Little Alchemists Transmutes Board Game Night into Major Fun

Little Alchemists is the kids’ version of the heavy, two-hour game Alchemists… sort of. It starts out pretty light, but the depth of deductive reasoning the game requires increases as you play through its seven chapters, and by the end you’ve got a pretty serious midweight game that is truly excellent, but perhaps beyond the ages 7+ the box suggests.
As in the full Alchemists, players in Little Alchemists try to figure out which ingredients make which potions by using their powers of deduction. (I know Alchemists, but I have never actually played the game.) The game works through an app that will read the two ingredient tiles you place on your hidden screen and tell you what potion they make, which changes in every game. At the start of the game, there are five ingredients that can make three potions, although as you might infer, there are more ingredients and potions to come. You start the game with three random ingredient tiles and will use two in each turn, refilling your hand afterwards, but you can spend a gold coin to buy a tile from the market at any time, with no limit on how many tiles you can buy or hold in your hand. As the game goes on, there will be customers for the different potion types, offering you three or four gold coins if you happen to brew that potion while the matching customer is active. Later on, there are artifacts you can buy to gain additional in-game powers or rack up more end-game points.
When you think you’ve deduced which set of potions a specific ingredient makes, you can submit a theory to the app, selecting the ingredient and then the set of potions. If you’re correct, you gain the top gem in the stack, starting at five points and going down to three, and then you show the other players only the set of potions you identified. They each can guess the ingredient and earn one gold coin if they’re right. If your theory is incorrect, you lose one point.