Tips alchemists

Don’t make mistakes

It sounds so obvious. I hate to say that about half of my lost games are caused by not following this rule.

Play carefully.

Check what has happened since your last move.

Put your action cubes onto the right action.

Place the crosses in the right column and row of your grid.

Have enough resources for the actions you want to do.

Select the right alchemical and the right seal.

Select the correct ingredients for your potion.

Look up the results in the right column.

Double check everything before you commit.

Check if the action can still be done as planned.

Keep your deduction sheet up to date all the time.

Learn deduction

You have better things to do than being in the lab brewing potions. Good deduction skills save a lot of lab work.

The "Basic Priciples of Alchemy" are a good start here. You'll find a copy of these in the rulebook. After this lecture you should pass the following test. Fill out the deduction grid with these findings: Mushroom + Fern yield Green+, Fern + Toad yield Red-. You should get 16 crosses at the end. If you get only 14 (many beginners do) reread the "Alchemicals" section. This is the most important deduction rule. Make sure you master it.

There’s more to deduction than is written in the rulebook. Find it out.

You don’t need to know everything. You just need to know enough. And you don’t even have to know. You may also guess. Most times it is sufficient to be confident.

It is better to know more about less than to know a bit about everything.

Make use of the theory table. There's a lot of nonsense in it, everyone knows that. But keep in mind that your dear colleagues value reputation as much as you do. So there must be some truth in their theories. Find out what it is and use it to your advantage. Of course, this is not state of the art knowledge as you would get from your own experiments, but as told before you don’t need to know exactly. Confidence is sufficient. The grey crosses will help you.

Automatic deduction isn't perfect yet. It misses crosses, sometimes a lot of crosses. Anyway, if you use it try to understand why it placed the crosses.

Publish

Your seals are worth 19 points in total. This is about half of the points you’ll get in the game. Your first theory will be most likely hedged, maybe the second too. That's ok. You can't know everything at the beginning. Starting lastest with the third theory you should be able to bring out your starred seals.

Play for grants. You'll need the money you can get there. A good alchemist gets his first grant usually with the second seal.

Other

Watch

Watch what the others do. And watch also what they don't do.

Plan your round

This starts at selecting the position in play order and continues with placing the actions cubes. Make up your mind what you want to do in this round. Decide then if you have to go early of if you can be late in the round and get more stuff. Refine your decisions when you place the action cubes. You should know then what ingredients to take, what to sell, which discount to give, and so on. Of course it can happen that you must change your plans during the round, e.g. one of your colleages foraged the ingredient you badly needed just before you. Always have a plan B at hand.

Think about what the others will do. It will help you.

Take Notes

This is especially important for round-based games. You can’t remember everything over a couple of days. You may use the built-in notepad on the upper right. It opens automatically when you enter the board, if there's text in.

Take risks

You may fail. That’s ok in the early game. It may cost one reputation point, but you get something in return that’s worth more.

You may promise a higher guarantee for your potion than you know for sure. On the long run 3 gold with 50% probability is more than 1 gold with 100%. Of course you should not do that if the next conference is due and you badly need the money for the printing.

Gold is scarce and valuable. Instead of spending it on a student you may choose to suffer damage yourself and spare the money for the next artifact or theory.

You’ll find other situations. Push your luck.

Information Finding

You can get information almost everywhere. Use all of it. Sometimes, what you get is too weak for deduction. But it still can be used to decide which charge to put on the hedged aspect in a theory.