By design, Little Alchemists was intended to be a game that’s both fun and accessible for a wide range of players. It’s the first CGE game aimed at children and their families, but we’re also pretty hardcore board gamers at heart. As such, we wanted to ensure the game is enjoyable by as broad a span of age groups as possible. Wondering if Little Alchemists is a good fit for your family table or gaming night? Here’s a quick breakdown of some of the ways it might appeal to different groups.

The core experience for children and their families

Little Alchemists is a great gateway game for children to delve deeper into logic and deduction puzzles through its potion making gameplay. The first few chapters are an easy on-ramp for younger and newer players alike. They’re designed to give a basic understanding of the core game loop (which you can learn about more here, if you’re unfamiliar) before eventually layering on more complexity in later chapters.

It’s a perfect way to get players of different age groups to the table to learn together, grow their skill, and progress to greater challenges as they make progress across multiple playthroughs. Are you a gaming parent looking for something to play with your kids that they won’t age out of in a year? Little Alchemists is a good fit.

Even younger kids playing with parental supervision

But what if you have younger kids who aren’t quite old enough yet to fully understand some of the concepts in Little Alchemists and you want to include them in some way? The cool thing about the game’s ingredient scanning and potion making element is that we’ve found it’s still a fun activity for younger kids even if they aren't playing the full game. We found this to be the case many times during playtesting with younger kids, too. 

Younger kids like scanning ingredients and seeing the magic they make unfold. It’s a great way to involve them in the family gaming activity as a helper (with parental supervision, of course) before they’re old enough to play the actual game.

Playing with adult gamers

Sure, Little Alchemists is for ages 7 and up, but we mean all the way up. By chapter three the game starts to grow some serious legs, and later chapters expand the gameplays with additional ways to score, a much more complex deduction grid, and other surprises we won’t spoil. Trust us — even for experienced board gamers, it’s still worth starting on earlier chapters (we recommend chapter two or three as a starting point for adults). By the time you’ve unlocked chapter seven, you’re playing the full game, which has a lot of moving pieces and spins out nicely into a medium weight family euro.

If you like the theme of the original Alchemists but want a faster, lighter, more streamlined version that doesn’t take several hours to play, then Little Alchemists is a good pick. Alternatively, if you’ve never played the original because it felt a bit too complex for your group, you might consider giving this lighter version a try.

Thanks for reading! You can learn more about Little Alchemists in our series of behind-the-scenes articles here on the CGE Blog!