Embers | Solo Playthrough - A Button Shy Survival Game
Transcript
This is actually really rough. The last game I played was like I won easily, but here I'm really having issues. Hey everyone, this is Attackers. Today I will bring you my playthrough of Embers by Steven Aramini. Um, this is a game by Buttonshy, as you can see with like the wallet. I mean they're not the only ones doing this water thing anymore but still um this is a buttonsha game is a solo game um where you are trying to have a campfire not be extinguished before you have like um gone through four days. So in terms of its theme it's kind of similar to set a watch. Also a game I want to show you on the channel at some point but um it does play a little bit differently. It's more like a spatial puzzle kind of thing. But um I will show you how that works. I've been wanting to show that to you for a while because it has released one or two years ago already. Um, but now I'm finally getting around to it. All right, before we get started, as usual, grab yourself a cup of tea and let's do this. All right, there we go. All right, before we get started, let me just quickly set up the game and then we can get started.
All right, and that concludes the setup of the game. Um, so this looks like it doesn't need a whole lot of table space, but there will still like be things put around here. So, it actually does need quite a bit of table space. I hope that this is enough now. All right, so let me uh guide you through what you see here. So, here's our campfire. This is like a stack of fire cards here. At the bottom is the day card um that we know or the night card that we know u when to start a new day. We like one day is like one entire round with like several turns and after the end of the fourth day if we survive that then we win. Um we have our heroes around the campfire. Um these are just dealt out randomly all on level one. There's a fifth one here in our um in our tent that we can take uh maybe get next round depending on whether we need it or not. Then here is the forage pile. This is like all fire cards that get removed uh usually by monsters. And that is pretty much everything you see here. Let me just quickly let me just briefly explain how the game roughly works and then I will go to my playthrough and uh explain the rest as I go. A round looks like that. So we first spawn monsters. That means we take like um cards from the uh top of the deck, we turn them over and then the monster gets put into the position that is shown here on the card below it. Then there will be an effect after I've placed these monsters uh depending on the number of heroes. So four heroes we have at the moment. So that means four monsters are
going to be put there. Um and then after we have done that, the top card there shows which uh effect will be active. The small disclaimer, even when I play without the camera, I sometimes forget to apply these effects. So, just forgive me if I also do here. Then we have the uh the action phase that we where we can use um two action lose two action points with each hero. There's specific actions we can do here. We can defend. Defend means if there's a monster at our position, we can defeat it and take it into our hand. Um the forage action here means for each um for each log that is shown here, we can take one card um from the top of the forage pile into our hand as well. So we can like stoke the fire so to speak. Then we have the promotion action here at the end. That means we can turn uh turn the hero to the level two side. Then they become stronger.
Then we have the bolster action. The bolster action allows us to give one action point to a different hero and use that action immediately. Then we have the maneuver action. And the muser action lets uh lets all heroes move around the fire. But they have like specific ways of moving. So the forager um moves next to another hero um just in a straight line. The defender jumps over a hero but needs to be next to a hero to do so. So no empty spaces between. Um the fire tender jumps over the fire. And if there this uh if there is already someone there, it would like take one of the adjacent spaces. If these are also filled, the fire tender cannot move and the scout um skips one empty space and then jumps over one or more um adjacent heroes and the leader can just move one space into an empty space. That's pretty much it. Um so that's like the main thing of the game to actually like use these maneuver actions. And then there are some special actions. Um I think one for the fire tender on the other side, the stoke action. I will get to that if we need it. And then we have the monster monster phase um where the monsters um attack um they will attack the fire remove fire cards which is bad of course because if the stack deck ever runs out we lose um and then they will also attack like the closest hero. Um and then we just do the reinforcement. That means if we have less than four heroes, we can take one or two uh we can like take heroes from the tent but not heroes
that we have lost this round this turn. Um and then that's it. Um there's also a t like time will also pass as soon as we see the day or the night card. Um I will let you later know how that works. And that's pretty much it. So let's get started with our playthrough. Let's first re reveal our monsters. The first one will go here in the top right like this. the next one will go to the bottom. If there if that is a space with a hero and then we look at the movement actions here, that's two movement actions. And the monster will now move clockwise um until either the movement points are gone or there is an empty spot without an hero, which would be here. So, the monster would be right here. Then we turn over the next card. This one goes also here. They just stack. That's fine.
