Players use their budding alchemy skills to create a homunculus, which is assembled from nine parts (head, ears, torso, tail...). To bring these parts to life, you must spend ingredients like dragon blood and unicorn horn, which can be extracted from homunculus parts that are of no use to you at the moment.

Each player has one homunculus as a target, but you can assemble the beast from any parts available to you. As the creation starts to come to life, you can make use of its special abilities: the ears let you eavesdrop on another player's hand; the torso gives you more ingredients to consume; the leg to dig through the discard pile and find a tile you need; and so on. As you use these parts, you flip the tiles face down; one of the three actions you can take on your turn is to turn all these tiles upright so that they can be used again.

The game wins when someone adds the final tile to her homunculus, but that players doesn't necessarily win. You score points for face-up tiles, with bonus points for matching your target homunculus, using tiles that all match each other, or ending the game.

Description written by W. Eric Martin and used with permission of BoardgameNews.com