Flamecraft Duals

Flamecraft Duals is a 2-player game from Cardboard Alchemy based on their previous game Flamecraft, but designed specifically for 2 players. In it, you take turns placing dragons at various locations around a hex-grid, trying to align dragon tokens in specific patterns in order to complete goals on cards to earn points.

On your turn, you go through three phases: Play, Score, Refresh. In the Play phase, you draw a random dragon token from the bag, place it on any space on the board, then fire up the token you placed. Spaces can have no more than 3 dragon tokens stacked on top of them, so you can’t play a token to be the fourth token on a space. Firing up a token activates its ability, such as a meat dragon moving an adjacent token to another space or a plant dragon firing up an adjacent token. During the Score phase, you compare the tokens on the board to the patterns on your cards and if you can match them up, you can reveal the card to score it and earn points. Finally, in the Refresh phase, you draw back up to 2 cards in hand. You also have 3 coins that you can spend to mix up what cards you have by drawing, then discarding 2 cards. Once the last token is drawn from the bag, the player whose turn it is finishes their turn and then their opponent has one last Score phase to try and score more cards. Whoever has the most points from their cards is the winner!

Thematically, Flamecraft Duals plays out similarly to the original, but the actual gameplay is pretty different. While both have dragons, shops and firing up dragons to use their abilities, the gameplay is pretty different. The original is much more of a worker placement/resource management game where you choose a location to move to and then gain and spend resources to activate abilities from that location. Flamecraft Duals on the other hand is more of an abstract strategy/puzzle game. Duals feels a lot closer to Quarto than it does to Flamecraft, as both have you manipulating a grid with pieces that are communal and don’t belong to any one player.

As a fan of games involving puzzling things together, I enjoy Flamecraft Duals a good amount. The abilities make for interesting strategies as if you use them right, you can usually score on any given turn. Half of the abilities allow you to move the dragons on the board, one lets you activate another ability and the rest get you additional tokens. Through clever applications of the abilities, you’re often manipulating multiple tokens on a turn.

Flamecraft Duals also has two mini-expansions and a Solo Mode included. The Fancy Mode has you use two of the eight fancy dragon cards to add additional rules to change up the game. The Fountain adds an additional scoring card that either player can score on a turn as well as a fountain token that blocks one of the spaces, moving each time a fountain card is scored. The Solo Mode uses the fountain, while adding in a challenge where if you cannot score on a turn, you either spend a coin or lose the game. Winning the game requires you to score all the fountain cards before you run out of tokens in the bag. The mini-expansions work somewhat opposite to each other, where Fancy Mode speeds up the game by giving players more to work with, while the Fountain slows the game down by placing an impediment in the way of scoring. Both change up the way you play enough to add a bit more replay value to the game. I don’t think the Solo Mode is a very good solo adaptation, as it makes the game very luck-dependent. In the regular game, not scoring on any given turn is unfortunate, but also doesn’t end the game. In the solo mode, if your first token is one that moves other tokens, you are likely going to have to spend a coin on the first turn just to not lose. Once you’re a few turns in, you’re better off, but the first few turns can be very rough in the Solo Mode if you’re unlucky and I think that makes for uninteresting gameplay.

As far as making Flamecraft Duals more space-friendly, the gameboard is the main issue. Instead of using the board that comes with the game, I’ve made a version of the board as a mousepad that I can just keep as a more flexible mat. I also was able to fit the cards and tokens into an Ultimate Guard 133+ Deck Case which gives the game a much smaller footprint.

If you’re looking for a fun, abstract two-player strategy game, I do recommend Flamecraft Duals as a fun puzzly game.

Flamecraft Duals is available now from our webstore.