I join A, M, and J on most Friday nights for a game night, so my “last night” recap is normally typed on Saturday. I’m typing this on a Sunday. Am I a liar?
Well, maybe. But not this time. We continued to play Emberleaf until 1AM, technically into Saturday. From a certain perspective, that game still happened last night.
If you’re not buying it, then accept it as an excuse for the lateness of this recap. Playing until 1AM, and then not actually getting to sleep at 3AM, put a crimp in my Saturday.
Better late that never!
Emberleaf combines engine-building, tile placement, and managing your action economy using cards.The main game board relatively early in the game. I’m playing red. You can already see how we pursued different strategies: I worked on building tiles in one neighborhood at a time; J (blue) spread his out; M (white) attacked those small beige tiles on the road that hinder movement.My play area at the same point in the game. As you build tiles, you place inhabitants (the red figures at the top of the area) to unlock various benefits. During your turn, you can either place a card into one of the empty slots in your play area, or you can slide cards to the left. Most cards have text that tells you the effect of placing the card (lightning-bolt icon) or sliding the card (the green arrow).The main board at the end of the game. You can see I built more tiles than anyone else… and only came in third. M played white; her attack strategy got her second place.My play area at the end of the game. As it happens I had only two cards on the mat at the end, but that has little directly to do with the scoring. I had a lot of problems with the action economy of the game, making one stupid mistake after another. A also had difficulty figuring it out. If you make a mistake in playing a card in Emberleaf, you may be paying for it for many turns to come.Behold the play area of the winner, J. His strategy was to emphasize end-game bonuses, on the blue cards; they’re face-down because that’s how he indicated to himself that he’d added their score to the total.
According to a couple of reviews I saw, Emberleaf can take a long time at higher player counts. That was certainly the case for us. Our four-player game took about five hours.
Emberleaf demands paying attention to a long-term strategy and understanding the consequences of what seem to be trivial decisions. If you’re a good planner, you’ll enjoy it.
