How to Play – Emberleaf

Recruit the best fellowship of Emberlings as you rebuild the forest and win the hearts of your people. The Emberling with the most points at the end of the game wins.

Core Actions

On your turn, choose one:

• Play a hero card: Activate its on-play skills and add stats to your fellowship.
• Slide cards: Move every card on your fellowship board one space to the left, triggering slide skills. When a card slides off the board, it triggers drop-off skills and returns to your hand.

Actions in the Game

• Walking: Move around the forest to position yourself for key actions. Moving from one clearing of the map to another requires 1 walk if the path is clear, and 1 extra walk if it's a dangerous path.
• Gathering: Collect wood, food, stone, and beehives to support your actions. You can hold up to 8 resources at a time (12 if the boat house next to your resource bank has been built).
• Attacking: Use attack skills to clear nearby dangerous areas, collect war banners, and advance the war banner track. The attack strength needed to clear a path is shown on the path token.
• Building: Spend resources to construct buildings in your current clearing, or upgrade your fellowship with special buildings. Building something will allow you to immediately home a villager.
• Homing: Place villagers in buildings to unlock bonuses, upgrade your fellowship, or activate scoring objectives. Each villager will give you a one-time bonus once it is homed.
• Favours: Collect up to 8 favour cards and complete their objectives. Favours are usually earned by visiting a clearing for the first time (but can be earned other ways).

Scoring

Earn points by:

• Connecting different types of buildings: When you home a villager, count how many unique building types containing one of your villagers are connected to each other. Score that many points.
• Clearing dangerous areas: When you clear a path, score points equal to the number of points given on that path.
• Collecting trophies: When you clear a path, the war banner advances to the next row on its track. The last row on this awards a trophy. Each of these trophies will score points, or give some other bonus action or resources (and in some cases, give other players a smaller reward). You can also earn a trophy when any clearing has all possible building sites built.
• Completing favours: All of your favours give conditional points at the end of the game.

Game End

The game ends after all six trophies have been awarded.