oh i guess it will be a point at the end and two points at the end of the game so you can have two coins please solid thank you and that is the final publishing uh for us so now we're gonna go to the exhibition are you able to make any of these um yes we're going to on the app you select final round and now there's the exhibit potion option so we're gonna go there and you have to pick a potion i will be doing the blue minus blue minus all right naveen here you go it's going to tell us if he indeed made a blue minus if he doesn't if it's literally anything else he's going to lose a point nope not today so these go bye-bye so those get discarded and because he was the first to do so his cube is going to go all the way up there right here yeah okay oh no you made a blue minus silly oh sorry go right there thank you and it earns him a point immediately i'll take it so i'm also going to exhibit two approaches not which is hilarious because that's the one thing she does not technically know yeah yeah why'd you choose that maybe it's the only two cards i had left oh that's why i couldn't i couldn't do it okay when i exhibit a potion and i'm going to i'm going to make a red minus let's do that so now if you make a big mistake here you know somewhere along this whole path i'm really there's some big ruins yeah but i feel like you're good i did it yeah maybe red minus so i'm going to place this up here and i get a point for that all right please and so i must discard the two cards that i used for the exhibition do you have enough cards to do i no no no all right i just have to tuck that thing away it goes into the the happy face and so i'm going to attempt to make a red positive now i this is a suggestion this is a guess based off of the information that i have on my business big this could be a four point swing which is huge yeah this could or me this will either earn me three points or it'll dock me a point so four point swing so let's go i said red positive right yes okay so this is using information that i just kind of uh deduced i guess oh be wrong okay so that the cards that i used get discarded ingredients cards are not worth anything at the end of the game anyway and then my cube goes up here because i was the first one to do it i get a point but because i also made both identical potions i get two points two three so that's three points total the reason why i think that they're opposites of the same color is because you can't actually use the same ingredients you have to use like a lot of different different sets of ingredients that's exactly why i couldn't pull it off because i had two scorpions which were definitely negative so i couldn't use it to then get a positive somewhere right yeah if you have two of the exact same ingredient you're not gonna do both um both sides so that's it that is the end of the game we finished but we still do this so who has the most number of seals i think it's probably tied uh maybe let's see i count one two three four five for me one two three four five for you so you both get a point nice um we do this on happy face but you only have one cube there so it doesn't get you anything nobody in the bed bay we're ignoring the adventurer because the game is done we're going into endgame scoring are you ready yeah yeah are you feeling about it you know i feel i feel unfortunately pretty good if that makes sense unfortunately pretty good because i i think the gap is just to stay and we're just going to swing you know forward because you don't think i made a mistake or something you know it doesn't look like it based off the way everything else worked out yeah we didn't do any debunking usually we do yeah so this is kind of a different one all right so the first thing that we score are our artifacts i don't think you have any right you didn't buy any well i haven't met from the very beginning no the article oh the artifacts no no no yeah okay so i have two of them the amulet of rhetoric i already took those points so it's just a thinking cap gives me one point nice as you get further along on the score track the numbers get thinner and thinner for some reason then we score our grants so we we both have two of them yeah and so they are worth two points each unless you took the center one i took the center one so i got three points two plus one yeah the center one is worth one less three three okay and i have four four points please all right so you're at 29 to 33. and now if you have any favorite cards left in your hand you exchange them i do four i believe it's two coins two coins yeah the sad thing was i wanted to really play this one play when you buy an artifact one artifact cost you one less gold beast but i didn't have all this gold yeah yeah going into this right i really wanted this for one you know oh yeah it's unfortunate so i get two gold coins and then i'm turning it in with that exchange rate of three to one we get up get points to money or money two points at one point at one point okay i have one two three four five six seven so i get two points nice okay and then we are going to do the big reveal so this is gonna be all based off of the i'm gonna move my screen just yeah i guess we don't really need to to have more secrecy no more secrecy all right another secrecy all right so on the app there's an area here that says show answers you just hit it and it it prompts you like are you sure yeah hit yes boom all the answers are at the top let's start with the yeah with the scorpion okay so the scorpion all big minuses correct so flip over the seal five points and red guess it correctly 26 the number of points as shown on the seal okay i'll pull it off yeah bullfrog is correct okay so blue guess i knew that too three points okay i put my three point my three-point seal on there yep uh feather is correct but oh what are you doing there five points five points for navy 26 goes to 31. uh-oh you're kind of gaining on me here the