Potion Explosion
Puzzle board game
Ratings
Age
4+
Category
Board
Languages
English
Fri Jul 26 2024
- Updated game engine
- Added notification icon
In Potion Explosion, students of the Horribilorum Sorcery Academy must gather ingredients to craft powerful mixtures. By removing an ingredient from the dispenser, you cause others to slide down. If ingredients of the same color collide, they explode, allowing you to collect them all! Use your unicorn tears and dragon smoke to complete potions, earn skill tokens, and become the Potion Master.
Dinsun Expert Review
Our Expert Score
Potion Explosion is a rare example of a board-to-mobile port that actually improves upon the physical experience. The tactile satisfaction of the 'marbles' clinking together is perfectly captured through high-quality sound design and haptic feedback. The core 'Match-3 with a twist' mechanic is deep enough to require genuine strategy—knowing when to trigger a chain reaction to gather extra ingredients and when to drink a finished potion for a strategic advantage is key.
The AI provides a solid challenge, but the online multiplayer is where the game truly shines. The UI is clean, and the tutorial does an excellent job of teaching the nuances of the 'Fifth Ingredient' expansion. It’s a colorful, chaotic, and highly strategic puzzler that stays true to its tabletop roots while embracing the convenience of digital play. If you enjoy puzzle games with a layer of tactical depth, this belongs on your phone.
Features
Solo mode against adjustable AI
Online multiplayer with global leaderboards
Tactical gameplay with deep strategic choices
Fifth Ingredient expansion available
Faithful adaptation of the award-winning board game
Tips & Walkthrough
The secret to winning is maximizing your 'explosions.' Look for moves that will cause multiple same-colored ingredients to hit each other in succession. This is the only way to fill multiple flasks in a single turn.
Gameplays
Completed potions aren't just for points—you can drink them! Use effects like stealing ingredients from opponents or taking extra marbles from the dispenser to finish your remaining recipes faster.
Screenshot
Q&A
Yes, it features a Local Pass & Play mode for playing with friends on the same device.
Ratings & Reviews
5 stars for fun, minus one for bugginess
Wed Dec 20 2023 ListenWithYourEarsThis is my go-to game on my phone. Really fun! Bought the expansion pack about a year ago and have really enjoyed it. Hoping for more potion expansion options in future! (“Paint” an ingredient a different color while on the board, swap 2 ingredients while still on the board, swap 2 ingredients from anywhere on the board, etc.) Only issue is that multiple updates have been VERY “buggy.” To the point that I can’t plan the online version because it just spins. Sometimes this lasts for weeks or even months until the next update. Sometimes deleting and reinstalling the app helps, but often you just have to wait for the next update to play again. If this gets fixed, I’d rate it 5 starts for sure!
Love this game but hope for more updates
Thu Apr 30 2026 Thesia1997I absolutely adore the animations with the potions and ingredients, as well as the professors! I was originally introduced to this game on BGA with some family members. We’ve been playing it for years. I later introduced Potion Explosion to my boyfriend and we all love playing it. My boyfriend bought the physical board game and then later found this app. We have given it many tries with the online feature, but we have yet to be able to finish a game. The app bugs out and gets stuck on one of our screens saying it’s the other person’s turn and it won’t sync up again or let us move forward. It seems to happen the most when life distracts us and we let the app sit in the background running or close the app entirely. The app seems to get disrupted and stops communicating between our two phones. He has a google phone and I have an iPhone, so maybe it’s something between the two that causes disrupted connection. We’re willing to stick with this app for the sake of the beloved game and will use it for times when we’re not doing anything for extended periods of time. We’re hoping for continued improvement and future updates. Thank you to everyone for your part in creating and maintaining such a cool app!
