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Dragons, enchantments and shopping! What’s not to love about the beautiful world of Flamecraft? Let’s swoop in and take a closer look…
Flamecraft has been a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign drawing people in with the stunning artwork and oh so cute dragons. The standard version includes wooden dragon meeples, cardboard coins and cardboard resource tokens. The dragon meeples are silk screened so look very nice and I was so excited to jump into my first game but, how did it play?
Preparing Our Scales
Roll out the beautiful playmat and lay out the starter shops and starter dragons. Pop the coins, resources, enchantment cards and dragon cards in their places.
Each player starts with a fancy dragon card, these are essentially hidden goals to gain extra hearts (points), 3 artisan dragon cards (that players can place in shops around town) and a dragon and matching heart scoring marker.
Get In Loser, We're Going Shopping
Now we are all ready to head out into the Flamecraft world of shops to collect some resources (potions, meat, bread, plants, crystals and iron) basically all the important things your dragon may need to cast enchantments and fulfil their fancy dragon objectives.
The shops themselves have different extra benefits. As you add more shops to the game (this happens when you fill a shop with 3 dragons) you find the newer shops have extra benefits that far outweigh the starting shops. This makes it important to fill those original slots with dragons and get more stores into the game ASAP. For example, if you have the Scale Mail Post in play, when you visit you can ‘draw 2 fancy dragon cards, keep one and give one to another player for 4 hearts’. There are lots of chances to give other players resources or cards to gain a benefit. This is a nice touch as it promotes a friendly playing atmosphere, rather than the ‘take that’ playing style.
We're Soaring Now
Once you have collected the correct resources to cast an enchantment at a shop, it’s time to enchant and collect the benefits. Benefits include hearts, dragon cards and coins.
We found it quite easy to collect the resources needed to complete these cards. Flamecraft isn’t a game where you are collecting everything you need for 5 turns just to do one thing on the next turn. I found that I was enchanting pretty much every other turn and collecting resources/laying dragons on the alternate turns. This is a game where you constantly have something to do.
Collecting extra fancy dragon cards as you go is definitely an important part. These give you bonuses that are either triggered during the game (these hold a sun symbol) or at game end (moon symbol).
Enchanted
There are 2 different enchantment decks that you can use, purple or golden. We found the purple deck was the simplest. It was quicker to collect the items needed to fulfil them without obstacle. I would suggest starting with the purple deck and moving on to the golden deck when you are ready for a further challenge.
There are some very cute names for the dragons, enchantments and shops which shows the attention to detail that has gone into this game. It’s fun to visit ‘Sew Cute’ or cast a ‘Hobbichino’.
There are also the optional companion cards which add an extra element to the game, giving each player a one time use power. Finally, there is a lovely looking solo mode included which is always great to see, meaning you can get those dragons to the table as much as possible!
Closing Time
There are 2 ways for the game to end – running out of enchantment cards or running out of artisan dragon cards. Initially we felt we would always be running out of enchantments but after playing a few games and then switching to the golden deck we found we were just as likely to run out of dragons. It seems to depend greatly on the shops that show up in town vs the enchantments that are available to cast. That’s good because it adds variety and replay ability to Flamecraft.
Overall we’ve had lots of fun playing Flamecraft. It’s not too complicated and the theme is very enticing so I think it will hit the table a lot in our house when we’re looking for a light strategy game. To end with a Game of Thrones quote (because why not?!) – ‘No one will take my dragons’.
That concludes our thoughts on Flamecraft. Do you agree? Let us know your thoughts and tag us on social media @zatugames. To buy Flamecraft today click here!
Editors note: This post was originally published on October 31st 2022. Updated on March 13th 2024 to improve the information available.