uh the flower is correct all right we'll get you your three points one two three okay and me unfortunately it was a hedge your head that was my first guess at the very beginning that's fair and you followed me on that one that's that's pretty good yeah yeah well there you go okay so i don't get any points for that the mandrake root is correct mandrake root is correct monique is gonna get five points oh she knew that one so you're at 45 now yes and i'm out the fern is correct as well five more you're at 50. oh you're gonna lap the board the red yep that's correct they're all they're all correct yeah so three points for you and of course the final one is correct and that was your guys in my three because this is the very first one if you remember that i published and i really wasn't i was between two of them and the difference between the two was the red aspect yeah so i hedged my bet and if this were i literally guessed 50 50 and i just guessed the correct one but i guess the wrong one then i would have been able to debunk my own theory later on the the round after so i was kind of disappointed that i was actually right yeah i wanted to debunk it but then i discovered that that was right yeah and i was like ah i can't debunk it i was pretty disappointed when i found out that was right because i'm actually scoring less points by being correct if i was able to properly debunk it not lose any points for it and earn the two points and then immediately publish again then that would have been at least three more points so i guess right also on the flower because i hedged it right and i wanted to debunk it so i wanted to debunk not only yours but mine also and i couldn't get to it so that's it that is the final score it looks like it's 50 to 37. um nobody oh we did a little bit of like losing a point in earlier in the game yeah just a little bit yeah can we can we see what your final final sheet looks like mine's a little more clean this is cleaner mine i i like to scribble everything out so that i'm left with just the ones that i know oh i see yeah i put circles through and then once i know something for sure then i make sure to go through the entire row and cross it out right so that way it's like kind of like sudoku when you're um when you're just like oh i know for a fact this is it so make sure everything else so when naveen published i don't know if it was you published the foot right i didn't know the bull frog no i was that's why i was like okay i'm okay with going second because if naveen publishes first then i can just take the second one it's true that makes sense yeah um i literally didn't those are the only two that i didn't know i was 50 50 on the scorpion and then the rest of them i figured out by by testing and deduction you know i realized well no you would have still got this one i i thought at the end i should have done bullfrog and then endorsed this but no you it would have worked out the same way yeah so that's it that is alchemist good job okay so we just finished our two player playthrough of alchemist this was one that uh we've been wanting to play for a long time yeah on the channel we've been wanting to play this since last year actually yeah and we weren't sure exactly how to film it and then we just said find said you know what it this has to be done from one person's perspective at least to make this make any sense so i know that that camera work was a little bit shaky and it wasn't the best quality camera but i hope that you're able to kind of have a sense of what the players are doing behind the screen because that's where a lot of the magic takes place right in this game you're you're figuring out information behind the screen you're taking notes you're trying to you're you're acting like an alchemist i guess yeah that's where all the player board or board gaming world yeah you get stuck in your own head you look down at that sheet and you're like what can this be you know so it's really really fun yeah so this is not a new game this is a this is a game that came out several years ago and has been on our shelf since probably around that time yeah when it first came out yeah this is just a game that we wanted to show people because we love it so much it's not for everyone it has a very strong deduction component and any game that has a strong deduction component is going to have people who are not going gonna are we're gonna be turned off to it this is the scientific method in a board game like you are definitely like experimenting theorizing hypothesizing and trying to put things together failing sometimes this game we actually did pretty well you know our 5050s worked out but in other games they don't yeah we tested a lot early on the deduction component is is very akin to like clue and so it can scramble the brain you know over the course of the game but uh let's start with theme what are your thoughts on theme i like it uh you know my my undergraduate degree was it was in the sciences so um kind of like it feels almost i hate to say it feels kind of like homework [Music] um but um but i like the theme of you know you're testing these potions and you're trying to come up with these these solutions to to you know your hypothesis and you're trying to publish these theories um so i think the theme does play pretty well here for a worker placement euro game yeah yeah um i agree this is this is the first alchemy game i've played right the second one is probably trust me justice which we just covered but they both play very differently i was actually initially drawn to this game because of the theme everybody has these big player screens and this is like it came out around the time where when we first started getting into gaming so this was very like wow what is that game um and it came on a recommendation from somebody i don't yeah a friend a friend taught it to us so when i started playing it i realized like oh wow this i really