The Fifth Ingredient

White wild ingredients, the Ghastly Cauldron, professors and four potion powers.

Short tag: [Fifth].

What it adds

Twelve white Ghost Ectoplasm marbles, the Ghastly Cauldron, seven Professor tiles, Reward and Scolding tokens, and 32 potions in four new kinds. Faces and powers.

Setup changes

Choose six potion kinds from the available base and expansion kinds. Return every unselected kind to its box and follow the regular starter draft and five-stack setup.

Put Reward and Scolding tokens beside the Little Help supply. If any chosen potion or Professor uses the Cauldron, place it in front of the dispenser and fill its holes with the twelve white marbles. Choose one Professor, randomly or deliberately, and display it for everyone. The booklet recommends one at first; experienced players may use two together.

Wild ingredients

White marbles can be treated as any colour during an explosion or when filling a recipe. You may choose how far to extend a matching group with wilds, rather than taking an unnecessary white marble that could support a later collision. Return whites from a completed recipe to the dispenser normally. A white ingredient must fill an available recipe hole rather than being saved in the Pool; you may hold it temporarily while resolving other permitted actions. FAQ.

The Ghastly Cauldron

An Exchange instruction swaps one specified marble for a white marble from the Cauldron. Put the offered marble in its place. If no white marbles remain, take another colour instead. Each Exchange earns one Reward token; it is not an ordinary free action.

Professors

Each Professor changes the entire game or adds a trigger. See the seven individual Professor rows. In particular, Gravitha penalises filling a higher layer before lower layers are complete, while Shi Zan offers a used-potion effect instead of the usual Little Help marble.

New potion powers

• Brew of Feather Touch collects a same-colour horizontal group, at most one from each track, with no explosions.
• Chameleonic Varnish converts one colour in your hand to another regular colour.
• Ghastly Concoction exchanges one ingredient in your hand with the Cauldron.
• Dram of Poltergeist Sweat steals one Pool ingredient from one opponent, then exchanges it with the Cauldron.

Scoring changes

Each Reward token adds 1 point; each Scolding subtracts 1. Other scoring and the end trigger are unchanged.