Fresh Plays: Emberheart + Clinic

• 00:00:00 Introduction
• 00:00:45 Fresh Plays
  • 00:00:57 Emberheart
  • 00:15:35 Clinic: Deluxe Edition
• 00:33:30 Signoff

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Hello and welcome to Kickin' It Creative. I'm your host, Candace Harris, and I am kicking it by myself today, and that is because I want to tell you about two games I've recently played for the first time that are all about saving lives. One of them is a game called Ember Heart. It's about rescuing dragons, and the other is Clinic Deluxe, where you're building a clinic and trying to treat patients and run the whole shebangabang. So today is just gonna be all about some fresh plays about saving lives. Emberheart is a game from Mindclash Games. Mindclash is very famous for their heavier games like Voidfall and Tercarion and Anachrony, those kind of games, but they also have this Mindclash playline, and it is lighter games that are still like their style. Um I think the first one was Astra, and then they had Ironwood. Astra's like about building constellations out. I actually thought it was pretty cool, but like nobody talks about it. And then Ironwood was the previous Mindclash play game, and that's a two-player asymmetric, kind of card-driven game that plays sort of like an LCG, but you're doing stuff on the board, and it's really, really awesome. Again, I think it's just because there are like just so many games out in the wild these days, but that's another fantastic game. So I was excited to hear about Emberheart, which came out at Spiel Essen 2025, and Mindclash hooked me up with a copy so I could try it, and I finally got around to trying it. So Emberheart is a medium weight worker placement game that plays in about 90 minutes, and it's gorgeous, number one, but it is the type of worker placement game where you are going to be taking turns, placing your workers, and then after everybody has passed, you're gonna like resolve everything starting from the bottom left space of the board. And the goal is to have the most glory, and there are different ways to get glory or victory points. Each player is gonna have their own dragon board, and the dragon boards are double-sided, so they're pretty cool, they're pretty snazzy. One side is kind of standard, one side is slightly asymmetric, really colorful art. So you'll get your board and you'll also get crest tokens. So your main like player piece are these crest tokens, but you also have a dragon, and your player board is basically gonna let you level up different abilities for your dragon, which is cool, and it'll give you some like bonuses whenever you place a stack of workers with your dragon. Also, all the dragons are super cute, these like screen printed wooden meeples, they all have their own flavor. During the game, you play five rounds, and you're gonna be collecting cards, you're gonna be getting dragons, you're gonna be getting what are those people called? Heroes. There's a heroes guild where you're gonna be able to get heroes, and the heroes need to be attached to a dragon. That's a pretty neat thing in this game. So you have spaces on the board where you're gonna be getting dragons and cards and other helpful resources. There's a space where you can get more workers. So let's talk about the worker placement in this game for a second. It's not a game where you have just like a set of meeples that you're gonna place one at a time. Instead, you have your crest, your player marker, but then you also have these cardboard discs that are different characters. One of them that you start with a bunch of, they're called grunts. Let's see, they kind of have like Rodney's likeness a little bit. But you have all these grunts, and when you're doing your worker placement, you're going to place a stack of workers under your crest token on the corresponding space of whatever action you want to take. Each action space has a slot for five pieces to be placed. The game is for two to four players, but it gives you options because if I place my crest on the three space, that means I have to put three worker cardboard workers, like either the grunts or they're also special workers that are these like cardboard tokens. And so let's say I only had grunts, I would put three grunts underneath my crest and put it on the three space. Then someone else could later put two grunts or whichever tokens under their crest and be on the two space. But each action's location on the board has spaces where you're gonna place a stack of these like worker tokens under your crest. And sometimes you can also add your dragon in there and trigger the dragon's special effects. The thing about it is each area of the board only really has a limited amount of things you can get, is mostly cards. So if four players go to the heroes guild, only three are actually gonna get something. So you have to kind of like think about which spot you want to like how much do you care about being first to draft something? Or do you want to just put one worker and see if you can get something for cheap, more or less? That's up to you. There is a consolation prize if you don't end up actually getting whatever you set out to get. So that's that's cool. But it gives you some like really interesting decisions. Besides the grunts, you have other special workers, you have scouts, rangers, and wardens. And one thing I didn't mention about the grunts is they're doing the grunt work. So after your action resolves, if you were able to like get something from that location, those grunts are gone, they are discarded. Whereas if you get some of these like specialized tokens, you get