Potion #9

It’s bejeweled the boardgame! Shortest. Review. Ever. 
Potion explosion is a filler game featuring four colors of marbles all sitting snug in six slanted rows of a natty cardboard alchemists board that looks like someone put all the carriages in Colt Express together the wrong way round and upside down

Each player picks two thick flat cardboard breaking bad flasks which feature a number of holes for holding marbles and two or three colors. The idea is to pick marbles of the corresponding colors from the alchemist chutes and fill up the potion bottle holes with the appropriate amount of Marbles. So far so simple but of course that won’t last
The sizzle comes in picking the marbles. You can pick any one you like. If after picking one marble two colours of the same marble slide together you get to pick up all those marbles too. Clever picking will see you netting a big haul and the unused once are put back in the top and refill the chutes again. 

Once you complete a potion it can be tapped to provide a special ability like steal someone else’s marbles or pick a number from the bottom or take another go and so on. Potions are worth points at the end the more marbles it takes to fill them the more they are worth. There’s six different potion types. When you get three of a kind you are awarded a seal token worth extra points. Once five of these have been drawn it’s game over. 
There’s a little bit more like being able to store three unused marbles on the side of you player board and being able to take negative point chits to take an additional one marble. 
It’s pretty simple stuff but combinations of marbles and knock on effects can be complex (don’t let someone who over analyzes their moves play this). There’s definitely skill here and repeated play will increase you’re skill. It’s a beautifully presented game, the marbles really make it, but a lack of player interaction is a negative for me. 
Worth a look, may well be your thing and I’ll play it again but it doesn’t shine above any other filler game out there 
Good fun for a bit 
Huzzah!
Vic