And this one goes here. But since there is a hero, it will move to the next empty space. This is where our heroes are. All right. So now um let's do uh the action phase and see what we can do. Um this effect here says spawn this card as an additional monster then ignore the newly revealed event. All right. So we have one more monster actually that goes here. But we ignore this uh event. Okay. So now we need to like kind of think of what can we do to actually resolve things here. But I do have a few ideas already. Let me do it like this. Uh with the fire tender, I will use a maneuver action. Jump over here and then there like this. And then I will defeat this monster. So the fire tender is gone. No more actions for him. At least for now. Then with the forager um I will move all the way over here like this. And then I will defeat this monster.
Okay. Then with the scout I will move here and then over here. Um and with the defender I will move over here. Right. So these are like have like pretty uh complicated movement actions but this like works now. Uh the scout um with the scout I would bolster the defender. So the defender has one more action now. And with the two actions, um, I will defeat these two monsters. And with that, I think I have used all of my actions. So now all the monster action I took into my hand, I would turn to the other side. I will shuffle them and put them at the bottom of the deck. That's very important because we need the keep the fire going. If it ever is extinguished, so there are no more cards in the deck, we lose. So now we do the monster attacks. So the monsters have like several things here. They have like the movement points which don't do anything at the moment. Then we have the fire um attack and the regular attack.
The fire attack means it will um attack the fire. Now, take one of these cards and put it at the bottom of the forage pile and with the other one it will attack the closest heroes. If there are several heroes that are have both the same distance to the monster, so to speak, we can choose one. So, one damage to the forager. The forager has one health. So, the forager is hurt. All right, that was that. Now with the reinforce action, we have um only three heroes. That means we can take one from the tent, which is the leader. And I will put the leader right here where the monster is. I can choose a spot where I want to put her. All right, that's it. I will tap her to the uh I will rotate her normally so we know next turn we can get her. All right, and that was all it. So now we spawn monsters again. So this one goes over here.
Then this one stacks here. Oh man, this one also stacks here. Oh, that can be very dangerous. Um, so I need to spawn one more monster and this one will go over here. It will move clockwise. But now the movement points are gone. Done. So like this. No more than one card may be foraged this turn. That's fine. I don't really need to forage too much at the moment. That is okay. All right. So now let's look at our actions. Well, it's quite easy with the leader. I will do two um two defend actions. So these two monsters are gone. So now I still have these. Who can go there? The scout can't go there. The defender could also not go there because the defender jumps over adjacent heroes and then stops there.
That is not great. Can we actually get to these monsters somehow? I could if I moved twice with the scout. That would work because No, if I moved twice with the fire tender. If I move with the fire tender, I jump over the fire to there and then I jump over this fire and then the scout could skip one empty spot and then jump over the fire tender. That would work. That would actually work. So, let me do that. Let me jump the fire tender here. There adjacent. And then I will jump over here again. And then with this one, I skip one empty space, jump over the fire tender, and I'm here like this. So now the scout has one action left. With that, I will defeat one monster.
With the defender, I will bolster and give one action to the scout and defeat the other monster. All right, so there's still one monster left, but that's the way it is. All right. All of these monsters that I had here, I will just turn them over, shuffle them, and then put them under the stack here. Okay, there we go. All right, now we have the monster attack. That's two fire. So, two fire will be gone. So, the first fire um we will put you at the bottom. We will continue our turn in just a moment. But now we have the time passes thing. So what happens here is now depending on the difficulty. I'm playing on the medium difficulty where you have to resolve the events that are there like all of the events but you also get to upgrade one hero for free in the time passes phase. And I think the best thing would be the fire tender can protect the fire quite well. So that might be an idea. So I will upgrade the fire tender.
