Do your kids love magic and potions? Maybe you’re doing a Harry Potter-themed month or year? Do you have younger kids? Do you want a cooperative game to help you work on sportsmanship and relationships? Cauldron Quest may be just the game for you!
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Cauldron Quest is a potion-building, wizard-thwarting game of dice, chips, and tokens on a circular board. It’s geared a little younger than some of our other games, but we still enjoy it and have a lot of fun with it (my kids are currently 8 and 9 as of this writing). Most likely, though, it’ll be getting another home in the next year or so.
How to Play Cauldron Quest
Place the potion Bottles face down around the edge of the board. There are six potion bottles. There are six matching tokens with the same ingredients on them. Place three face up in the center of the board, in the “cauldron.” These show you what potion bottles you need to get into the center to make your potion.
When it’s your turn, roll the two white action dice. What you roll will determine if you can move a potion bottle, if the wizard moves along his path, if a path is blocked, or if you get to roll the magic dice.
Potion Bottles
If you are able to move a potion bottle, choose which you will move. At the start of the game, all potion bottles are upside down, so you don’t know which you need and you just have to guess. Be careful, though; if you leave a potion bottle along the wizard’s path and he comes by, your potion bottle will be bumped back to the start!
The wizard has a circular path that he only moves along in one direction. You just move him however many spaces you rolled (either 3 or 4). If you roll a wizard hat and the spell lightning bolt, though, one of the paths is blocked. These are chosen randomly from the face-down path blocker tokens; you don’t get to choose.
Spells in Cauldron Quest
Finally, if you roll a potion and a spell lightning bolt, you get to roll for a spell! There are three regular black dice that you can use for a spell. You get three chances to roll a spell and can save one or two dice between rolls. There are three possible spells:
- Roll all evens: reveal a potion (turn it right side up)
- Roll all odds: swap two potions (useful if a path gets blocked, or you move one potion far up the path only for it to be revealed as not something you need)
- Roll a total of 12 between all three dice: move any potion bottle up to 6 spaces
There is a lot of luck to Cauldron Quest. You do have some choices; in what potion bottles you move or reveal (though that starts as luck, too), and which “magic spells” you roll for. If you have younger kids who enjoy magic, Cauldron Quest is a great game for you!