Hey everyone!
Let's play Alchemists again!
I've run this game before on TT, back before The Events, and I think we're well overdue for another session of it. So yeah, let's do that! For those of you seeing this for the firstest first time ever: Alchemists is a board game about Elder Scrolls alchemy system. You are tasked with not just discovering the properties of the natural ingredients of the world, but also duking it out in the arenas of academia for prestige and... no yeah basically just prestige. Since it's been a while and the archive is somewhat awkward to fish through, I'll be reposting the broad details of how to play the game, as well as the modules I'll be using for this game. First up, the basics.
ALCHEMY 101
For prospective players, that's the only thing you absolutely need to learn. If you're interested in joining, absolutely read the above.
Next up, the four modules from the expansion, The King's Golem. In my previous games, the first run was with no modules, the second was with three of four. This time around, I'll be opening up module selection to player voting! I'm running Startup Funding no matter what because I like it, but the other three are up to whoever gets in (and, to a lesser degree, anyone who just wants to watch the chaos unfold. I have a champagne room on Discord, hit me up if you want the deets). The Palace Library isn't a module in and of itself, but the other modules all add its functions, so you should give it a review at your leisure.
STARTUP FUNDING
BUSY DAYS
THE ROYAL ENCYCLOPEDIA
THE GOLEM PROJECT
THE PALACE LIBRARY
As ever, you can review the rulebook for the original or for the expansion. I'll need as many as four players to take on the intellectual challenge of becoming an alchemist, each of whom should specify which modules they do or do not wish to play using. I will not refuse older players from returning, but I will stipulate that anyone who's played the game before will play on Master difficulty for starting components, and will not receive the bonus ingredient in addition to their Startup Funding. Likewise, I will not run The Golem Project if we have ANY entirely new players to the game. Trust me, if you haven't played the vanilla game, you aren't ready for it.
Who's up for some science?
Let's play Alchemists again!
I've run this game before on TT, back before The Events, and I think we're well overdue for another session of it. So yeah, let's do that! For those of you seeing this for the firstest first time ever: Alchemists is a board game about Elder Scrolls alchemy system. You are tasked with not just discovering the properties of the natural ingredients of the world, but also duking it out in the arenas of academia for prestige and... no yeah basically just prestige. Since it's been a while and the archive is somewhat awkward to fish through, I'll be reposting the broad details of how to play the game, as well as the modules I'll be using for this game. First up, the basics.
ALCHEMY 101
Ordinarily, the game uses a phone app to read card pairs to determine what they make, since the whole premise is based on people not knowing for certain what each pair does, but for this game, I'll take pairs via PM and inform people of the results properly. For this segment, though, you can use the Alchemists Lab Equipment app on your phone or online. Just set the code to DEMO, and off we go.
There are eight ingredients in the game, and each one is randomly assigned one of the eight alchemical structures with each game code. Your general goal as an alchemist is to discover the properties of each ingredient. By default, the phone uses your camera to scan ingredients, but I prefer to just select the two by hand. Either way, when putting ingredients in your cauldron, don't let any other alchemists see! Do absolutely let them see the results you got, so you can properly brag about it. Anyway, we'll start you off with this simple pair: lotus flower and scorpion. Select Drink Potion, enter those in, and tell me what you got.
Oh, what's that? You got poison? Well, there's your first lesson. This teaches us a few things.
So, as mentioned, mixing two ingredients together gets you a potion, and it determines this by both size and sign of their aspects. Let's see about working with things we already know (although it is your responsibility to discern this yourself in gameplay, for this lesson I will be charitable and share some of my notes). Let's instead go with the raven feather and toad. And for this demonstration, before you enter it in, check my notes on their alchemicals and see if you can guess what they make before you mix them!
(If you want to notate those alchemicals in text, you can do so by their large symbols. Every alchemical has either 1 or 3 large symbols, and the threefers are always the same signs. So this pair would be a B+ and an O+.)
Did you guess that would make a health potion? I sure hope so, because I didn't bring any antidotes with me. Anyway, there are seven potion types. Red potions, as you have noticed by now, are health and poison respectively, depending on their sign. Similarly, positive green potions are speed and negative green are paralysis, while blue potions offer wisdom and insanity.
