Emberheart
- Board's Eye View
- 10 hours ago
- 3 min read
Mindclash are best known for their heavy eurogames like Anachrony, Perseverence and Trickerion but over the past couple of years they've broadened their range to publish slightly lighter more accessible Mindclash Play titles, including Astra, Septima and Ironwood. There's quite a lot going on in Emberheart but this game by Rob Fisher and Adam Porter is still at the more accessible end of Mindclash's range. The game's attractive art is by Andrew Bosley.
Others have described Emberheart as How To Train Your Dragon - the Board Game. That's a fair summation because in Emberheart you'll indeed be recruiting and training dragons. But this isn't a game that's a movie tie-in. In the first instance, Emberheart is a worker placement game. You start off with basic 'grunts' that you place out in the various action slots around the board. You must place at least the minimum number indicated for each location but players who place more workers will be able to claim slots that give them higher priority so that they get first dibs on the benefits - in most cases, first choice of the three cards on offer at that location. This then is worker placement combined with bidding, so it's highly interactive - to the extent that players can effectively muscle others out from gaining any benefit at a location - tho' there is some small consolation when you are outbid in this way. Unless you're always taking the top (most expensive) slot at a location, you'll be making an assessment of how likely it is that others will go there and might outbid you to nab the card you particularly want. We've enjoyed this bluff/counterbluff and push-your-luck element; tho' less so on those occasions when our calculations failed to pay off.
Your workers are a finite resource - they aren't routinely replaced - so you will probably want to 'upgrade' at least some of them to specialists: scouts, wardens and rangers. These are workers that are returned to the player at the end of your turn rather than lost to the general supply but, unlike the more generalist grunts, they can only be deployed at specific locations. You also have a dragon meeple that you can add to one of your worker placements each turn. This will give you benefits that depend on how far you have advanced on the three attribute tracks on your player board.
Advancing on your player board tracks can earn you victory points as well as worker placement bonuses, and you also need to keep an eye on the flame track on the central board. Various actions will move your token on that board either to the left or to the right (ie: lowering or raising your flame level). There are points to be earned at the end of the game for being lower on this track than other players.
You're collecting Hero and Preserve cards for their benefits and points-scoring bonuses but these benefits and bonuses are only activated when the cards are paired: for example, a blue-background Hero card with a blue dragon. On the hand, the bonuses from Garrison cards are earned immediately a player satisfies that card's requirements.
Players are not only managing and deploying their workers in order to collect and pair dragon and other cards, they will also need to have an eye to the negative effects shown on the round's Poacher cards...
With so much going on and numerous card effects there's inevitably a fair amount of iconography to decipher but Mindclash have done a pretty good job in ensuring that the icons are clear: this isn't a game that will have players glued to the rulebook to decode all the cards. The player boards are double-sided, so you can play with or without asymmetric powers, and you can expect to play a game through in under two hours, even with a full complement of four players. All in all, this is a flaming good game!
