LogFAQs > #985737341

#15 - Emberleaf
My Score: 6.0
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/426513/emberleaf
---

NBIceman nailed it. If we just got out of the "bad/fundamentally flawed" tier I would call this the "not bad but not fun" tier. These games aren't awful or even bad, but they just don't enough for me to desire to play them.

So the give context I was at the conference for 4 days. One day I was solo, one day with one friend, and two days with two friends. This is one of the games I played in the hot games area with both of my friends and a stranger and we were all new, but a stranger kindly taught us all the rules to the game. I will say out of everyone I played with, this was the only stranger I didn't enjoy playing with. He wasn't awful but he just had a negative attitude about the game after a turn or two and it may have soured my opinion a little bit.

So onto the game. This is a typical points game, whoever has the most points after the game ends wins. A main part of this game is what they refer to as card dancing. If you have played Viscounts of the West Kingdom it has some similarities to that. On your turn you do one of two things: You play a card from your hand and get any lightning effects on that card or you slide all the cards you have down one to the left and resolve all of their slide effects. If they slide off the board you also get their drop effect and the card goes back in your hand.

So playing and sliding cards is done decently and is probably the best of the game. You have a grid of 2 rows and 4 columns (the two right most spaces are locked at the start however). When you play a card you can play it into any available space (not already occupied) and do the lighting bolt effect of the card you just played. Alternatively if the space has an effect on it you can choose to do that effect instead. Some cards don't have a lightning bolt effect at all so you should try to play it on one of the space effect spaces since you aren't giving anything up.

Sliding is basically what it sounds like. You start with the top left, slide it over resolve its effects, then bottom left, then second column top, second column bottom, etc. Note that if any card slides off the board, after you resolve its effect it goes back into your hand and is not considered for everything else happening. There are some symbols on the board as well that may be covered or uncovered depending on where you are in the process but I'll go over that in a bit.

There's some strategy into where you play cards, for example a weak slide effect card you may want to play all the way on the left so you get the card back after one slide, but someone with a strong slide effect you may want to play as far right as possible so you get as many slides as possible. You also have to determine when you want to do slides vs play cards, do you want to load up everything and then get some massive slides or do you want to do a couple of impactful cards and then slide to get them back.

That's pretty much it for the card dancing so lets go over the actions now. I already went over play, slide and drop actions and there is also a triggered action (when A happens get B), and charge actions (I can 1x or 2x a turn spend A to Get B). Every card (I believe) has two actions on it, some have double slide but most usually have two different types. A very common type of Action is "Gather 1 resouce per resource symbol". Resource vs Resource symbol is somewhat confusing and is one of my more minor complaints because its not always clear what its talking about. Basically though what this means is you get one of the resource (I'll use wood as an example) for each wood symbol you have on any card on your board, and any visible symbols on your board (This is what I meant when I said some spaces have symbols).

So you could for example have 8 berry symbols visible and get 8 berries (This isn't super common but also not super hard to do). This leads to my second complaint: resource generation outpaces resource storage. At the beginning of the game you can only store 8 total resources, and you have a way to upgrade it to 12. It was very common for people to max out on resources and it's honestly a lot harder to use it then to get it.

For spending resources, the main way is to build a building which is a second kind of action. There are 6 buildings on your board that all cost honey (the hardest to get resource) and provide some kind of permanent upgrade for you (this is how you unlock more storage, unlock your rightmost column, or just give you permanent symbols such as berries or woods). There are also neutral buildings that anyone can build that are cheaper and don't require honey. When you build a building you place it in your current clearing and move one of your four animal types onto it, and get whatever that animal space gave. There are 4 animal tracks of 5 each, the first of each track lets you draft a card and then you get various effects for the spaces after that. You then score VP for each unique building type connected to it, encouraging you to build a variety of building types in the same area.

So I mentioned how you build in your current clearing. There are I believe 6 clearings on the board and you have a leader meeple that starts on one. Movement is like every other resource, You play a card that says walk, and its usually "Walk 1 per foot symbol". The cost to move along a path is 1 movement + 1 for any monster on that path (most paths have 1 monster, I think 1 path has 2). So it's not very expensive to move a lot, especially if the monster have been killed. Near the end of the game I did one move action and moved halfway around the entire board. There is a bonus for visiting each clearing once to offer a little incentive not to just go to your own clearing and rake in victory points by building in it all by yourself the whole game.

So I mentioned monsters (I think they are actually called banners). Another resource is a sword, similar to the others. they allow you to attack something in a path adjacent to you and give you VP if you beat them (and make it easier to move for everyone. There is also a shared Banner track on the board that you will get to move one row down and get one of the resources on that row. If you are the one who gets it to the bottom of the track you get to take one of the 6 victory tiles (Idk what they are actually called) and refresh the monsters (the monsters are on the green easy side at the start but switch to yellow side after the first refresh).

There are two ways to get these victory tiles, being the one to get to the bottom of the banner track, or being the one to build the last building in a clearing. Once four of these are taken the game ends (after the round finishes so everyone gets an equal number of turns, there is no one more round mechanic).

The last thing to note is there are way to get bonus cards. (Visiting each clearing gives you a bonus card) where you choose one of the 5 face up cards. These can be something like "Have the most markets" or "have at least one building in four different clearings" and are pretty varied