The seventh potion isn't really a potion at all, mind you. If the alchemicals of a pair of ingredients have all matching sizes and no matching signs, those pairs neutralize and create a neutral potion! On the one hand, there's not much demand for neutral potions, and in a vacuum that's meaningless, but think of it this way: if you know anything at all about one ingredient in that pair, you know that the opposite holds true for its neutralizer!
Anyway, in the physical, players usually use a little bit of a chart (supplied with the game) to denote what each pair of ingredients produces, and therefore what the properties of each ingredient are! I STRONGLY encourage doing so yourselves. Here are some sheets to get you an idea of what to expect. An orderly notebook is paramount towards backing up your findings when some upstart inevitably tries to discredit you, and nothing causes scandal and failure quite like an error of notetaking!
There are eight ingredients in the game, and each one is randomly assigned one of the eight alchemical structures with each game code. Your general goal as an alchemist is to discover the properties of each ingredient. By default, the phone uses your camera to scan ingredients, but I prefer to just select the two by hand. Either way, when putting ingredients in your cauldron, don't let any other alchemists see! Do absolutely let them see the results you got, so you can properly brag about it. Anyway, we'll start you off with this simple pair: lotus flower and scorpion. Select Drink Potion, enter those in, and tell me what you got.
Oh, what's that? You got poison? Well, there's your first lesson. This teaches us a few things.
- Both of these ingredients are poisonous: their red aspect must be negative. Easy enough.
- One of them has a large red aspect, the other a small one. This is what makes the catalysis happen: matching signs on an aspect, but differing sizes. Even if two ingredients have the same sign, if those signs are the same size, they don't react to each other, and you'll get a different potion.
- I just poisoned you. There's no way to go head-to-head like this in gameplay, but you should still never really trust anything another alchemist says unless you can verify it yourself. But that we'll cover later.
So, as mentioned, mixing two ingredients together gets you a potion, and it determines this by both size and sign of their aspects. Let's see about working with things we already know (although it is your responsibility to discern this yourself in gameplay, for this lesson I will be charitable and share some of my notes). Let's instead go with the raven feather and toad. And for this demonstration, before you enter it in, check my notes on their alchemicals and see if you can guess what they make before you mix them!
(If you want to notate those alchemicals in text, you can do so by their large symbols. Every alchemical has either 1 or 3 large symbols, and the threefers are always the same signs. So this pair would be a B+ and an O+.)
Did you guess that would make a health potion? I sure hope so, because I didn't bring any antidotes with me. Anyway, there are seven potion types. Red potions, as you have noticed by now, are health and poison respectively, depending on their sign. Similarly, positive green potions are speed and negative green are paralysis, while blue potions offer wisdom and insanity.
The seventh potion isn't really a potion at all, mind you. If the alchemicals of a pair of ingredients have all matching sizes and no matching signs, those pairs neutralize and create a neutral potion! On the one hand, there's not much demand for neutral potions, and in a vacuum that's meaningless, but think of it this way: if you know anything at all about one ingredient in that pair, you know that the opposite holds true for its neutralizer!
Anyway, in the physical, players usually use a little bit of a chart (supplied with the game) to denote what each pair of ingredients produces, and therefore what the properties of each ingredient are! I STRONGLY encourage doing so yourselves. Here are some sheets to get you an idea of what to expect. An orderly notebook is paramount towards backing up your findings when some upstart inevitably tries to discredit you, and nothing causes scandal and failure quite like an error of notetaking!
For prospective players, that's the only thing you absolutely need to learn. If you're interested in joining, absolutely read the above.
Next up, the four modules from the expansion, The King's Golem. In my previous games, the first run was with no modules, the second was with three of four. This time around, I'll be opening up module selection to player voting! I'm running Startup Funding no matter what because I like it, but the other three are up to whoever gets in (and, to a lesser degree, anyone who just wants to watch the chaos unfold. I have a champagne room on Discord, hit me up if you want the deets). The Palace Library isn't a module in and of itself, but the other modules all add its functions, so you should give it a review at your leisure.
STARTUP FUNDING
In the base game of Alchemists, each aspiring researcher begins the game with 10 reputation, 2 gold, 2 ingredients (3 if you're on Apprentice difficulty), and 1 favor. The Startup Funding module changes that, giving each alchemist a slightly more asymmetric distribution of resources to start their career with. Each player will be dealt four cards that look a little bit like this:
From these four cards, you'll choose two to keep, and gain all the benefits (and drawbacks) they each provide. Apprentices still get 1 extra ingredient, and if you grab any favor cards, you draw one more than you'd actually have, and then discard one. That much is the same as before.
