Four player game with Alchemy

I had my first shot at playing Alchemy today. The biggest change I noticed in Alchemy is the introduction of a new treasure: Potion. Now, in addition to Copper, Silver, and Gold, you can use Potions to buy cards. New cards require potion to be used to purchase the card.

Here are the 10 cards we had to choose from (I forgot the 10th one):

Familiar
Transmute
University
Library
Apprentice
Island
Lighthouse
Masquerade
Mine
???

I decided that my strategy would be to use Familiars to curse my opponents, but things got very interesting when I realized that with Masquerade we would be passing cards to each other constantly, and each of us would be able to pass our curses to each other.

The game moved rather slowly and ended up being over an hour as we were all new to the cards, and passing cards back and forth with Masquerade slowed things down. We ran out of curses first, and then ran out of Islands soon after. Things were still moving slowly and only 5 of the Provinces had been purchased.

The game ended when Player 2 decided to purchase the last Alchemist, and then we were out out Alchemists, Islands and Curses. I'm not sure Player 2 or any of us actually knew who was ahead at that point, as the Masquerades/Curses had shifted a lot of negative points around.

The final point totals were:

Player 1 - 24 points
Player 2 - 19 points
Player 3 - 5 points
Me - 7 points

The winning player had gone with a strategy of buying lots of Islands, and ended up having 7 of them for 14 points. Despite having 10 curses, he still had 24 points total (he had managed to get two provinces in there), which was good for the win.

Alchemy is a very interesting and fun set. Islands are VERY powerful, much more powerful than we realized at first, as they allow you to remove Victory cards from your deck in addition to getting you points, for the cost of an action. The Potion treasure is a bit too involved, as getting a potion in your hand takes time, and none of the cards were overwhelmingly impressive to the point that you need them in your deck. Still, I look forward to playing with the other new cards from Alchemy!