really enjoyed clue when i was a kid yeah and that type of deduction mixed in with a euro worker placement game well that really like sold it for me and so theme was eurogamer yes so theme-wise i really enjoy it the rule book is very very um the rulebook is very narrated it's very there's so much personality to the rule book like whoever wrote the rule book is was speaking as if they were they are the alchemist and they're explaining to you why everything is thematically tied in like uh down to the types of potions that you're making the the blue negative potion is a potion of insanity so you lose yeah you lose a reputation because people don't trust you as much you get to go first in turn order because you bought breakfast instead of like yeah so it's all very uh very whimsical and just there's so much personality to the story of this game so i haven't read the rule book that's cool to know yeah the rule book has a ton of flavor text and in every aspect of the rule book there's a little bit of flavor text explaining like why thematically enough to keep you intrigued yeah to keep reading the rulebook because sometimes it's you know you pull up in a rule book and you're like oh man i'm on page six of 12. yeah that's good it's it's nice so the thematic ties are are excellent they really tried to make everything kind of fit with a scientific method like you were saying so in terms of components and sort of replayability the game needs an insert yeah that's probably you know one of our biggest gripes with components wise everything's in baggies yep everything's easy enough to sort though you just put everything in a bowl you know in their appropriate bowls and yeah you're gonna open the box there's just gonna be like bags and bags stuff everywhere it's that kind of game and then just these player boards are like a big chunk you kind of throw them in there otherwise everything is really nicely um illustrated replayability is good yeah there are two different variants there's the apprentice variant and the master variant we were mentioning that a little bit earlier right and so um especially in this game where it seemed like we were kind of on we were kind of solving all the other videos there wasn't a whole lot of conflict there is that master variant that you can try and play with like harder harder rules i suppose yeah yeah harder debunking rules and just it's a little bit more of a challenge artifacts there are i believe six of each um from ej from each age and so every time you play you're going to have a different combination of those and so that is going to steer gameplay definitely obviously the solutions are always going to be different when you play so every time you you step into it every game feels different right right and in terms of player count it does scale pretty well i still prefer higher player counts three and four player games just because there is a lot more you know it turns into more of like a meta game at that point yeah yeah we were talking about that earlier in a two-player game it's a lot more open you have a lot more action cubes so you're able to do more stuff with less competition so it does become this breezier version of the game than you kind of saw here neither of us debunked theories so in higher player accounts there's a lot more competition for spots and player turn order becomes a lot more important and that selling to the adventurer becomes a lot more challenging so in a two-player game if i saw navino going to the adventure i it kind of made me think maybe i shouldn't go because if i compete against him and i lose then that's two cubes that i'm wasting right right so in higher player counts there is more space for the adventurer and so you will see that bidding mechanism a lot more often yeah i think it's more interesting in a higher player account when everybody's at that 50 50 moment and you want to get a theory on the board and then you're all kind of you kind of know a little information about what they guessed about and they know some information about what you guessed about so when that happens in a three or four player game it's kind of like do i want to rely on their imperfect information yeah to kind of push my thing forward am i willing to take that chance so that actually happens a lot you did we didn't see it today but in higher player counts uh by the time you get to that first conference you're not ready you don't you're a lot of times you don't know exactly exactly any information from the theory board so you're guessing and so you might end up relying on somebody's guest information that happens a lot and so if that steers you down the wrong direction suddenly you're getting a lot of these things wrong you might even try to debunk somebody and be wrong right because you'll find yourself justifying you'll say ah you know i that does fit with what this one fits with so technically that could be right so i'm gonna kind of go with it for a little bit right and then maybe i'll debunk it later on but then uh maybe somebody else will debunk it before you you know so that that competition for space in a higher player count also becomes really really important strategy wise you might even do that on purpose so like if i was 50 50 on something and maybe i did figure it out and i just publish the incorrect version right of the theory and then everybody relies on the incorrect version that i properly hedged later on realizing that it was wrong right so there's a lot of that like purposeful leading people in the wrong direction and then once everybody else piles on then you can then go and be like oh yeah by the way i debunked it and then devalue everybody else yes i've seen you do that before in the past i mean i don't know if any of this makes sense yeah but just know that higher player counts it definitely turns into more of a metagame you are trying to get into each other's heads i've played a game where somebody only