to keep them. So there are different locations on the board, like the left side of the board is where you can place scout tokens, so scouts or grunts, and then there's an area called the mountain, which is pretty special. Uh, and it's it look it's kind of different. I really, I really like that because like the the spaces on the left side of the board are just cards. I mean, they're cool and they're gonna give you stuff, and that's awesome. But like the mountain is where it gets a little different, and I'll talk about that in a minute. But there's an area called the tavern, that's where you're gonna get more tokens, and again, like when it's time to resolve, whoever is in the highest space is gonna get to pick something first, then whoever's second highest gets to pick something second, etc. etc. Also, you can go to a space multiple times. Like, maybe I want to get a lot of worker tokens, so maybe I go and I place twice on the tavern. I don't know. Maybe, maybe that's what I want to do. That's cool. And then you have an area called the poachers camp. This is an area where you're gonna be able to draft dragons. Dragons come in different colors, similar to the hero cards and similar to the what are they called? Preserve cards. Yeah, the preserve cards. Because in order for your hero cards and your preserve cards to work, you need to have a dragon attached to them, a matching dragon, too. And there are some wild dragons, so that's the kind of stuff you get on the left side of the board. And then in the mountain, this is a different deck of uh like beefier dragons. When you place your crest at the mountain, each player who's there, or shall I say the first three, are going to get a card from the bottom of the mountain. Then, if you want to go up a level, there's like a little turn order track. Then in that order, only two players are gonna get something. And you have to sacrifice one of your wardens. So you have to have a warden, like a grunt's not gonna work for that. You know, you need to have the properly trained worker to climb up this mountain, and then the top of the mountain, only one player is actually gonna get something, and that is also an opportunity to bump up on your tracks that are on your player boards, and these tracks are gonna give you stuff when your dinosaur is placed. Oh my gosh, your dragon, not your dinosaur. When your dragon, I hope I didn't say dinosaur a bunch of other times. When your dragon is placed, so for example, on the red track, when you get to the first level, but when you place your dragon, also, it counts as a single grunt. And as you work up there, it'll count for more grunts. So you can go to spaces with your dragon and have to put less tokens underneath because the dragon actually counts, it's helping with the work. Then you also have the blue track, which is gonna help you get gear. Gear is how I think is how you can swap out grunts for better tokens. So when you go to place one of your tokens and you spend a gear, you can change out what type of worker you are placing on that space. So that's what that track's gonna do. And then the green track is gonna help you reduce your marker on the flame track. At the top of the board, there's this flame track, and during the game, different things you're going to do are going to increase your flame value, you're gonna try to decrease it, and the way it works is at the very end of the game, you are going to possibly score points based on where you are. You want to have low be low on the flame track, and you want your your opponents or the one of your opponents to be very high because you get a number of glory points based on the difference on that track. So your dragon can help with that, and there are other things in the game that are gonna help with that. Then you have the preserve section, and you have these these little preserve cards which are cute, and you have to attach a dragon to them. That's another way that you can bump up on the tracks. Then you have this section, the garrison, where you need to kind of meet a requirement to be able to take a card, and the cards are great, they give you points and they help you bump up tracks. Another cool thing is there's an area that has these aid tokens, and when it's your turn, you can either place a stack of worker tokens with your crest somewhere, or you can take one of these aid tokens, and each one does something a little different. One's gonna let you decrease your marker on the flame track, uh, one is gonna let you be first player for the next round, which is nice in a worker placement game. The other one's gonna give you gear tokens, but these are first come, first serve. So there's a whole timing thing of like, hey, when do I place my stack of workers to get what I want from, you know, whichever area, whichever kind of card or dragon, versus ooh, I want to snag these tokens. And then above that, there's an area where you're gonna put raid cards, and one of them will get taken away, but raid cards are basically like, hey, for each red dragon you have, you have to lose one of your worker tokens. Those kind of effects. But the person who takes one of the shields gets to choose which one of those raid cards goes away. They're not like too punishing or anything, but it's a really lovely game. So it's like you play five rounds, you take turns placing your tokens, you're getting more resources. There are two spaces in the middle of the board where you can get more gear tokens, because again, that's gonna help you upgrade your existing tokens. You can go to the tavern and get more tokens, but it's really fun because you can you can kind of see