There's two new things to watch out for. First off is that book token. That allows you to take the Visit Library section before the game starts, giving you a bit of a knowledge headstart. That's covered below, if you want to know more. Second: yes, there are two cards in the Startup Funding set that let you have an Artifact right out of the gate. One of these gives a tier 1 artifact, which of course is a huge leap in capability from the word go... but it also comes with a sizable reputation penalty, because how did you get something so rare and fancy without going through the shopkeeper? The other card lets you have a tier 3 artifact, which effectively means another way to get victory points at the game's end instead of a bonus now. Both artifacts chosen from these cards come from the pool of artifacts not used in the current game, and the tier 3 artifact, if chosen, is kept hidden from the other players. How intriguing!
This module also adds a new tier 1 artifact, related to these Startup Funding cards.
From these four cards, you'll choose two to keep, and gain all the benefits (and drawbacks) they each provide. Apprentices still get 1 extra ingredient, and if you grab any favor cards, you draw one more than you'd actually have, and then discard one. That much is the same as before.
There's two new things to watch out for. First off is that book token. That allows you to take the Visit Library section before the game starts, giving you a bit of a knowledge headstart. That's covered below, if you want to know more. Second: yes, there are two cards in the Startup Funding set that let you have an Artifact right out of the gate. One of these gives a tier 1 artifact, which of course is a huge leap in capability from the word go... but it also comes with a sizable reputation penalty, because how did you get something so rare and fancy without going through the shopkeeper? The other card lets you have a tier 3 artifact, which effectively means another way to get victory points at the game's end instead of a bonus now. Both artifacts chosen from these cards come from the pool of artifacts not used in the current game, and the tier 3 artifact, if chosen, is kept hidden from the other players. How intriguing!
This module also adds a new tier 1 artifact, related to these Startup Funding cards.
- Replicator: Costs 3 gold, awards 1 victory point. At the end of the round you obtain it in, use (and discard) one of your startup cards again. Repeat this effect for your other card at the end of the following round.
BUSY DAYS
This module screws around with the turn order selection. As in the base game, going later in the day gets you better stuff, while going as fast as possible may even carry extra consequences. This module changes what the rewards (and costs) for doing so are!
As you can see, there's a lot more to deal with here than before. In addition to paying gold for certain spaces, you might have to pay with actions or reputation to unlock certain spaces. Likewise, you might get even more resources than before! Gold, reputation and book tokens (as explained in the library section below) are available on some possible spaces. Also note that the boards scale up in intensity the further in the game you go. Those final round spaces can get VERY hotly contested, and VERY expensive for those higher-level spots!
Oh, and some of the Busy Days are only available if The Golem Project is in play. They play around with some of the more unusual components from there. This shouldn't realistically affect your decision on this, mind.
As you can see, there's a lot more to deal with here than before. In addition to paying gold for certain spaces, you might have to pay with actions or reputation to unlock certain spaces. Likewise, you might get even more resources than before! Gold, reputation and book tokens (as explained in the library section below) are available on some possible spaces. Also note that the boards scale up in intensity the further in the game you go. Those final round spaces can get VERY hotly contested, and VERY expensive for those higher-level spots!
Oh, and some of the Busy Days are only available if The Golem Project is in play. They play around with some of the more unusual components from there. This shouldn't realistically affect your decision on this, mind.
THE ROYAL ENCYCLOPEDIA
This is kind of an add-on to the existing theory board. As you might recall, the original theory board had space for each of the eight ingredients to support an alchemical, plus five grants for having seals on the matching theories.
The iconography on the lower right indicates that if we're running The Golem Project, you need a different resource to access this board. By default, you can Publish to this board for 1 gold, same as ever. If we're using The Golem Project, the payment is 1 approval. Endorsing still uses gold.
When you publish to the Royal Encyclopedia, you're not doing it about a specific ingredient, but rather about an aspect color. See those question mark spots? When you publish, you set both of those question marks for your color to either positive or negative (or one of each). Then, you indicate ingredients that have that property. So, for example, you could list two ingredients that have wisdom-granting properties, and two ingredients that inflict insanity. Then you throw a seal down on there, pay your publisher, gain some rep, you know the drill.
