Brewing and selling potions is certainly not a new concept for a board game, but it’s delivered with simple-yet-satisfying style in Potions of Azerland. You’ll need to gather resources from the forest, increase your knowledge in different potion types, go to the market to collect and trade goods before fulfilling the orders of travellers – or, in a neat twist, drink the potion yourself for some bonus effects. With many actions happening simultaneously, and the turn order preference decided in secret, Potions of Azerland offers just enough riffs on the well-tread formula to make for a light and breezy strategy game experience.
The various actions you’ll take when playing Potions of Azerland will be very familiar to most players, but they’re also kept simple enough that they’re non-threatening to newcomers, too. The fact that you can do many of them simultaneously keeps things moving quickly, too. Foraging allows you to roll dice for ingredients. Studying increases knowledge, enhancing the point value of potions. The Market enables you to purchase ingredients or hire workers. Brewing turns your ingredients into potions, and then Fulfilling involves you giving potions to visitors, resulting in instant points, endgame points and/or ongoing abilities.
A couple of twists set the game apart from others; first, the turn order for each of the five core actions is decided in private, based on an individual priority tracker. If you want access to more ingredient dice at the market, you’d put that as your first choice to try and guarantee that. However, you might want dibs on which visitors you want to trade with, or the ability to brew more potions. If you don’t want to do the action at all, you can choose to get coins instead, which are useful for other things. The unknown of the turn order until it’s all revealed simultaneously makes things tricky, and can drastically impact your ability to progress if you don’t end up with a higher priority, so it was always the part of each round that required the most thought, and excitement.
“Do I drink the potion to increase benefits later, or do I earn victory points from visitors in this round?”
The other twist I like is that instead of giving potions to travellers, you can instead drink them yourself, giving you benefits. It unlocks additional abilities on your player board that can be incredibly useful later, like a personal Black Market that gives you more buying options, or extra dice to roll for insurance. It also means that the potions you do sell have increased value in victory points. As you can see which visitors are on the board – and the ones that are coming next round, too – it creates a strong push and pull, as you figure out what path to take. Do I drink the potion to increase benefits later, or do I earn victory points from visitors in this round? What if somebody else beats me to it? For a simple game, it offers a lot of different paths to success.
That makes for a solid and engaging experience, blending resource management, simultaneous action selection and some important turn-to-turn decision making. You’ll also have eight rounds to do all of this, so long-term planning and taking advantage of the random elements are important. For example, in our first game, I was unlucky enough to repeatedly roll the resource dice onto a resource I didn’t need to brew my potions. I had already, in the secret prioritisation of turn order, opted not to go to the Market on that round.
By not rolling the right resources and not having the Market as a backup plan, I was stuck without the ability to brew what I needed, essentially wasting a round of play. Sure, I was able to build it back up in the next round when I finally got what I needed, but it put me on the back foot early. When it was all said and done, only one point separated all three of us from one another, despite taking on different tactics, which is the mark of a solid board game, in my view.
Where Potions of Azerland falls down slightly is with its components. The resources, potions, and other various markers are colourful and stand out well, and I think the private prioritisation boards are simple and effective, allowing you to slide in the different priority tiles easily (although, they can fall out if you flip them over a bit too eagerly). But apart from the main game board, the other “boards” are not thick and are flat, with no divots to place the various pieces in front of you. It does mean that the board game is on the cheaper side, but enhancing the player boards would have given the whole experience a more premium, tactile feel that it’s somewhat lacking.
Potions of Azerland is still a lot of fun, though. While its premise is simple and has been done before, the combination of a secret turn order and potions that can be drunk instead of traded makes for a surprisingly large amount of tactical depth, with no clear victor in sight until the very end. Our experienced group agreed that it was much more fun in practice than we anticipated, and with a runtime of just over an hour once you know what you’re doing, it slots in nicely as a light-to-medium style game with enough choices to keep it interesting across multiple plays.
Potions of Azerland is available now in all good board game stores. Thanks to VR Distribution for providing a copy for this review.
About the Author
Luke Mitchell
he/him
Luke spends his time making radio, playing video games, binge-watching TV, getting unreasonably invested in wrestling, and hanging out with his beautiful pets.
