Flamecraft: lighter than expected
I was excited to play Flamecraft. Don’t make me say fired up.
Played the very cutely-illustrated Flamecraft last night. At the end I was left wondering whether someone could explain the 20+ point gap between the green and purple dragons compared to yellow, and my blue. And whether my relatively poor scoring position or the lightness of the game had let me down, or whether I was tempted to try again and see what kinds of intriguing and variable shop abilities would appear next time.
Most of us were new to the game, and we seem to agree it was down to maximal resource collection and luck.
It didn’t help that I was ill-focused on placing my dragons on shops that would give me fancy dragons as a reward (which provide instant or end-of-game scoring conditions … given I had a starting fancy dragon that would reward me for turning in other fancy dragons end of game). This choice resulted in my turns not being as productive at the shops as they would have been at other shops. And by laying dragons at these shops (and filling all the slots there) I also unlocked a couple new, better, shops which the other players could then visit and benefit from. On top of that, I just forgot I could place enchantments at wild shops, so I foolishly placed enchantments at shops matching the symbol on my enchantments, meaning I missed out on all the wild shop (better) goodies!
That said, I still wouldn't have caught up if I was able to undo those mistakes.
Purple had a couple interesting tactics and moves. They held onto an intimidating number of coins (which can be used as wild resources) the whole game, which felt like a way to have an end-game surprise push to the finish line, though they still ended up in second place. They also got probably twenty hearts (victory points) by doing two impressive combos — they placed enchantments on shops (which got them hearts) then fired up the "place a dragon" action on those shops which let them place a dragon on a different (newly-revealed) shop to gain multiple hearts as rewards from those shops. Thinking through the combo-ing wasn't fun for me or didn’t come as naturally — swapping a dragon from one shop to another to get as many resources as possible that would fulfill contracts felt like homework.
The green player seemed to give away resources using the (coincidentally) green dragon a bunch of times — getting 2 hearts each time, probably getting at least 8 hearts total. But they also won because they had a lot of fancy dragons whose conditions were met, and a companion dragon who they were able to use to provide extra help. Beyond that, they must have gotten a bunch of enchantments to account for the large gap, which is the primary way to score. I didn't totally follow all the action as it played out.
It felt like there were some vocabulary questions that would come up more than I would expect for a somewhat light game. We had to clarify end-game scoring conditions (“most” doesn’t have to mean more than everyone else, it can mean tied) and shop abilities (when a purple dragon is in the park, and you can fire it from a shop ability, we ruled that you were allowed to swap that purple dragon with any other shop, not just the one you were on).
As far as design goes — a lot of the icons are easy to read from a glance, especially the colorful resources, but not all elements were as clear. The cute drawings of the dragons don’t show them using their powers, so you need to read tiny text on the bottom to understand what a dragon can do. Granted, a dragon’s color does indicate what their ability is, so if you play it enough, you would hopefully memorize which ability goes with which color, but I hadn’t memorized them, and the text and icons at the bottom of cards weren’t clear enough to read from a distance. Instead, I needed to reach over and pick them up or reference my player aide card, and given that the game is all about combo-ing different cards, it slowed down my processing in real-time. Instead, ideally the card art would demonstrate the action described on it. I only assume this wasn’t done because of a tradeoff during the production process to avoid production delays — that art and text were decoupled so changes to one wouldn’t require changes to the other.
While I believe everyone enjoyed themselves, I felt let down afterwards. The winners looked like a couple runaway leaders who consistently stayed ahead (continually gathering as many resources as possible). I’m not sure how I could have caught them and don’t know that I’m compelled enough by the types of mechanics to want to try again. It reminded me of Viticulture — trying to fulfill contracts — but with fewer ways to get there and less mechanical tie to a theme (grapes age in Viticulture, there’s a vineyard and a wine cellar, etc.) to keep me intrigued. The end-game scoring conditions themselves were repetitive — in the vein of having a certain number of resources and a bonus if you have the “most” (there’s that definition of “most” we had to look up). Some of us had the same end-game conditions, which I guess adds to the competition, but just felt anticlimactic to realize the end-game cards we’d been hiding from each other were in some cases the same, or solely based on amount of resources, rather than some other clever or game-changing twist (like you might find in Dune Imperium).
That said, it’s a lighter game, and the choice of cute dragons goes along with that, so perhaps I shouldn’t expect more nuance or thematic mechanics or more ways to win. If you’re looking for a middle-weight game, you’ll probably enjoy this, at least once, especially with someone who has a less discriminating eye, like kids. However, it feels too complex for truly light-game players, and not satisfying enough to have staying power for many repeated plays.
Fun fact: when googling the name of my dragon companion (because — sorry, Sandara — I didn't have much love for your ability given how few fancy dragons were face up for me to leverage), I discovered that the companion names appear to be taken from the names of people who worked on or playtested the game!