If you're going to debunk the Royal Encyclopedia's entries, you just need to demonstrate that one of the aspects is wrong. So, for example, if I say the toad has a negative blue aspect, but you demonstrated that it's blue positive, then that debunks it all right. Similarly, if I put four ingredients down as having wisdom, but you demonstrate that a fifth ingredient has properties of wisdom, that ALSO debunks it, because there's four ingredients that have a positive blue and four that have a negative. (If you're using Master debunking rules, it gets even wackier, so I'll ignore those for now.)
This also means hedging works differently. See those bookmarks by each ingredient spot? When you hedge an encyclopedia entry, you're basically saying "every other ingredient on here is right". Same as with the normal theory board, really. You also get some new seals to account for this added board: one extra 3-pointer, and one white seal for hedging on the Royal Encyclopedia. (The white seal does nothing if used on the normal theory board, so don't use it there.) So if I hedged on the toad by putting down a green-hedging seal, the above debunk wouldn't hurt me. And if you're wondering, there's nothing saying the normal theory board and the Royal Encyclopedia have to line up. The people in academia can feel avant-garde for contradicting the establishment, and royalty doesn't care what the commoners think.
The iconography on the lower right indicates that if we're running The Golem Project, you need a different resource to access this board. By default, you can Publish to this board for 1 gold, same as ever. If we're using The Golem Project, the payment is 1 approval. Endorsing still uses gold.
When you publish to the Royal Encyclopedia, you're not doing it about a specific ingredient, but rather about an aspect color. See those question mark spots? When you publish, you set both of those question marks for your color to either positive or negative (or one of each). Then, you indicate ingredients that have that property. So, for example, you could list two ingredients that have wisdom-granting properties, and two ingredients that inflict insanity. Then you throw a seal down on there, pay your publisher, gain some rep, you know the drill.
If you're going to debunk the Royal Encyclopedia's entries, you just need to demonstrate that one of the aspects is wrong. So, for example, if I say the toad has a negative blue aspect, but you demonstrated that it's blue positive, then that debunks it all right. Similarly, if I put four ingredients down as having wisdom, but you demonstrate that a fifth ingredient has properties of wisdom, that ALSO debunks it, because there's four ingredients that have a positive blue and four that have a negative. (If you're using Master debunking rules, it gets even wackier, so I'll ignore those for now.)
This also means hedging works differently. See those bookmarks by each ingredient spot? When you hedge an encyclopedia entry, you're basically saying "every other ingredient on here is right". Same as with the normal theory board, really. You also get some new seals to account for this added board: one extra 3-pointer, and one white seal for hedging on the Royal Encyclopedia. (The white seal does nothing if used on the normal theory board, so don't use it there.) So if I hedged on the toad by putting down a green-hedging seal, the above debunk wouldn't hurt me. And if you're wondering, there's nothing saying the normal theory board and the Royal Encyclopedia have to line up. The people in academia can feel avant-garde for contradicting the establishment, and royalty doesn't care what the commoners think.
THE GOLEM PROJECT
Welcome to die.
The Golem Project is the largest module by far, adding an entirely new array of deductions to your usual business in the game. At the behest of His Royal Highness The King, the alchemists of the kingdom are charged with finding the one (and only one) combination of ingredients that can awaken the recently unearthed golem!
Let's start out with the changes to the board, before anything else. The first addition to The Golem Project is to the playspace itself, expanding the choice of actions you can take. This slots on the lefthand side of the normal board, adding two actions and modifying the Buy Artifact action. They otherwise follow the usual clockwork order, with Research Golem taking place between Transmute/Sell and Buy, and Visit Library taking place between Buy and Debunk/Test.
As you can clearly see, the King's approval is critical to this new venture. Every turn, the King's mood changes, determining how many approval tokens players can accrue from Research Golem actions. As you might expect, first come first serve on these, so do your golem research earlier to ensure approval access! So, uh... how do you research a golem, anyway?
The process is simple (but the inherent deductions are not): when testing the golem, you choose one (and only one!) ingredient from your hand and feed it to the golem. The golem can respond in up to two ways to this ingredient; its ears may emit steam, and/or its core may glow. The cause of these symptoms is linked to the size and color of certain alchemical aspects; signs have no bearing on Test Golem actions. I'll use the test code DEMOS for the app if you want to run through the following sample experiments.
