Alchemists - A Creativity Quest Review

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The barrier to entry "Wait, we have to download an app first?" and setup "Do we really need all of these cardboard bits?" are enormous with this one, but it's definitely different. But I really wouldn't take anything out of this design. Once you get into it, there really aren't that many moving parts- collect ingredients, get a little money, deduce, publish. There are a lot of people out there that would hate it, but they probably won't even be asked to play it in the first place. Games like this are very self-selected.

I've got a few friends who just love it!

How does this play with different numbers of players?

Gary Sax wrote: How does this play with different numbers of players?

It's okay with 2 but better with more. It's been carefully designed to scale well: you use a slightly different setup, even a different board side for each player count.

That was our experience, too. It works fine with two, but it's really better with three or four.

Hmmm, thanks for the info. Was thinking about it for two. We're both academics so the theme would be a draw and the deduction sounds cool.

Yeah, I think you'd like it given that you seem to like worker placement games all right, especially if they have a strong theme.

One of my friends that has it plays it most frequently with his spouse, who's not the biggest gamer but really wanted to learn Alchemists based on the theme.

(FWIW, the friend above is Matt Loomis who is an aspiring game designer who really didn't like worker placement games until the last couple years. The other is Ben Rosset, who designed Brew Crafters, another WP game- Ben said that he and his group were playing Alchemists obsessively).