Soaring High: Why Emberheart Is a Dragon-Sized Delight

Welcome to this week’s review! This time I’m taking a look at the board game equivalent of How to Train Your Dragon. So, without further ado, let’s jump into it.

Disclosure: A review copy of this game was provided to The Meeple Digest in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.

Emberheart is the latest game from the publisher Mindclash Games, best known for their heavy euro games like Anachrony, Voidfall, and Trickerion. While still a worker-placement euro game at heart, Emberheart is lighter in comparison to those other games. In terms of accessibility, I would compare it to another recent game I reviewed – River of Gold. I’ll go more in depth below, but the TL;DR is that Emberheart is another excellent addition in the gateway+ level space.

As I mentioned in the intro, Emberheart is about as close to a How to Train Your Dragon-themed game as it gets (without the official license). You act as one of the King’s champions who’s tasked with rescuing and protecting dragons and recruiting heroes. The game takes place over five rounds with each containing two main phases. The first involves placing workers to the game’s six main locations which contain cards, such as dragons or heroes that you add to your personal tableau. In addition, each of the six main locations have five different spaces, which correspond to the number of hirelings you send to that location. In the second phase of each round, players take cards from each of the locations. However, the more hirelings you send to that location, the earlier you’ll get to choose your reward.

This worker-placement/bidding mechanism is the main component of the game. Hirelings are a resource, which come in four different types. There’s a wild one, called grunts, that can go to any location; however, they are one-time use only. The other three types, called experts, return to your supply at the end of each round, with the caveat that the type can only go to certain locations. There’s another resource, called gear, which is used to swap hirelings between the different types, often to upgrade your grunts to experts. While it’s challenging to completely forgo certain locations, you can still specialize in certain areas.

My favorite part of the game is the worker-placement/bidding system as it creates much of the tension in the game. For example, there may be a card at a certain location that I really want, so the only way to guarantee first choice would be to send five hirelings to that location. But if I do so, I might not have enough hirelings to send to other locations; or even if I do, I might have to accept that I’ll get the last choice. Also, since there are five spots at each location, but only three cards are available, there could be situations where the last one or two players don’t get any cards from that location.

I found that this also creates a lot interesting tactical decisions without being bogged down by a lot of rules. The actual rules to the game are relatively simple, with the only exception being the mountain location, which is a bit more involved than the others. Players mostly collect cards, such as dragons, to score victory points. The heroes also provide some nice abilities, such as benefits for performing certain actions, and end-game scoring conditions, such as points for having the most of certain type of card or resource. You can also create so some satisfying combos with the heroes. For example, in one game, I had a hero that gave me rewards for every two green-colored dragons I had at the end of each round, so I focused on collecting a lot of green dragons to score high.

Another element of player interaction involves the flame track. Certain actions in the game will force you to move up the flame track, such as acquiring more valuable dragons. There are also ways to lower your flame token, such as through hero abilities or by taking certain cards in the tavern location. At the end of the game, players will score points depending on how many spaces there are between their flame token and the player in the worst position on the track. There can be a lot of points to be had if there is a sizeable difference between player’s flame track tokens, and this creates another nice layer of decision making and interaction.

In addition to the cute theme, the production quality is nothing to scoff at. For a game that can be found for slightly over $30, the artwork and components more than make up for that price point. One nice touch are the individual player tokens, which include individually-designed dragon meeples for each player.

The only real negative I have for the game is that while there is a built-in two player mode that blocks off some location spaces each round to simulate competition from more players, I found the game to be at its best with the full four players. For me, the most interesting part of the game is the worker-placement/bidding system, which isn’t quite as exciting when there are fewer players. Therefore, I’ll likely only bring this game out with three or four players.

Overall, I really enjoyed Emberheart, and it’ll stay in the collection alongside River of Gold. The cute aesthetic and theme are certainly a selling point, and there’s enough excitement and depth, particularly from the bidding system, to make me want to keep coming back. If you’re looking for a lighter worker-placement game, with a lot of player interaction that’s not going to break the bank, I can’t recommend Emberheart highly enough.

With that, I’ll wrap up this week’s review! If you’ve played Emberheart, what are your thoughts on the game? And what are your favorite games from Mindclash? I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of the games I’ve mentioned or future content suggestions in the comments below. Happy gaming!

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