Smells like... victory!

Who will be the most successful perfumer?

Parfum takes the players to the wonderful world of fragrances. Using ingredients like vanilla, lavender or violets, the players distill precious essences in order to create unique perfumes. Only the player catering to their clientele's preferences will be able to sell their perfume. Each customer favors a specific fragrance which must be contained in a flask to induce them to buy it. 

A dash of dice rolling, a hint of acquiring and selling and add a bit of backstabbing and you have one great game... that I did not think guys in general would have liked to play (what a stereotype). In fact, most of my gaming buddies are guys and they really enjoyed this game...

Here is a quick run-through of how the game works...

You start off with a player board (where you will store all the perfumes you are about to create) and you grab three water droplets (which will be used to change the face of your die or gain points at the end of the game - more on this later).

Randomly, you will take all the players point trackers and place them one by one on the '0' piled on top of each other. This will determine start order for waking up (yep, like Fresco, you have to wake up and choose how many actions you will be performing today) - whoever is on the bottom will pick first and so on...

There are three phases in this game:
First phase is to wake up (which I mentioned above) - the person that is last in score track points gets to wake up first and pick in what order he or she will play. The earlier you start a round the less actions you have but waiting to go last could mean that all the good ingredient dice are already gone or there are no essences left to create.
Once everyone has picked their turn order makers, the player with the first turn will begin with 3 actions... onto our next phase...

Action and Distill phase:

Depending on how many actions you have, you can choose to do one of the following: Take a die (ingredient), take a water droplet or add a new essence to the row if there are missing some (you randomly choose one from the bag - which is included - and place it on the board.

Now you roll all the ingredients (dice) you collected and with the help of water droplets you can modify the die face if it fails (see picture on left). One droplet lets you re-roll one die while two droplets lets you simply change the face of the die to the side you need (probably to the successful side - the one with the bottle on it). Also note that certain ingredients have a better chance than others to get a successful distillation. And this is also where you might want to think about taking away dice from future players that might want to create an essence found in the middle row of the board.

Once you rolled and re-rolled or changed the face of a die, you can now create an essence...

On the front of the tile you will see what type of ingredient you need to create that essence, if it is a top, middle or bottom part of a bottle and how many coins it is worth (points).

If you have the right combination of dice, then you can acquire this essence and place it next to your player board (on either side if it is a top or bottom and on the right if it is a middle). The point of placing these essences is to create a perfume and if you have either a two-level perfume or a three-level perfume you will receive a number of flasks to sell at the next phase of play. Note that once you have placed an essence next to your board you can not move that essence to the other side or to finish off another perfume in front of you... you can have 5 bottoms of perfumes but you will need tops and middles to be able to complete the perfumes in order to sell them.

Now let us sell these perfumes shall we... on the top of the board there are buyers that are looking for perfumes with their favorite fragrances in them...
For example, one lady would like a perfume with a scent of at least two lavenders (now depending on what essences you used and if you have completed perfume bottles, you can sell one flask to that person and collecting the coin value on the tile). That person will leave the board and the next turn order player will then sell one of their flasks if they have any and if they meet the fragrance requirements... if they do not, then they pass to the next player until it comes back to player 1 who can then sell another flask if possible.

The game continues like this until one of two things happens... you have no more essences to take out of the bag and place on the board, which ends the game immediately, or the last round marker comes out from the buyers pile and you have one final round to play the game. Player with the most points wins...

Ok so what do I think of this game... well when I do a completely walkthrough of a game it usually means I understand it and I like it a lot... so this game is no different. I really enjoyed this game, even more than Fresco and Scoville. I like the different varitions of game play as each turn the players play in different orders (hopefully) and that taking dice away from other players makes it harder for them to score - but watch out, being the first place in score means that you wake up last and often means going last... ok you get more actions but if you have absolutely no dice to work with well your lead will leave quickly.

I have only played this game with four players, I think it would be cool with 2 or 3 as well and the board has two sides for this change in players.

The quality of the pieces and board is great and the graphic artwork is really nice... plus the game has a bunch of dice...

Really recommend this game to anyone and I give this 5 out of 5 flasks of perfume.