It has happened, after trading in two games, Zombicide: Green Horde by CMON and Conan by Monolith, I got close and finally traded in all my points at my FLGS All Systems Go to get a free $100 game. Their rewards system has you, once you’ve spent $1000 in store credit or purchases you can get a free game, if I did my math correctly. I’ve probably spent $500-600 in store credit, plus picking up games. So what game did I get, you’ll have to find out, but I did buy a couple of games with store credit to get to that mark.

Potion Explosion and The Fifth Ingredient Expansion

Potion Explosion is a game that I have played before. And it is a game with some of the best toy factor out there. In Potion Explosion you take marbles out of a tray. Every turn you get to take one, if removing a marble causes two like colored marbles to hit, you get to take those, and if that causes two to hit, you take those. It’s kind of like a matching app game. You use the ingredients, the marbles, that you take to complete potions, because of science. These potions give you powers, so it might be to steal someone else’s stored ingredients, it might be to take a marble of your choice, or you can make all your stored ingredients into whatever ingredient you want for the turn, and there are more as well. That is a great part of the game and offers a lot of things to think about, and you are doing all of this the pursuit of points. But, what really sells this game is just the fun toy factor. Picking out marbles, them hitting together, picking those out, and it happens again, that is just so much fun to chain everything together.

The Quacks of Quedlinburg

This game is one of the hotter and bigger games in the past few years. I thought about getting it before now, but generally have passed because I wasn’t sure I wanted a push your luck game. Kind of like Potion Explosion, you are quack doctors creating your potions. You put as much as you can into your pot without the potion going poof. To do that, you draw tokens out of your bag, adding them to a track, trying, with the white colored ingredients to not cause everything to blow up. You can stop whenever you want, but the further you progress in your potion, the more points you will get. This game plays over several rounds, and you buy more ingredients for your bag to draw out and to hopefully get you to the point where you are scoring a lot of points. This one generally is just right on that edge of, I know I’d like it, but do I want it. I decided, to help get to my free game, that it was time to make the jump and pick up The Quacks of Quedlinburg.

Heroes of Land, Air, & Sea

Now we are to the free game. Heroes of Land, Air, & Sea. Another game that has been on that list of games I really want to get, but it’s expensive. It’s a $100 game, so why not pick it up for free. This is a fantasy 4X game. The biggest 4X game is probably Twilight Imperium by Fantasy Flight, but this one, in a fantasy setting, really just caught my eye. And I want to try a game where you are all against each other in an epic battle as you eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate. Plus the game comes with awesome minis, and will look great on the table. I won’t lie, I’m a bit intimidated by how big the game is, but I am very confident that I will love it. Just the amount of tactics that will go into this game and the different paths that can lead to victory, this game looks awesome. Granted, I won’t be able to play it for a bit, it’s a bit much to just play with my wife, but I can’t wait until I get it to the table.

Which of these games seems the most fun? Do you have any experience with them? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

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