The concept of a tabletop game being recreated on PC and console is not a foreign concept in the slightest – from Monopoly to Munchkin, the digitisation of beloved board games has existed since the early days of computing; even if you were to ignore the countless versions of Chess, Ludo and Solitaire available from the comfort of your phone, these adaptations can range from straight-forward recreations like Carcassonne, all the way to complete visual overhauls such as Civilization or Gloomhaven.
It’s safe to say that there’s no singular rule for how these games should be adapted, something that Flamecraft takes in its stride. Based on the cosy 2022 board game of the same name, you take on the role of a Flamekeeper, the fantasy equivalent of an employment agent whose sole purpose is to get their artisan dragons into work, make sure they are producing the finest goods, and gain yourself a strong reputation.
Each game begins with a set of starter shops, ranging from bakeries to forges in which your dragons will begin their work. Each player can enter one shop per turn and gather materials, play a dragon card and activate the abilities of any dragons in the shop – this all culminates in gathering a number of resources that can then be spent on enchantments, thereby allowing you to enchant a shop and increase your reputation. It’s a fairly simple loop that requires more than just a paragraph in a review to explain, but the game also features a fairly comprehensive tutorial to help you grow accustomed to everything.
Despite being competitive, the game leans more into its collaborative elements, as the resources placed on the board are accessible to everyone – shops, dragons and abilities can all be utilised by any player, with sharing your own personal goods being encouraged to give yourself a tactical edge. If you are looking for a game of cutthroat tactics, this certainly won’t be it, but if you enjoy the cosy comforts of dragons sharing bread and potions, you’re in the right place.
You can choose to play against friends or AI opponents, but the game also features an interesting single-player campaign; in place of opponents, the game sets you out on your own into a standard round, with each turn placing certain resources such as dragons or enchantments throughout the shops. In some ways this turns the game from a strategy into a puzzle, but your goal remains the same – score high and move on to the next round. Sadly some of the steam is lost in this format; despite the story snippets tying each round together (which are wonderfully written to evoke the kind of “friendship is magic” optimism these games foster so perfectly), there isn’t much to keep anyone interested in playing alone.
Aside from some quality of life changes for digital players, gameplay doesn’t differ too much from the board game, but it’s the charming package that the game is presented in that makes all the difference; you’re not given a digital version of the game board, you are given a living snapshot of the town – dragons roam about, smoke pipes from chimneys and the watercolour world breathes as you zoom between shops – Flamecraft should be the benchmark that other board game adaptations strive to be.
Even with strong adaptations such as Wingspan and Blood Bowl 3 on the (digital) table, these often boil down to adding a background and some fancy effects to the tabletop equivalent, but Flamecraft blurs those lines much more effectively, turning what was once the play mat into a seemingly functional world, even if it is still just a background to the elements of a board game – all of this to say that the game looks stunning.
Sadly a lot of the charm of the game can be lost in its weird complexities – something that hangs on from the board game. Each turn feels like a mash of different actions happening at once, with other players being less of a hurdle to overcome and more of a presence that just hovers around and occasionally changes the board – you might suddenly find a shop that is full and can be enhanced easily, or randomly receive a resource from an opponent, but most of the time it feels like a single-player game; admittedly this is even more unusual when you account for the single-player campaign included in the proverbial box, but nonetheless it isn’t as social a game as others tend to be.
Thankfully this shortfall doesn’t mean the game isn’t enjoyable – it can take some getting used to, but once you find yourself in the groove, you’ll barely notice that absence and instead start working around it, because even though it might be a competitive game, isn’t the ultimate goal just to make a town full of dragons who enjoy their jobs?
More importantly, coins (which are a universal resource able to replace any other item in a cost with certain exceptions) are much rarer than other goods, implying that the world of Flamecraft is primarily led by the workforce instead of a structure of management – good on the dragons for seizing the means of production.