like, hey, like if I'm later in turn order and there's a space open, I might be able to get something super cheap in terms of like how many worker tokens I need to put under it. And there's also like you get points from getting up those dragon tracks on your player board. I I really just like how you have to, the cards from the heroes guild, how you have to like attach them to a dragon, like they're riding this dragon. I think that's really cool. It's a like a nice touch. And one like minor thing that I really appreciated graphic design-wise, is that for the hero cards, in order for them to score at the end of the game, you have to have a dragon attached. And the victory point marker is on the banner that needs to connect to a dragon banner. And that was something that thought was just like a nice little touch because there's another type of card in the game where the victory points are somewhere else indicating, like, oh, a dragon does not need to be attached in order for this to score points. I think like the graphic design is really cool, the art is fantastic and it just flows smoothly and has like really fun work placement decisions, like lots of groans at the table, lots of fun stuff you can do. That mountain location, figuring out like how high you might want to go. Do you want to keep getting cards? It's great to go up there because, like, maybe in one, you know, from one placement, you could get three dragon cards and bump up on your dragon tracks. But you have to get rid of your warden workers. So there's just lots of like fun decisions from having different types of workers and the flexibility to bid however many that you want to take an action, and also the special power of your dragon, like when you place your dragon with your token. So Ember Heart is like really, really, really, really solid, like for a medium worker placement game that plays in 90 minutes. I don't really think I hear many people talking about it. That's one of the reasons I wanted to mention it, especially because I finally played it. But back in at Essen, I I watched a demo of it for like 20 minutes and I knew it looked cool, and so I'm glad to have finally played it. So that one is Emberheart, where you're saving and rescuing dragons, and then the other game that I played recently that I've had forever. Forever. Not forever for real, but like for a while. But it's a game called Clinic. This is the Clinic Deluxe edition, though. I feel like I was like intimidated by this game for a while. This is designed by Alvin Viard, who hot take I think is a very like underrated hidden gem of a game designer. He has a like a really cool style where he always has some kind of like stress track or something, like it tramways is really, really good. I still have not played Small City yet. That's next, that's next on my uh Albin Vyard list. When I reached out to Alvin about Small City, because I was like printing an insert for it, and I was like, oh, I'm missing some of these like fun little mini expansions. And I was like, hey, do you have any more copies of any of these? And then I found out that he was doing a new crowdfunding campaign for a new version of Clinic, and I was like, oh snap, this is my this is my signal to finally play that game. And again, like I I don't know why I was so intimidated by it. Well, I know when you look at the game board, it looks crazy. It it looks a little a little bonkers, but it's it's not. It's like there are literally in this game three actions, like the rules are not that crazy, but it is a complex puzzle. It is a puzzle, man oh man, and it's so thematic. So Clinic is published by Albin's studio AV Studio Games. Also, Capstone is the distributor in the US. So, and I'm pretty sure it's still available, but Albin is dropping a new like big box version of it on crowdfunding. This, I think it actually dropped today, April 7th. I'm recording this on April 7th. I was like, let me let me play Clinic so I can finally see how it is, and like, you know, maybe share some thoughts while it's on crowdfunding. And as I started reading the rules and opening it up, I just fell in love. Like the theming and the like the humor in this rule book is just so good. It's it's really, really, really, really cool. So the game is played over six rounds, and players are competing to build a medical clinic. Like, hey, there's we live in this town that needs to treat all these sick people, but we can't agree on how the clinic should work and what it should look like. So we're gonna make our own and we're gonna be competing for popularity. Popularity is victory points in this game, and it's a tile placement game, and it's it's quite a spatial uh uh logistical puzzle of a game because everybody starts with their own player board that represents like a if you're playing on the easy side like I do, like a four by three grid of spaces where you're gonna be able to build out these modules, like different rooms in your clinic. You start with, I think it's the psychiatric, a a service hub, and then you have a treatment room and you have a supply room to start. In order to treat patients, you need to have a treatment room adjacent to one of the different types of service hubs. There's a psychiatry hub, there's a cardiology, ophthalmology, orthopedics, and neurology. And you play with a different number of them depending on your player count. And I'll just say up front, like this is a really good one for solo, but I did get a chance to play two players with my good friend Ben from Table Scraps, and I loved it even more. I I was like, oh, this is like this is a great solo game, and it is, it is, but I I