Emberheart: Gorgeous Dragons on a Board That Is Too Big for Us

Some boxes do the work before anyone has read a single rule. When I put Emberheart on the table with Caro and Quentin, the silence that followed the lid coming off was worth every sales argument in the world. Andrew Bosley, the illustrator behind Everdell and Unconscious Mind, gives us dragons you actually want to rescue, and Super Meeple has taken good care of the French edition, released there as Dragonniers. We played it as a three, and I brought it back out a few days later as a two, with someone else. The gap between those two games is exactly what this piece is about.

Playing time: 60-90 min · Age: 12+ · Players: 2 to 4 · Publisher: Mindclash Games, Mindclash Play line · French edition: Super Meeple · Designers: Adam Porter and Rob Fisher · Illustrator: Andrew Bosley · Mechanisms: worker placement, positional bidding, set collection · Price: around 37 €

An Island, Some Poachers and a Great Many Cards

The pitch fits on one line. The isle of Emberheart shelters the last dragons, poachers have landed, and the king sends you to save whatever can be saved. Each player takes on a champion travelling with their own dragon companion, and spends five rounds recruiting heroes, freeing dragons up in the mountain and finding them clearings where they can live in peace.

Mindclash is best known for complexity monsters like Anachrony and Voidfall. Emberheart belongs to their Mindclash Play line, the more accessible one, and you want to know that before buying: this is a solid mid-weight, not an expert game. The rulebook reads in twenty-five minutes and teaches in fifteen. The board eats a lot of table and there are seven card decks to set up, but nothing in there is intimidating.

The theme works better than I expected. You can feel the debt to role-playing games in the tavern where you hire, in the heroes' guild, in the idea of sending a party out to explore a location. This is not generic fantasy pasted onto an abstract engine, there is real coherence between what you do and what the card you play is telling you.

Bidding Hirelings to Get There First

Here is the heart of the game, and this is where Emberheart gets interesting. You have five action crests and a pool of hirelings. On your turn you place a crest at one of the six locations on the board, but you resolve nothing yet. At the same time you choose the space you land on, from 1 to 5, and that space costs you exactly as many hirelings as its value.

Once everyone has programmed, you resolve location by location, starting from space 5. Whoever bid highest picks their card first. Whoever settled for space 1 takes what is left, and sometimes nothing is left. It is an auction dressed up as worker placement, with one permanent dilemma: spend five hirelings to be certain of landing the card you want, or gamble on three because you doubt anyone else is heading there, and keep your strength for later.

The hireling system adds the layer of management that makes those calls genuinely painful. Basic hirelings are consumables, they are gone once used. Specialists come back to you at the end of the round, but they can only be sent to the locations matching their specialty. Turning a basic hireling into a specialist takes equipment, so an action, so a crest you will not be spending elsewhere. Mismanage your pool and you spend a whole round repairing your hand instead of scoring.

The rest is more conventional without being bad. Dragons are worth points, the heroes you recruit are worth nothing until you pair them with a dragon of their colour, at which point they hand you a power and a scoring condition. And then there is the Flame track, the game's quiet good idea: it is judged in relative terms, not absolute ones. The player carrying the most Flame scores nothing, the others score according to how far they sit from that player. So you watch your neighbours' track as closely as your own.

What Lands

The production, first: clear rules, readable iconography, dual-layer player boards. At 37 euros you get your money's worth, and the game has the kind of table presence that pulls curious people over.

The pace, second. The round does not end when everyone is finished, but the moment the last of the four aide tokens is taken. Which is how our first game ended with Quentin, two crests still in hand, calmly explaining to us exactly what he thought of us. You play the efficient move before the perfect one, nothing drags, and our games came in at an hour and a quarter without anyone reaching for their phone, which remains my best indicator.

The Other Side of the Coin

And yet something is missing, the same thing every time, and it took me two games to put my finger on it. Locations offer five spaces. With four players around the table, five spaces for four champions is tight, you have to fight, someone ends up eating space 1. At three, the pressure already drops noticeably. At two, with the deck simulating a third player, it almost entirely disappears: you go where you want, you pay the minimum, and you take the card you were aiming for.

This is a design choice I do not understand, because the fix is obvious. Removing one space per missing player would have tightened the board and given the bidding its whole reason to exist, whatever the player count. As it stands, the most appealing mechanical promise in the box only really holds up at four. The French site Vin d'jeu reaches the same conclusion, and Le Labo des Jeux recommends playing at three minimum. I would go further: at two, Emberheartbecomes a decent solitaire optimisation puzzle in a box that promised something else.

The ironic part is that Mindclash Play already has the two-player game you want, and I loved it. Ironwood, released in the same line and also localised by Super Meeple, is an asymmetric card duel built from the ground up for two players, with no compromise and no simulated third player. It is a genuine favourite of mine, and I will add that it comes from two Belgian designers based in Brussels, Maël Brunet and Julien Chaput, which does not hurt when you run a blog out of Koekelberg. Good news on top of that: its Steel & Spirit expansion is announced for October, with modules that dig even deeper into the asymmetry between the two factions. If you are after a Mindclash game for a table of two, look there instead.

A second, lighter complaint: the heroes' permanent powers are too tame. You recruit them for the points they bring at the end, almost never for what they do along the way. Sharper abilities would have given games more texture and real reasons to replay differently.

Verdict

Emberheart is a handsome game, pleasant, well produced, teachable in a quarter of an hour and done before the evening stretches out. For a group looking to step up from family games to mid-weight without getting hurt, it is an ideal doorway, and Mindclash fans will find here something to play with people who will never touch Voidfall.

But buy it knowing how many of you will be playing. If your table is regularly full, you have an excellent four-player game on your hands, tense and interactive, and you can add a point to my rating. If you mostly play as a pair, walk on by: the board will not tighten up for you, and that is all that was missing for this game to be truly memorable.

7/10