Me and three other designers cooked up a board game and playtested it immensely during 4 weeks. After several iterations the game turned into a casual board game where 3 to 4 players compete to brew the strongest potion.

● Huge swings and comebacks
● Resource management
● Flexible card use
● Sabotage for your opponents

Game Concept

Race against other players to brew the most potent love potion or deadliest poison. Being one of the extremes gives you rewards, ending up in the middle generates nothing. Players achieve this by playing ingredient cards, modifiers and cast spells to either boost their own potion or sabotage their competitors' brew.

Sabotage and Comebacks

The basic concept is essentially a ladder where you either want to be either above or below all other players to gain the reward. Quick player turns and by having all cards playable on either yourself or your opponents we created a range of fun interactions in high tempo. With modifiers and what we call spell cards, the tide constantly changes and players would temporarily team up against those currently ahead to constantly have a changing lead. 

Each card also had two actions on them, and you can only pick one of them to be played. This created more options for the players and we tried to pair up specific actions for interesting decision making. The selectable double action made the cards as a whole less situational, reducing the random component of card draw. It also gave more design space regarding balancing of the cards.

True Judge: Playtesting

During the development we found a few fundamental flaws built into the game. One of them were kingmaking, scenarios where a losing player was able to dictate who else would win with their last action. Another problem was the prominent advantage of being the starting player in a round. 

We sent a pitch and a full rule book to a small publisher. Due to slow response we decided to shift our focus to other projects and the board game got put on hold. But I still have a printed copy if you want to play! ^^