Potions of Azerland Review – Fantasy Burning Man

Disclaimer: Potions of Azerland was provided for free by VR Distribution, although the writing and opinions of this article are my own.

Potions of Azerland is the first published design from Graydon Baker and Warped Reality Games. Compared to their upcoming title, Manatee Sanctuary (heading to crowdfunding soon), this one sticks to much more familiar fantasy territory. So no, it wasn’t the designer or the publisher that caught my attention. And it definitely wasn’t the title, which sounds like a paperback you’d grab in an airport because your phone died.

What pulled me in was the art. Or more accurately, the artist. Andrew Bosley has done some of my favourite board game illustrations, including Everdell and Merchants of the Dark Road. I didn’t know much about the game, but with Bosley on board, I figured it would at least be nice to look at.

How to play

Welcome to the potion festival of Azerland! A kind of fantasy Burning Man where folks gather to drink colourful concoctions, dance to forest flute techno, and generally vibe on whatever magical liquid they’ve knocked back.

But you? You’re not here to party. You’re here to work.

Your goal is to brew, sell, study, and (sometimes) sip potions in a bid to become the most prestigious alchemist at the festival. After six rounds, whoever has the most prestige wins. Everyone else goes home with nothing but regret and glitter in their shoes.

Each round you start with five empty slots in your player board representing the five phases of the round. You also get five tokens, numbered 1 through 5. You’ll assign each one to a phase, determining your priority for that action. Higher priority (i.e. lower number) gives you better perks. For example, in the Market phase, the lowest-numbered player buys first. In other phases, you might get to take more actions or earn more stuff.

If you’re tight on cash, there’s another option. Instead of assigning a token to a phase, you can flip it to the coin side and earn some money. That means you’ll skip that phase entirely, but you’ll have more gold to spend later.

Once everyone has locked in their priorities, you all reveal your boards and decide whether to drink a potion. Drinking gives you immediate benefits depending on the type and level. Then it’s time to walk through the five phases in order:

• Forage: Roll some dice to gather ingredients. The higher your priority, the more dice you get.
• Study: Choose a type of potion to gain experience with. Leveling up a potion type gives you stronger drink effects and bonus points when selling to guests.
• Market: Buy ingredients or apprentices in priority order. Stock is limited, so going early matters.
• Brew: Use your ingredients to brew potions according to recipes. Better priority means more brewing.
• Fulfill: Sell your potions to festival-goers for points and powers. These guests have specific tastes and rewards, so pick and brew carefully.

Then it’s on to the next round. Repeat these phases five more times, and when the final cauldron cools, the most prestigious brewer takes the win.

One great brew, then it spoiled

I came away from my first game of Potions of Azerland thinking, “Wow, this could be a game of the year contender.” It pushed a lot of the same buttons as Argent: The Consortium, which I love. The mix of leveling up your potions, using them to get game breaking abilities along with the additional specialties you unlocked through guest cards really appealed to me. I love games that sit right at that intersection of structure and unpredictability, and Potions of Azerland seemed to fit that bill.

The way you prioritise your day each round was also clever. You’re faced with the tough but fun decision of choosing which actions to lock in, and which ones to leave out in exchange for extra gold. And the dual-layer boards, where you slide in tokens to mark your choices, are just satisfying to use.

The potion trees looked promising too. You’ve got speed potions that give you more flexibility in the market, love potions that let you hypnotise guests for points, and intelligence potions that ramp up your knowledge gain. On paper, they all seemed viable. I was excited.

But that excitement didn’t last.

After a few more plays, Potions of Azerland started to feel flat. Beyond a couple of clever mechanisms, it settles into something much more conventional. I kept wanting it to go further than it did.

Take the core idea of the potions themselves. You can either drink them for a one-time effect, or hold onto them to fulfill customer requests. At first, this felt like a great choice. But it didn’t take long for us to realise that drinking potions almost never paid off compared to just cashing them in for customers. That fun little dilemma quickly turned into an obvious decision every time.

Leveling up your potions had a similar problem. Advancing up the tracks feels good. You unlock better potions, gain small bonuses, and it gives you something to aim for. But with only six rounds, it felt hard to make those upgrades actually matter. Even when you did manage to climb high on a potion track, it rarely felt worth drinking that powerful potion instead of just using it to fulfill a customer request.

And the potions themselves are hard to make.

The market and foraging systems are both heavily luck-dependent. You might draw exactly what you need, or you might get stuck with ingredients that don’t help at all. There are ways to manage that, such as intelligence potions that give you more options, and you can try to go earlier in turn order when it matters, but even with those tools, I often found myself asking, “What can I make with what I’ve got?” instead of pursuing a clear strategy.

Missing a dash of something

For every strong point Potions of Azerland puts forward, there’s a “but” waiting to meet it. That applies to the rules, the pacing, and surprisingly, even the artwork.

There’s a lot going on in the game. Multiple systems to explore, plenty of actions to weigh up, and a constantly shifting board state. That sounds exciting, but it slows things down more than you’d expect. Each turn is full of small decisions, and because other players are always reshaping the board, you have to constantly pause and rethink. Slowing down the pace of the game. As a result, it doesn’t feel like a bustling potion festival, instead it’s more like a quiet tour through a potion workshop, with plenty of stops along the way.

To its credit, the rules are surprisingly digestible for how much is packed in. But even here, there are stumbles. Take the rule for using leveled-up potions to fulfill a guest. Each level grants a bonus point… unless you’re using two types of potions, in which case you only get the bonus from the lower-level one. Or you’re using a wild potion, which doesn’t count at all.

It doesn’t sound too bad written out, but in the middle of a round, surrounded by other exceptions, it’s an easy to forget. It’s also disappointing when you finally get a third-level potion, only to find you never gain the bonus because guests always want more than one type.

Guest abilities are another hurdle that require a bit of patience. There are loads of unique effects, which sounds great, until you’re three games in and still flipping through the rulebook to decode some mystery symbol that didn’t make it onto the player aids.

And then there’s the art. As I mentioned earlier, Andrew Bosley’s illustrations were a big reason I brought the game to the table. But even that didn’t land the way I hoped. The character art mixes stylised portraits that look like real people with full-blown caricatures from the world of Azerland. The result is a strange, in-between space where nothing feels quite cohesive. It had that uncanny valley vibe where everything just slightly off in a way I couldn’t ignore.

In the end, Potions of Azerland never fully delivers on the promise of that first play. It has moments of charm and cleverness, and there’s definitely something here. But the more we played, the more I found myself wishing for a version with tighter rules, clearer iconography, and a bit more momentum to carry it across the line.