Potion - A New Bingo Game At Tombola

Just a couple of months after their last new game launch, Tombola have put other online bingo sites to shame by coming up with yet another new bingo game called Potion.  It runs in 4 themed rooms called Toad, Owl, Mouse and Cat, with shared chat for all four.

Potion is a single ticket multi-stake game with price levels of 5p, 10p, 25p, 50p, £1 and £2; the prizes you can win are adjusted according to stake level so that, for instance, the prizes (including the room jackpots) for a 50p stake are ten time the size of the prizes.

Potion’s game engine has 45 balls, 18 numbers and 3 cards to complete but this is presented in a non straightforward way.  Each player starts with 18 potion ingredient bottles arranged on a set of shelves each with a different number between 1 and 45, and three potion recipes to complete:

• Youth – 2 x roots, 2 x honey
• Love – 2 x dragons, 2 x roses, 2 x toadstools
• Wisdom – 1 x snake, 3 x beetles, 4 x crystals

Each bottle contains a different potion ingredient and when the number is called, that ingredient drops into the cauldron and is marked off on the corresponding recipe.  Although the ingredients are colour coded depending on which recipe they belong to, this is in no way related to the colours of the bottles so which ingredient is in which bottle remains a mystery until the corresponding number is called. Here, the honey (yellow) has come out of the green number 38 bottle.

Each recipe has its own prize which goes to the player or players who complete them first; the Wisdom prize represents around two thirds of the total and the Love prize, two thirds of what’s left.  The remaining amount is the Youth prize.  Each recipe also has its own jackpot – 500x stake for completing Youth in 5 or fewer calls, 1250x stake for completing Love in 9 or fewer calls and 10,000x stake for completing Wisdom in 12 or fewer calls.

The theming of the rooms at first sight doesn’t appear to affect anything apart from the colour of the background but in a nice touch, if you clear the right space on the shelves by opening enough ingredient bottles the animal from the theme will arrive on the following call to sit in that space for the remainder of the game.  All four creatures are animated for extra entertainment value.

As always when Tombola introduce a new bingo game, when we visited the rooms were very busy with players wanting to give it a try.  However, the players weren’t evenly spread across all 4 rooms, cats being significantly more popular than toads, and this meant that the size of the prizes and the chance of winning varied from room to room; the number of players is shown in the bottom right hand corner after entering the room so you may wish to check this when deciding which of the 4 to play in.

With a minimum spend of just 5p, three prizes to play for, lots of visual interest and RTP that is guaranteed to exceed 90%, Potion should continue to prove extremely popular.

UPDATE (December 2019) – 3 months after launch, a few changes have been made:

1. There’s now just one Potion room, but players can choose which of the magical creatures to theme their game on, and a new creature, Bat, has been added
2. The colours of the bottles now match the colours of the ingredients inside.  It seems players were finding it too confusing as it was
3. The RTP is no longer quite as good – but still guaranteed to exceed 80%