Tips & Strategy

Plan around shared spaces, patient deadlines, plant availability and the benefits that compound over five days.

How to teach it

Start with the three locations and the nine-hour schedule. Show how players plan only a location, then choose an action when the hour arrives. Explain the Tea track next, because it changes who takes scarce spaces first.

Your first game

Use the standard bonus tracks and leave Personality cards, Events and Goals out. Choose a medicine card, point out its ingredients and skills, then demonstrate how its deadline and reward work. First-time players can focus on one or two medicine types while learning how their skills improve.

Planning choices

• Leave enough Pharmacy time to accept and finish patients; a new order cannot be taken until you produce a medicine.
• Watch the plant display before committing a Forest hour. Later hours offer more plants but other players may take the useful ones first.
• Tea can improve next hour’s order. A small movement may matter when several players want the same Village or Forest action.
• A two-hour training course needs Village markers in both hours. Make room for it before filling the rest of the plan.
• Buy furnishings for benefits you can use repeatedly, and remember the merchant’s first-hour surcharge and final-hour discount.

Videos and the rulebook

The listed previews and playthroughs were recorded around the game’s crowdfunding and prototype period. They can help explain the planning and action sequence, but the current English rulebook and publisher corrections control rules questions.

Sources

• Tinctura Overview within 3 Minutes! How to Play, Inspired 2 Game.
• Tinctura - Mid Euro Board Game with Programming and Action Queuing Goodness. Board Game Playthrough, Meeple University.
• TINCTURA - DT Preview with Mark Streed, The Dice Tower.
• Tinctura Preview - Running A Pharmacy Is Hard Work, BoardGameCo.
• Tinctura - Pre-Program Your Actions to Mix Plants, and Cure Illness. Board Game Rules Overview, Meeple University.
• Tinctura - A Preview Video (EN), Epitrapaizoume.
• Current rules: Skellig Games English rulebook. Community answers are linked from the FAQ.