New expansion is buggy
Wed May 16 2018 pbeasiI enjoyed the original game but it became kind of same-y after a while. This expansion solves that problem, but introduced some bugs. The expansion tutorial froze on me the first time I tried it so I had to force quit and start over. It worked fine the second time, but my first game was a disaster. Every once in a while when I used an ingredient from my pool, it didn’t disappear. I couldn’t use it again, but it blocked a slot. On my next turn, the problem fixed itself; at least until it happened again. Once it did it to two ingredients from the pool which totally stunk because now two slots were blocked. So whereas I could have filled the pool with colors I didn’t need and used a potion to make them wild, I couldn’t do that and lost the game. Please do more extensive testing before releasing updates. iPad Pro 12.9 (first release) with latest released iOS.
Near Perfect Fun! Just One Thing...
Sun Oct 18 2020 ElviteExtremely fun game. It made me run out the next day to buy the physical games. The one thing this game sorely needs is an Undo button. I would limit any Undo button to only going back one move maximum and only if someone hits the Undo button within a time limit of say 5 seconds or so. If they put that in, it would vastly improve the game with the easy to make missteps that are immediately apparent after tapping. It would be like allowing someone about to drink a potion to “get it to their lips” but change their mind before drinking it when they immediately realize it won’t have the effect they thought it would. It would also allow someone to put a marble they accidentally pulled back in the rack (if done within the time limit).
Desperately needs a notification system
Sun Aug 03 2025 noraarThis is a great digital version of there fantastic board game. Offline gameplay is super fun with other friends, and the. AI opponents are fairly decent (though are typically not challenging enough for me). Online gameplay, however, is extremely frustrating without notifications when it’s your turn. So many games timeout because either myself or the opponents don’t realize it’s our turns until it’s too late. You can obviously check the game periodically to see if it’s your turn, but it is very easy to forget to check!
I didn’t agree to beta test this app
Tue Jun 06 2023 imperatrix mundiUpdated for version 3.2.3: Still many bugs. Wasn’t worth finishing the one game I attempted to play. Potion of Prismatic Joy still extremely difficult to put marbles into the flask. Potion of Lavamancing locked up when I only had two marbles of a column to remove. I force quit the app and resumed. The app returned to a much earlier point in the game. I am forced to play the red character, but when I start the game, the opening screen shows both the AI and me as the yellow character. Then the game starts and I’m the red character. It would be nice if I could be the green or blue character and rotate through the other colors for the AI. I’ve updated to iOS 16.5. A few notes: I only play the base game in offline mode against AIs. I am on an iPhone X running iOS 16.4.1 (a). That’s all the specific info I’m volunteering because, as I stated in my title, I didn’t agree to participate in beta testing this app. Yeah, that’s how egregious some of the bugs are. This doesn’t even feel like a release candidate, it’s that bad. I don’t know what is going on behind the scenes. Maybe Asmodee Digital had unrealistic deadlines for the app to go live. Maybe all of Horrible Guild’s dev and testing budget was spent on the online aspect of the game. (I’m guessing that’s where the sellable user data/money is.) Maybe Horrible Guild is embracing its name too literally. Maybe there’s some other combination of behind-the-scenes events that caused this buggy-as-fsck app to go live. I don’t know. All I know is releasing this app as it stands was the wrong call. It’s like y’all didn’t even bother testing basic offline functionality. But y’all need to fix it.
Fun but sometimes unclear.
Thu May 17 2018 EBJ7There were some moments when I thought the game was stuck. Either I couldn’t select a Potion or move on. Turned out when using the Potion of Prismatic Joy you need to hit the tag below the Potion, not the Potion itself. Also had moments where I thought I needed to select a new Potion but the game was waiting for me to make a move. If your new and not paying attention it can be frustrating. As you play more it won’t be an issue. I do wish they had a beginner option that gently reminded you, where you were in terms of your turn or where you need to hit or tap something.
Interface needs work
Thu Jun 25 2020 applemazWhile everything looks beautiful, it isn’t a good layout of the game. You can’t see what your opponent has unless you click on them. Too much of the screen is taken up making the players layout look good an not enough is devoted to showing the other players. Game needs to play in landscape mode really with the sides of the screen showing all 4 players and what they have (at all times) without requiring you to click on them. The dragging of marbles to your potions is buggy and refuses to work sometimes. This needs to be fixed also.
