Elixir

From: Mayfair Games List Price: $25 Players: 3-6 Playing Time: 30-60 minutes  Type of game: Card Skill level: 2 Complexity: 3  Reviewed by: Peter Sarrett, Issue 24, September 2000

I’m not a fan of card games in which skill plays a very small role and decisions are obvious. Some people may enjoy shutting down their higher brain functions and coasting on autopilot, but I prefer to have my hands firmly on the wheel when I sit down to a game. By all rights I should loathe Elixir, a French game now published in English by Mayfair. It’s got all the wrong ingredients. And yet, with the deck stacked against it, I actually enjoy it. Not in a “I can’t wait to play again” kind of way, but in a “I’m in the mood for some silliness” vein. That seems to be just the note the game tries to hit, so I’d have to chalk it up as a success.

Players start by drawing a set of spells. Each spell requires 1-4 different ingredients to cast, and their effects generally increase in power and utility with their cost. Somewhat like Careers, players can tailor their own goals by drawing any mix of spell costs as long as they add up to the required total. One game you might try a hand of three threes, the next time nine ones. The first to get rid of all their spells wins the game.

With the unused spells set aside, players draw their initial hands from a second deck of “finds”. These come in three basic flavors— ingredients, objects, and transactions. Ingredients are the things you need to cast spells—stuff like an ounce of stardust, dragon’s tongue, or griffon feather. Objects can be mostly useless items like ham or 10 yards of rope, or magical devices like sticky fingers or love potions which provide a special benefit when played. Transactions are ways to exchange cards, either with the deck or with other players, increasing the chance of getting that ogre’s beard you’re looking for. Crucially, all players can participate in each transaction, not just the player using the card.

A basic turn involves drawing a card and playing any spells, objects, or transactions you’re able and willing to play. Most turns consist solely of drawing a card, and this is where the game bogs down the most. It’s frustrating to keep drawing ingredients you don’t need. Worse yet is when you watch all of the troll’s nose you need go into the discard pile. Some spells let you reshuffle the discards or swap unused spells, but if they’re not in play there’s absolutely no way to do it. If all copies of the ingredient you need get discarded, you’re out of luck until the deck runs out—which takes forever. In fact, the game’s biggest problem is its penchant for wearing out its welcome. It could conceivably go on forever if nobody gets the ingredients they need, and there’s really no way around this. You just have to cross your fingers and hope for the best.

The spells themselves are what make it worth bothering. Sure, there are spells that let you swap hands or trade spells with other players, and spells that let you draw more cards or duplicate other spells—all the kind of good stuff you’d expect. Big deal. The cool spells are the ones that make people do goofy things, like address someone else as “master” or scratch their head when they talk for the rest of the game. These invariably cheap spells liven things up and raise the silliness quotient—particularly late at night. Usually I absolutely hate this sort of thing, but Elixir has the mix just right and it works. I can’t explain it better than that, and don’t promise that you’ll feel the same way. Certainly it works better with players who enjoy the silliness and play it up, making Elixir as much a parlor game as a card game.

We’ve played with three and four players but, despite the box’s rating of 3-6 players, wouldn’t dream of stepping up to more. The wait between turns—or more pointedly, between being able to actually do something besides draw a card—would kill the fun. This is a game that needs to be played briskly. If it could be guaranteed to end in a timely fashion I might recommend it more highly. I also have a hard time recommending a card game with a $25 price tag— the highest I’ve ever seen for a stack of cards without the word “Mox” on them.

Elixir is light, family-friendly (well, if you don’t mind your child being asked to remove an article of clothing seductively…), and subject to being in the proper mood, Elixir is better than I expected it to be. I don’t see it getting played often, but when it does I expect it will be enjoyed in the proper spirit.