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Alchemy in board games usually involves wizards, ancient laboratories, and a suspicious amount of bubbling liquid. Parks & Potions takes a friendlier approach. Here, we’re park rangers using botanical alchemy to heal animals found across forests, wetlands, and other natural habitats. No monsters need defeating, and nobody is trying to turn the local beaver into gold. At least, that isn’t mentioned in the rulebook.
Seeing real wildlife combined with colourful potion brewing immediately caught our attention. Collecting resources and completing objectives is familiar territory, but using those resources to care for endangered animals gives the game its own flavour. We wanted to know whether there was more to it than simply collecting whichever colours appeared on the dice. After several games, we had a pretty good answer.
👥 1-5 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 15-30 minutes
📝 Designer: Chris Eastridge
🎨 Artwork: Alan Gomes
🏢 Publisher: Moon Saga Workshop (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
A standard game of Parks & Potions lasts five rounds, with a sixth round added when playing with five players. Each round represents one day of work in the park and is split into three dice rolls. The first player rolls four potion dice showing a mix of primary, secondary, and speciality colours. After every roll, all players simultaneously collect up to two potions matching the colours shown.
Those potions go onto your personal inventory board, which has room for six bottles. You can discard potions whenever you need room, but mixing them is usually the better option. Primary colours combine into secondary colours, while other recipes let you trade rarer potions for even more specialised ones. Mixing isn’t tied to a specific step either, so you’re free to combine potions whenever it helps, even while collecting from a roll.
After the third roll, players use their stored potions to complete objective cards. Animal cards show which colours are needed to heal that animal and award points once completed. Some animals also provide an extract token. Once an objective is finished, the potions return to the general supply, while any unfinished cards and unused potions stay with you for the following round.
Extract tokens are one of the more interesting resources in the game. They don’t take up inventory space and can be bottled at any time to become any potion you need, provided you have somewhere to store it. At the same time, experiment cards score according to how many extract tokens you still own at the end of the game. Every extract therefore asks the same question: use it now to finish an objective, or keep it and hope it’s worth more later.
At the end of the round, players refill their display back up to three objectives. You can choose a face-up card, draw blindly from the deck, or replace a card you’ve been holding onto. Since players refill in turn order, this is one of the few moments where somebody else can take the card you had your eye on.
Each ranger also has a unique ability that can be used once during the game. Depending on the ranger, this might let you take any two potions instead of following the dice, treat certain potion requirements as wild, or temporarily increase your inventory. After the final round, or when players can no longer refill their objectives, points are counted from completed animals, experiments, and biome bonuses. The highest score earns the title of Guardian of Nature.
Artwork, Components, and Visual Design
Once everything is on the table, Parks & Potions certainly doesn’t look shy. The neoprene playmat, colourful potion tokens, rainbow extracts, and illustrated wildlife immediately catch the eye without making the game feel cluttered. The mat keeps everything organised with dedicated spaces for the objective market, trackers, extracts, and deck, so it’s easy to see where everything belongs.
The animal cards are easily our favourite part of the presentation. They feature real species from around the world, including red pandas, pangolins, blue whales, shoebills, and quite a few species we hadn’t heard of before. Each illustration leaves plenty of room for the important information, so finding potion requirements or biome symbols never feels like a hunt. Experiment cards move away from nature and focus more on research equipment and potion brewing, but still fit the overall style.
The potion tokens are thick enough to handle comfortably, while the engraved wooden dice are easy to read after a roll. The player boards clearly show your inventory and one-time ability, and everything stays easy to follow throughout the game.
Accessibility has also received proper attention. Every potion colour has its own symbol, and those symbols appear consistently on the dice, cards, tokens, and player aids. Since colour mixing sits at the centre of the game, this makes reading the table much easier without drawing attention to itself.
Our Experience
The six-space inventory ended up being more important than we expected. Filling it wasn’t difficult. Deciding what actually deserved one of those spaces was the real challenge. We regularly kept a potion because it would probably be useful a round or two later, only to realise it was stopping us from collecting something we needed right now. Mixing potions often became less about creating the perfect colour and more about keeping the inventory moving. More than once we combined two awkward potions into one slightly more advanced awkward potion. It wasn’t exactly the result we’d hoped for, but at least it freed up some space.
The biggest change between our first and later games was how we looked at our objectives. We stopped treating them as three separate jobs and started looking at them as one puzzle. Instead of keeping the highest-scoring animal, we often kept the card that worked best with the other two. Experiments also became part of that calculation, especially when deciding whether spending an extract was really worth it. Once we started thinking that way, planning our next few turns became much easier.
Knowing when to give up on an objective turned out to be another lesson. We held onto one particular animal through almost an entire game because it only needed “one more potion”. It continued needing that one potion right until final scoring. After that, replacing an objective stopped feeling like admitting defeat and started feeling like the sensible thing to do. Sometimes the best move wasn’t finishing a card. It was accepting that another one would fit your inventory far better.
Extract tokens created the most discussion around the table. I usually wanted to save mine because multiplying several experiment cards sounded like a great idea. Other players happily bottled them the moment they could finish another animal. Neither approach consistently won. One game I’d carefully built an impressive collection of experiments, only to discover someone else had simply healed more animals than I had. Apparently paperwork doesn’t impress wildlife.
The alternative modes changed the conversations around the table in different ways. The drafting variant made us watch everyone else’s plans much more closely because taking one potion could leave another player without the colour they needed. The cooperative game replaced that with discussions about who should visit which biome and whether sharing resources was worth leaving another habitat unattended. Both variants encouraged us to pay more attention to each other than the standard game, although we’d still introduce new players using the regular rules first.
Our Thoughts
Collecting coloured potions is the straightforward part of Parks & Potions. The more interesting question is which objectives are actually worth spending those potions on. The printed points only tell part of the story. A lower-value animal might complete a biome set, provide an extract, or simply work much better with the cards you already have. We often found ourselves choosing the card that fitted our overall plan rather than the one with the biggest number in the corner.
Everyone works from the same dice, but they rarely need the same colours. Because each player has different objectives and a different inventory, every roll means something slightly different around the table. Sometimes we had to change direction because a speciality colour refused to appear, but we rarely felt completely stuck. There was usually another route available, even if it meant changing our priorities for the round.
Experiment cards also became more influential than we expected. One experiment doesn’t change much, but collecting several makes every extract token increasingly valuable. At that point, spending an extract isn’t simply giving up one flexible resource. It also reduces the value of every completed experiment you own. We liked that this scoring route stayed connected to the rest of the game instead of becoming a separate mini-game.
The standard game does become fairly familiar after several plays. New objectives change the potion combinations in front of you, but you’re still managing the same six inventory spaces, mixing the same colours, and completing the same types of cards. The one-use player abilities help during an important round, but they don’t really change how you approach the game as a whole. That’s where the drafting and cooperative variants earn their place, adding enough variety that we’d happily swap between them from time to time.
We’d be most likely to bring Parks & Potions to the table with our family, or friends who enjoy lighter resource-management games without spending half the evening learning rules. Players looking for heavy engine building or lots of direct interaction will probably outgrow the standard game sooner. For us, though, Parks & Potions ended up being an enjoyable resource puzzle with a theme that still feels refreshingly different. We’d happily bring it back to the table when we’re in the mood for something approachable that still asks us to think a few turns ahead.
📝 We received a copy of Parks & Potions from Moon Saga Workshop.