So, let's say we pass the golem a mushroom, and its core starts glowing. One of the mushroom's alchemical aspects must cause this; we know the alchemical here for ultra spoiler reasons (it's R-), so we can safely confirm that either a large red, small blue, or small green is responsible for making the core glow (and similarly, we know none of those can cause the ears to steam). Which, in turn, means that there is a total of four ingredients, including this mushroom, that can cause the core to glow. In fact, every single reaction combination possible has two matching ingredients. Of course, without knowing the alchemical or even having a grounding for what it does, that's not very useful in a vacuum. But there is one bit of useful info we can get out of this. Do you remember what pairs of alchemicals have exactly the same sizes on all their aspects? That's right, neutralizing pairs! If two ingredients provoke identical reactions from the golem, they will make a neutral potion.
The brunt of your goal with the Golem Project is deducing exactly what color/size combination provokes each reaction. And you must submit your findings in secret reports to the King. This is where Progress Reports come in. At the end of the round (after Drink Potion but before the other end-of-round stuff, including conferences), players that have already tested the golem twice (tracked with that space in the lower left) may send a progress report using this board, and the progress report tokens (each player has 6, each corresponding to a different color/size combo). There are three ways to submit a progress report, and you only get to do this once per round. Player order doesn't really matter here, so once Drink Potion is resolved, you can all do this in PM as usual to me.
So, testing the golem is all well and good, and strictly speaking you don't HAVE to animate the golem. Having the findings to let the king do it himself is already pretty baller, and you aren't even allowed to try until you do two tests already, so feel free to ignore all of this paragraph if you're already overwhelmed. But still, what if you did it yourself? The first step is, of course, knowing what causes the reactions. In our case, the core glows in response to a small green aspect, and the ears steam in response to a small red. If you refer to your sheet, you can see that last row indicates how to transfer those signs to golem animation. We need two, and exactly two, ingredients to animate the golem, corresponding to both the color and the sizes in question, but this time, we DO care about the signs: positive for large sizes, negative for small sizes. This maps out to exactly two ingredients: whichever two ingredients have negatives in both red and green aspects are the ones that animate the golem. In the DEMOS code, that's the mushroom (R-) and the scorpion (O-). Size doesn't matter for the animating pair; you may note that both of these ingredients have large red aspects! If you want to make an animation attempt, you need to only specify the ingredient pair, not have them on hand (the King will be in attendance and will provide the requested ingredients for you). Successfully pulling that feat off nets you 5 victory points!
Anyway, that's all the golem-specific mechanics. There are a few other changes to the game with this module I should go over. First is conferences; progress reports also factor into those. I'll only be using the Apprentice versions here, for everyone's sake. During the first conference, if you've submitted a progress report at all, you're already an overachiever and get 1 reputation and 1 favor. During the second one, players can gain or lose rep based on how thorough their reports are! Whoever has submitted the most thorough reports gains 2 reputation, while whoever has submitted the least thorough loses 2. (For exact tracking, treat single-token reports as 2 points on this scale and double-token reports as 1 point. Tied players all get full marks in either direction, which means if nobody has submitted anything by this time, you all lose 2 reputation and I get to spend a full post laughing at you.) And to make matters even more stressful, the second conference now has even more demanding standards than usual, requiring a threshold of 3 seals on the board to gain rep! Buuut... if you successfully managed to animate the golem even at this early stage, you get a whopping 3 points of reputation for being a Super Player! (The coin text layout had to be assembled from fondant instead, hope that's okay.)
Beyond that, there's also a few new cards for existing stuff: one new favor, two new artifacts. The Royal Signet is a tier 2, the Mahogany Bookshelf is a tier 3.
About the only other thing worth mentioning is that if we're using The Golem Project, we must also use the Royal Encyclopedia module. That's about it! Everything related to scoring can wait until later, but to gloss over it, approval tokens lightly translate to gold and subsequently victory points, proper progress reports translate to points based on accuracy (with a range of +8 to -16, so make sure you're only submitting if you know what you're doing, there's no penalty for a failure to submit reports outside of conferences).
The Golem Project is the largest module by far, adding an entirely new array of deductions to your usual business in the game. At the behest of His Royal Highness The King, the alchemists of the kingdom are charged with finding the one (and only one) combination of ingredients that can awaken the recently unearthed golem!
Let's start out with the changes to the board, before anything else. The first addition to The Golem Project is to the playspace itself, expanding the choice of actions you can take. This slots on the lefthand side of the normal board, adding two actions and modifying the Buy Artifact action. They otherwise follow the usual clockwork order, with Research Golem taking place between Transmute/Sell and Buy, and Visit Library taking place between Buy and Debunk/Test.