Oh no yeah that's fine. I will upgrade the fire tender. And then we take we rotate that to the next or flip it to the next number and put it at the bottom of the deck. Okay, that was like the first day. Now we continue our turn. The next fire card will be removed by that monster. So you just do that like in the middle of your turn and then or in the middle of the round and then the fire tend like the monster will attack the closest hero with one damage. That's the fire tender, but the fire tender has two health so nothing happens. That's great. If a second monster would attack the fire tender, it would all reset again. So, um the fire tender would only be defeated if one monster has like two attack or more or if they are stacked monsters because they attack at the same time. Okay, that was that. Um we don't um have to get a new hero here because we still have four. So, we can't get the forager for now. That's fine. Okay, then we spawn monsters again. So, we have one right here. Then we have one right here.
We have one right here that stacks, which is pretty bad. And we have one right here that also stacks. Oh, this one would have moved one. And this one would also move one. Wow, we have three stacked ones here. Oh, that is pretty rough. I don't know how to deal with that to be honest. But let's see. Let's see what we can do. Um, the scout can move here. The fire tender can also move here. Um, who can move here? Uh, no one at the moment. That is a problem. Okay, I think I know what to do. It is not perfect, but with the scout, I will jump over the empty space and then in here. Um, and then I will do one damage. So with both of them, defender and leader, I will bolster and give one action each to the scout. So he can attack twice, two more times. With the fire tender, I will do the um I will do the uh forage action. That means I will take like the top card and put it into my hand. Same thing with the other one here. Okay. Um that means um that is all done. By the way, the effect says no hero heroes may promote. Um but I'm not doing any promotions anyway. All right. So now I shuffle all of these up.
Um, and then you put them here at the bottom like this. Okay. So this will now uh this monster will now attack the fire tender first. Do four damage to the fire, but the fire tender is at level number two, which means one of those will be prevented. So that's three. One, two, three. We put those here at the bottom of the deck. So we do a quick break because we have the knight passes. um light passes um phase again. So um I cannot do the promote action, but it says like it said like other effects can flip heroes. So I can use that effect here. I will which one the defender can like with one action defeat two monsters. That might be really good. So let me flip that one to the next level. Then we flip that to the two and put it at the bottom. So now we will continue the attack of the monster. able to do one damage to the fire tender. Fire tender has two health.
That's fine. So, we are good here. Wow, this is pretty rough. It's pretty rough. I'm losing like a lot of fire, but okay, let's see how we can continue continue this. So, first of all, we need to spawn monsters. Oh, it's Oh, it's not great. I need to like forage a lot. So, this one goes over here, but then moves one up here. This one goes here and also moves one. Oh, man. These are all stacked. This one will move. Go here and then move one. And this one goes here. So, check this out. We only have one fire card left. Oh, we need to do a lot of stuff here. I have a problem now because this one can only move uh leap over heroes. So, not in that direction where I would need him, but only in this direction. This one here first needs to go to an empty space and then leap over heroes. That's not possible at all. This one can only move like to an adjacent empty space which also doesn't do anything. And this one can uh just leave over the fire or go to an adjacent one then there. But these are also filled.
So I think I need to get one of these two out of the way first and then I can work with the fire tender. So I think that's what I need to do. All right. I guess I will move with the leader once here and then I will poof. I don't know. Uh, I guess I will just stoke once maybe. I mean, so I mean forage once. So if he starts here, he should defeat that monster first. Okay. And then he could jump over here and there. Or I could also like take these here. I think I will um forge with him and take another card into my hand. This is actually really rough. The last game I played was like I won easily, but here I'm really having issues. Um, oh, by the way, I didn't read that to you, but it said like flip one hero in camp from level two to level one if possible. Oh, right.
I should also do that. And then let me flip this one. Sorry, I forgot about that. So, these two are done with this one. I could defeat that one here. And that's pretty much it. With him, I can just move around a little bit. That is all pretty rough to be honest. I really can't do anything. So I guess with this one I will defeat this one here and then I will do another forage action. Ah just way too many monsters. Um this is an issue. But maybe I can do something to get something in place. You with you I could jump over here. That doesn't do a whole lot.
