Other Stuff Monthly #20!

 Another game from the big boardgame backlog I mentioned in my review of Red Outpost, this time it's Ars Alchimia. It's a translation of a Japanese board game, which is kind of interesting, since it seems like  this doesn't happen as often as I'd like. The same goes for Japanese TTRPGs, too, but that situation is slowly changing (though there are still many many TTRPGs from the 90s and 00s with cool-looking art, and cool-sounding concepts that I don't think we'll ever see in English).

 

Anyway, Ars Alchimia is a worker placement game that follows the players through their four years at alchemy school. Each year, you need to gather ingredients and recipes, employ assistants, and finally use forges to make magical items using alchemy. The big gimmick is that each player has a lot of workers (the exact amount varies based on turn order, the number of players, and some other choices that happen in-game). You see, when you send workers to a location, if there are already workers there, you have to send a larger group of workers there to take it over. Furthermore, you can also send more workers than you need, with the twin benefits of making it more difficult for following players to use the location, and adding to your own dice roll (for getting extra ingredients when gathering, etc.).

 

So, once the players get a hang of it, there is a lot of opportunities for some pretty spiteful play:  for example, if you know that a player that comes after you needs a specific ingredient, you can force them to make a choice between getting that ingredient and having enough workers left over to do other things elsewhere on the board). I think offering these cruel choices is a little more interesting than the dynamic in a lot of worker placement games, where you can just straight up block your opponents from using certain facilities.

 

I don't really have anything negative to say about this game. It's a lot of fun, the inter-player interaction is cool, it moves really fast, even with four players, and there's a lot of very cute and cool artwork on the board and cards. I think it's out of print now (and maybe even the English publisher might have gone out of business), but if you can find a copy of Ars Alchimia, I definitely recommend picking it up. I've only played it a few times at the time of writing, but I think with time, it might come to stand among the likes of Dominion and Istanbul and other all-time favourites!