Potions & Puppies is a light weight game that has a unique twist on resource management and press your luck. It's a 1 to 5 player cooperative game where all players must work together to share resources to discover recipes to a variety of potions to help you get past tasks inside the tower. Each puppy has a unique magic ability to help their friends but must balance using their own abilities with using those same crystals for potions.
Puppies have a variety of actions to take on their turn ranging from gathering crystals from a shared stash to discovering or brewing potion recipes. Each puppy also has two unique abilities - a lesser ability can be used an unlimited number of times per game as well as a once per game ultimate ability that will make the puppy's player mat flip and their remaining ability will cost more gems to use for the rest of the game. Discovering potions is vital to puppies' success, and each time a player wants to discover a potion they must use three colors of crystal from in front of them that do not match any other current recipe before flipping over the top potion card. Potions can be be brewed by using the same crystals as are on the recipe card by placing them onto the puppies' current tile. When all potions have been brewed, the puppies can move forward.
Brewing a potion that is labelled on the modular tile they are currently standing on allows the group to move forward and one step closer to escape. They also have unique abilities such as rearranging recipes, looking at the potion deck to see what is coming up next, and digging up many crystals at once. At the end of each turn the active player can draw up to two crystals from the blind bag to replenish their resources - but each time a black crystal is drawn the guardian moves one space closer to the puppies and the crystal goes back into the bag. If the puppies brew all the potions on the final tile before the guardian lands on their current space - they win! Otherwise, it's game over.
-description from designer