- Research Golem: Administer a single ingredient to the golem, recording your findings in the same way you would record a potion test. The ingredient you submit is hidden as usual, and findings are technically public. If the King has any approval left to give, gain 1. After you've tested the golem twice in this way, you may send progress reports and attempt animation.
- Buy Artifact: The shopkeeper has some exclusive wares (and dispositions) for customers with royal approval. Every time he restocks, he'll add a fourth artifact to a new space, and give a 1 gold discount on its price, but you also have to spend 1 approval to buy it.
- Visit Library: The Palace Library is normally forbidden to commoners, but alchemists on royal golem-animating business can do a little research there by spending 1 approval. See that section below for the deets.
As you can clearly see, the King's approval is critical to this new venture. Every turn, the King's mood changes, determining how many approval tokens players can accrue from Research Golem actions. As you might expect, first come first serve on these, so do your golem research earlier to ensure approval access! So, uh... how do you research a golem, anyway?
The process is simple (but the inherent deductions are not): when testing the golem, you choose one (and only one!) ingredient from your hand and feed it to the golem. The golem can respond in up to two ways to this ingredient; its ears may emit steam, and/or its core may glow. The cause of these symptoms is linked to the size and color of certain alchemical aspects; signs have no bearing on Test Golem actions. I'll use the test code DEMOS for the app if you want to run through the following sample experiments.
So, let's say we pass the golem a mushroom, and its core starts glowing. One of the mushroom's alchemical aspects must cause this; we know the alchemical here for ultra spoiler reasons (it's R-), so we can safely confirm that either a large red, small blue, or small green is responsible for making the core glow (and similarly, we know none of those can cause the ears to steam). Which, in turn, means that there is a total of four ingredients, including this mushroom, that can cause the core to glow. In fact, every single reaction combination possible has two matching ingredients. Of course, without knowing the alchemical or even having a grounding for what it does, that's not very useful in a vacuum. But there is one bit of useful info we can get out of this. Do you remember what pairs of alchemicals have exactly the same sizes on all their aspects? That's right, neutralizing pairs! If two ingredients provoke identical reactions from the golem, they will make a neutral potion.
The brunt of your goal with the Golem Project is deducing exactly what color/size combination provokes each reaction. And you must submit your findings in secret reports to the King. This is where Progress Reports come in. At the end of the round (after Drink Potion but before the other end-of-round stuff, including conferences), players that have already tested the golem twice (tracked with that space in the lower left) may send a progress report using this board, and the progress report tokens (each player has 6, each corresponding to a different color/size combo). There are three ways to submit a progress report, and you only get to do this once per round. Player order doesn't really matter here, so once Drink Potion is resolved, you can all do this in PM as usual to me.
- Place two report tokens on an empty space under either reaction. This signifies that you believe one of those two color/size aspects causes the indicated reaction.
- Place one report token on an empty space under either reaction. This signifies that you are absolutely certain that is what causes the reaction.
- Remove one report token from a space where you have previously placed two. This signifies that you have narrowed down your guess to a certainty, and know which of the two causes the reaction.
- That's it. You can't remove a report token from a space if it's the only one left; the king doesn't like it when certainties go away.
So, testing the golem is all well and good, and strictly speaking you don't HAVE to animate the golem. Having the findings to let the king do it himself is already pretty baller, and you aren't even allowed to try until you do two tests already, so feel free to ignore all of this paragraph if you're already overwhelmed. But still, what if you did it yourself? The first step is, of course, knowing what causes the reactions. In our case, the core glows in response to a small green aspect, and the ears steam in response to a small red. If you refer to your sheet, you can see that last row indicates how to transfer those signs to golem animation. We need two, and exactly two, ingredients to animate the golem, corresponding to both the color and the sizes in question, but this time, we DO care about the signs: positive for large sizes, negative for small sizes. This maps out to exactly two ingredients: whichever two ingredients have negatives in both red and green aspects are the ones that animate the golem. In the DEMOS code, that's the mushroom (R-) and the scorpion (O-). Size doesn't matter for the animating pair; you may note that both of these ingredients have large red aspects! If you want to make an animation attempt, you need to only specify the ingredient pair, not have them on hand (the King will be in attendance and will provide the requested ingredients for you). Successfully pulling that feat off nets you 5 victory points!
