There is value in publishing such caveat theories because: you do gain reputation up front, you may gain more reputation every round if you are most-published, you may win grants from the university, and of course, you look good at conferences. However if the theory is later found to be correct afterall, you don't gain points either. If the theory is later found to be wrong only for that specific component, you don't lose face because hey you had stated a caveat albeit in small print.

When you publish this type of theory, you secretly put a caveat in the appendix saying that you're actually unsure about one of the three components. There is one special type of theory, which I call the caveat theory. This final revelation makes up a significant chunk of overall scores. For each correct theory, you gain points. At game end, the app announces the alchemical properties of all ingredients. During conferences, you gain or lose reputation depending on how much publishing you've done. Every round, the alchemists with the most theories gain reputation. You gain reputation each time you publish (reputation points are converted to victory points during final scoring). There are several ways to score points, and most of them are related to publishing and debunking theories. You put tokens here to remind others of the types of potions you have produced. This is a small player board which you put in front of your player screen. You challenge a component of a specific colour of a specific published theory, and the app will tell you whether the sign of that component is indeed wrong. Debunking a theory does not consume any ingredient. Your opponents won't see what you are mixing, but you have to announce what potion is produced. Mixing potions require spending two ingredients from your hand. Testing potions, selling them to adventurers, and debunking theories are actions which will give you information. You forage for ingredients at the forest, you make potions to test on students, you test them on yourself, you try to sell them to visiting adventurers, you publish theories, you debunk theories, you transmute ingredients into gold coins. The game is played over six rounds, and it uses a worker placement mechanism for players to select and execute actions. The alchemical components of the ingredients are randomised every game. All four pairs of ingredients above will produce the negative blue potion - the insanity potion.Įveryone starts the game knowing nothing about any of the eight ingredients. To determine what kind of potion you produce when mixing two ingredients, you need to find the component with a matching sign, where it is large in one ingredient but small in the other. Every ingredient has three alchemical components, red, green and blue.

Alchemists board game