Not really. So instead, what will I do with you? Maybe give you a bolster action. Does that do anything? Not really. Yeah, then I will take two more forage actions. That's all I can do. All right. So, what did I do here? Okay, so this might buy me another turn, but it is getting really close right now. All right. So now the monsters attack. Let's start with this one first here. This one uh does four fire damage minus one. So that's three one. Okay. A quick intermission here. Um we can upgrade one of our heroes. Let me upgrade the defender again. And then we turn it to a one. Okay. So we might still be able to get there. Okay. One, two, and three.
And then one damage to the fire tender, which doesn't matter. And then here, actually, I would have not upgraded the defender. I would have upgraded the scout instead, I think. Yeah, because the scout can bolster the others with just one action. That's really strong. Okay. And then this one would um attack the fire twice. Oh man, this is not good. This is really not good. Um and then do two damage to the closest hero, which is the defender. Defender is hurt. Okay, but we have we are still surviving um with the forager. Uh I can now get the forager in here. Where do we get it? Here. We put him here because this one can jump over there. Maybe. Yeah, I think that's the best idea. Okay, that was rough. All right, let's spawn new monsters. But I think we lose now because we don't have four monsters here to actually spawn. So, this one goes here.
This one goes here. This one. We need to um have the intermission here again. So now the round would be over again. Um so we would put this one. We would we would now put this aside. But the issue is we need to continue our turn. We can't because we don't have any monsters anymore. So the deck is actually empty. Otherwise, we would have tried to survive until the end of the turn. We would have won. But we didn't quite because we don't have enough monsters to spawn anymore. These were an issue um that I couldn't do with the movement here. I could just couldn't reach them with my movement. Maybe you saw something. Maybe I missed something, but I just didn't see anything here. So, that was pretty bad. All right. Well, that concludes my pretty pretty unsuccessful um playthrough of Embers by Steven Araini. So, uh what do I think about the game? Um I like it. I think it's pretty good. It is quite interesting because you're trying to manage like that deck. So, it tries to take the idea of settle watch um for you to um try to keep the fire alive as long as possible. That works quite well. Um the game is it may seem strange for me to say that, but the game is a little bit on the easier side. Yes, I just lost. Um but that's like the other thing is that like the movement is very limited. And if you're pretty unlucky, like I was now that all heroes are bunched up on one side, um then it's kind of hard to actually defeat the monsters. If you have like one turn where you like three or four monsters
keep lying here, you can pretty much forget it. Um and that that's like what happened here. It was still quite close. And that proves with me almost not being able to move that it was quite close. Um that the game is rather on the easier side. But you can increase the challenge by going to the next difficulty which then will not allow you to upgrade these heroes and then the game definitely becomes harder. There's also a mini expansion here, the new guard. I have played with this before um but I don't quite remember what it does anymore to be honest because I usually play with the base game. Um let me just quickly check here. Are there like new heroes? Um, and there are also like battlecry cards now. And these are like objectives um that you have during the game and some of them are a little bit harder for more challenging plays. So if you like this game enough and you have played it quite often, I think it makes sense to include that expansion because it makes it um more challenging. Yeah. So it's a very decent solo game. I think it's designed quite well. It is definitely not one of my favorite button games. I think it works well. Um it doesn't have like quite the staying power like other games, but it's a cool idea. here. If you like what you saw today, um you can try to seek out a copy if you want to.
Well, and that concludes my playthrough of Embers. I hope you enjoyed this video and thank you so much for seeing the very end. As usual, I would like to thank you all for your support, especially want to give a shout out to my generous patrons. The biggest thanks go to Thagna for supporting me the highest tier. Thank you so much for that. I truly appreciate that. You can also support me by watching, liking, commenting my videos, subscribing to my channel, supporting me on Patreon, and joining my Discord server to hang out with me, my amazing community. Right. Thank you so much for watching. I will see you in the very next video on my Discord server. Take care everyone. Stay safe and cheer.