These dragons aren’t just adorable, they’re industrious

In Flamecraft, you oversee a village where dragonish artisans pry their trades. It’s a competitive—but cozy—worker-placement and resource management game balancing the production of resources with spending them on enchantments and satisfying fancy, upper-class patrons.

The gameplay is simple. You’ve got shops where you can make various resources and dragons you can put to work making them produce more. Your character hops around, shop to shop, overseeing the work and making upgrades. As you fill shops with artisanal dragons, new ones becomes available with upgraded and unique abilities to enrich the variety of play.

The main draw for Flamecraft, however, has to be the whimsy. Sandara Tang’s artwork is adorable. While many games would have a particular type of card (“Potion Dragon” or similar), in Flamecraft, even among mechanically identical cards, each has its own unique name and portrait. All the shops have funny, punny names like Draco Bell and Gnome Depot. Most of the little dragons have either thematic or Easter Egg names (I noticed a Westley and Buttercup in our first playthrough).

The game box in our deluxe edition is delightfully well organized. The playing surface is a roll-out game mat that’s actually really welcome for dealing with cards that may want to slide under other cards. The dragon minis are all unique, not just recolors of the same molded piece. And if you don’t opt for the minis, the alternate dragon meeples are still substantial and adorable.

Overall, this is a friendly, easy-to-learn cozy strategy game that has tactical depth if you choose to look for it. And it looks great on a shelf between plays, too.