Noctiluca ended up being a fantastic family game for my daughters and I. The game has just enough theme for an abstract game that my 6 year old thought it was very cute. She’s also into coral reefs right now so this game being about tiny, bioluminescent creatures called noctiluca and we need to use their healing power for our potions that we are creating. I’ll breakdown the game using 5 categories for people who don’t want more info: • Theme • Component Quality • Aesthetics + Gameplay + Replay-ability Score is 5/5, if you enjoy collecting dice to finish potions with your family, add it to your board game collection! The theme of the game is cute, like I said my daughter that it was cool, but the game is mostly an abstract dice collection game, the theme doesn’t drip out of the game. Maybe if there were rubber noctiluca tokens to replace the dice after collecting the dice, but without something like that the theme just isn’t there without someone trying to amp it up. The components are fair, a bunch of dice with normal pips of several colors are wonderful. The pawns for placing on the edge of the board work, the board works. The cards are a decent thickness, and the other cardboard tokens are great. The aesthetics of the game are tough. I love the rainbow of dice. The board for some reason just isn’t as colorful and I’m annoyed that the main board side is the solo variant, the back side is what you’ll mostly play and it doesn’t really lay perfectly flat. If I was publishing the game I would swap the sides of the board. Also the pawns are egg yolk colored and that is not the best. But the cards and tokens are wonderful, sometimes it’s hard to see blue on the cards, but other than that the cards are great. Gameplay, which is the most important part of the entire review, is luck based but you have control over the cards and dice pips you are collecting. Players start with 2 potion jars to fill up with noctiluca, they’ll place a pawn on the edge of the coral reef and take one of two paths of dice they can take. A player says they want dice with X number of pips showing, so they collect all of those and fill up their potion cards with the dice. If there are any left over dice the player passes them to the next player and they will either take one or pass the dice to the next player until those dice are used. Cards score points once filled and points for making the same kind of potions increases because of the tokens that you take for finishing the potions. Once the game ends you score four different variables and it isn’t entirely obvious who wins. Replay-ability is fine, the dice will have different pips next time you’ll play but the cards won’t change. Maybe you’ll get a different favorite noctiluca for scoring at the end, but more than likely you’ll see everything this game has to offer in one play. But I would play it again right after if my daughter asked me to, and that isn’t the case for every game.