Anyway, that's all the golem-specific mechanics. There are a few other changes to the game with this module I should go over. First is conferences; progress reports also factor into those. I'll only be using the Apprentice versions here, for everyone's sake. During the first conference, if you've submitted a progress report at all, you're already an overachiever and get 1 reputation and 1 favor. During the second one, players can gain or lose rep based on how thorough their reports are! Whoever has submitted the most thorough reports gains 2 reputation, while whoever has submitted the least thorough loses 2. (For exact tracking, treat single-token reports as 2 points on this scale and double-token reports as 1 point. Tied players all get full marks in either direction, which means if nobody has submitted anything by this time, you all lose 2 reputation and I get to spend a full post laughing at you.) And to make matters even more stressful, the second conference now has even more demanding standards than usual, requiring a threshold of 3 seals on the board to gain rep! Buuut... if you successfully managed to animate the golem even at this early stage, you get a whopping 3 points of reputation for being a Super Player! (The coin text layout had to be assembled from fondant instead, hope that's okay.)
Beyond that, there's also a few new cards for existing stuff: one new favor, two new artifacts. The Royal Signet is a tier 2, the Mahogany Bookshelf is a tier 3.
- Courtier: May be spent in place of an approval token. Simple enough, really: research isn't the only way to earn the King's notice, and frankly it's not even optimal. Don't worry, this guy's a pure Spike when it comes to the royal court.
- Royal Signet: Costs 3 gold, awards 1 victory point. Immediately gain 4 approval tokens. This is a great option if the King has been stingy with approval tokens, if you want to fiend for library visits, or if you're preferring the Royal Encyclopedia to the usual theory board. You might also be married off to one of the Bannisters later down the line, but that's outside the scope of this game.
- Mahogany Bookcase: Costs 5 gold, awards 2 victory points per book token you have. I shouldn't have to incentivize you to go to the library for research purposes, but this is a delightful way to turn an abundance of research into an abundance of victory points. If this is dealt out during our game, be extra attentive to options to check out a book!
About the only other thing worth mentioning is that if we're using The Golem Project, we must also use the Royal Encyclopedia module. That's about it! Everything related to scoring can wait until later, but to gloss over it, approval tokens lightly translate to gold and subsequently victory points, proper progress reports translate to points based on accuracy (with a range of +8 to -16, so make sure you're only submitting if you know what you're doing, there's no penalty for a failure to submit reports outside of conferences).
THE PALACE LIBRARY
This is a new feature for the King's Golem, and an alternate vector for gathering intelligence on the ingredients. Whenever you would gain a book token from any of the modules, I'll offer you a set of four ingredients to look up information on. You just tell me what ingredient you want to learn about, and I will tell you whether it has solar or lunar symbology. These record sheets have the different alchemicals marked appropriately for you. The golem spaces at the bottom only need to see usage if we're running The Golem Project; you can review my notes on that module for how those matter.
What does lunar/solar symbology mean? Well, each of the possible alchemicals falls into one of those two categories. Think of it as doubles of the same sign canceling each other out, as below:
Long story short: if you know whether an ingredient is lunar or solar, you can immediately knock out half of the possibilities for that ingredient. This comes in VERY handy for nailing down which half of a neutralizing pair is which!
What does lunar/solar symbology mean? Well, each of the possible alchemicals falls into one of those two categories. Think of it as doubles of the same sign canceling each other out, as below:
- Universal positive (+++): Comes out positive, or solar.
- Universal negative (---): Comes out negative, or lunar.
- Primary positive (++-): Comes out negative, or lunar.
- Primary negative (--+): Comes out positive, or solar.
Long story short: if you know whether an ingredient is lunar or solar, you can immediately knock out half of the possibilities for that ingredient. This comes in VERY handy for nailing down which half of a neutralizing pair is which!
As ever, you can review the rulebook for the original or for the expansion. I'll need as many as four players to take on the intellectual challenge of becoming an alchemist, each of whom should specify which modules they do or do not wish to play using. I will not refuse older players from returning, but I will stipulate that anyone who's played the game before will play on Master difficulty for starting components, and will not receive the bonus ingredient in addition to their Startup Funding. Likewise, I will not run The Golem Project if we have ANY entirely new players to the game. Trust me, if you haven't played the vanilla game, you aren't ready for it.
Who's up for some science?
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