really figured out one ingredient everything else they were they were deducing by the way people were playing the theory board so there's a lot of psychology to just that part of the game which is really interesting in harry potter accounts and so i know we already discussed a lot about uh mechanics but just kind of diving in further uh this game is interesting because it takes it takes two big mechanics and amplifies both almost equally you got the worker placement and the deduction you need to have both you need to work on both right totally yeah so earlier on you're doing a lot of testing and so you you probably strategy wise you probably want to test with the same ingredient on different other ingredients other ingredients one ingredient to test with multiple different ingredients yes because if you're taking like the whole rainbow of ingredients and just testing them with one another you're gonna get little bits of information here yeah you're not gonna get you're not gonna find out the solution to one until later on in the game yeah a lot of that relies on of course getting the right ingredients so all of the decision making in this game is really interesting it's really fun like starting with just what turn order what turnout i really like that i really like that part of the game which benefits am i going to get what is it going to be what's going to be worth it the most the favorite cards are very helpful like very helpful i wanted to use mine but i couldn't at the end i just i was short money i know you know so money is very very tight that's another aspect of this game that you have to manage because you only start with two coins it costs a coin to publish these uh artifacts are very expensive the only real way that you can get money besides transmuting is selling to this adventurer which you're competing for with your opponents which takes ingredients out of your own personal economy yes which means you cannot test with those ingredients so just the money aspect and figuring out how to get more money in order to publish more theories is interesting putting out your cubes first when you're going last so that everybody sees where you're going and can react accordingly exactly very interesting that work replacement mechanic i think is is really cool yeah and then even down to the exhibition last ditch effort to earn those points at the very end of the game when you can no longer test assuming you have the ingredients in hand yeah assuming you can make those opposite potions really interesting so um oh i think i feel like this this game is it's just so fun for me to play the one drawback that i would say is especially in the apprentice version of the game it's snowballs so if you have a player at the table who is just doing well never making a mistake and just continues to do well if you make a mistake you're probably not going to beat that right right i know that there are those thresholds on the scoreboard to try to make like a catch-up mechanism but it's relying on you to lose points yeah so a lot of times these people who are doing really well don't lose people yeah like like you today um you didn't have any wrong guesses uh and if you did you hedged them appropriately right so you never found yourself in a position to lose points so not bad so it's one of those cases where you probably just want to try with the master variant yeah there is an expansion to this game it's called the king's golem and um if this amount of deduction breaks your brain do not play the expansion i think flips it upside down it does it shakes it yeah it's like it's yeah it's crazy that makes sense expansion adds an extra layer of deduction on another board for you to to need to figure out and so um maybe for people who who are just like really good at this version of the game have them do the expansion that one is uh yeah that one's intense we've played it before and it changes the game quite a bit yeah so like i said this is definitely one of my favorite games it's really fun to play around halloween time as well even though it's not spooky it just has that like you know um sciency you're mixing chemicals in a lab kind of thing yeah yeah but like i said it's not gonna be for everybody especially because of the deduction mechanic and just kind of what it expects from you but this is a game that i really really love and it's always going to be kind of like in our collection probably it'll be there and you final two same thing exactly i love it it's great game um every single time i i i want to get out of the gate and like learn that first one so much faster and then i always find myself in that third round and i'm like it's still 50 50. i don't know what to do so that that position that it puts you in is really really fun for me yeah yeah and by the way this is also the game that got me interested in cge yeah the publishers after after i played this they they put out more and more excellent games and quickly became one of my kind of go-to publishers that i that i kind of monitor right so yeah same anyway that is alchemists well thank you guys so much for watching the play through we hope you enjoyed it we hope that made sense for you guys as well yeah if you'd like to see more videos like this please consider subscribing thank you bye [Music] you

Channel: Before You Play

Views: 23,847

Keywords: Alchemists, Czech Games Edition, Alchemists board game, alchemists playthrough, alchemists how to play, Review, CGE Games, how to play alchemists, alchemists spiel, Board game alchemists, how to play alchemists board game, alchemists tutorial, alchemists runthrough, alchemists board game review, alchemists game review, alchemists board game tutorial, alchemists board game runthrough, alchemists board game rules, board games, board game tutorial, board game rules, alchemists

Id: wXD8HuCNPzc

Length: 107min 4sec (6424 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 29 2020