think I like the multiplayer a little more. But you play over six rounds, each round, each player is gonna perform three actions. So the whole game, you have 18 actions to increase your popularity as much as possible. And the way the game flows is each player has six action tokens, two copies for of each action. One is you can build stuff, two is you can hire staff for your clinic, doctors, nurses, orderlies. Three, you can admit patients. If you look on the game board, it's basically just a big player for those for those actions with the popularity track and a time track going around the perimeter. And what's gonna happen is everybody's going to simultaneously pick one of their action tokens, put it face down, and then simultaneously reveal them. When you reveal whichever players chose the build action, they will build. Building happens first, and it'll just go in turn order if multiple players picked build. Then it would go to whoever picked higher in turn order and then admit patients. And after you take each action, each single action, new patients are going to spawn on the board. Not spawn. They're arriving, they need help, they're booking appointments. So let's talk about the doctors and the patients for a second. You have different colored like meeples for the doctors, and you have different colored cubes for the patients. So a white cube is basically saying this is a this patient has a very mild condition. And then when you a yellow cube is slightly worse, orange is even more worse, and then red is like danger if you don't treat them. You might lose them, and that's a thing in this game, so be careful. But then you have doctors, and you have white, yellow, orange, and red doctors. And the way the game works is by default, white doctors can only treat white cube patients, yellow doctors can only treat yellow cube patients, etc. etc. So the red doctors have the most experience, but they don't want to bother treating, you know, just somebody's little cold or cough or whatever. The way you mitigate that is with nurses. So each treatment room can hold two doctors and two patients, but any number of nurses. So if I have, let's say, a yellow doctor and I would like to treat an orange patient, if I have a nurse in there that I can buddy up with that doctor, I can treat the orange nurse. So it's like each nurse lets you offset the level of the doctor in comparison to the patient. And it goes both ways. Like even if I have a red doctor, like I said, they don't want to waste their time dealing with a white patient that has just some little bobo illness, you know, they they want to work on the the red patients. So so yeah, so the nurses are gonna help with that. You can also hire orderlies, and if you put an orderly in your supply room, it's gonna help cut back on your expenses, which we'll talk about. And then when you go to admit patients, you're gonna be able to take patients from the appointment area of the game board, and those come out randomly, as do the doctors. So each player's gonna like perform an action, then you're gonna refill each slot of the appointment area for the patients with new patients, then you're gonna take another action, yada yada yada. So building is a big part of this game. You have these different modules, you have some special ones, you have the treatment rooms, the supply rooms, and then you have your service hubs. And there are lots of little rules, it's not like too crazy, like you know, like once you learn it, you don't have to keep looking it up or anything. So, for example, a service hub. Each building can only have one service hub on each floor. And I say each building because you could technically start multiple buildings and like kind of have a medical campus like Ben did, but you also have multiple levels to your clinic. So there are rules where you can like build above, and then there's adjacency of like, hey, if I'm building a different service hub upstairs, if I build the treatment room directly above the supply room downstairs, it's adjacent, so I can use that same room. So there's just placement rules like that. You can build gardens, and gardens are gonna help you make more money when you treat patients because they're looking out their window at their beautiful garden. You also have to deal with parking cars. Oh, so every time you take a you recruit, you hire a doctor, nurse, or admit a patient, they each come with a car, and you're gonna need to park that car somewhere. And you can also build parking lots that are gonna help you park cars more efficiently throughout the game. And you can also buy build conveyors, which will let you move through the hospital faster. Because after everybody takes their actions, the next thing that's gonna happen is everybody's gonna simultaneously move pieces around. So if you just, you know, hired a nurse and a doctor, you're gonna want to put them in a room. And every space, once they come into your clinic, every space that you move, it costs one time. But if you have these conveyors, you can kind of like move through faster. It's almost like a portal. Think of it as like the doctors have rollerblades on or something. So you have ways where you can make your movement efficient, but by the end, after you've moved, you know, these different patients into different treatment rooms and the doctors, you're gonna tally up all of that time you spent and mark that on the time track. You wanna be efficient with your time because at the end of the game, you're gonna lose popularity based on where your marker is on the time track. So you're gonna want to do stuff to spend less time moving people around. Like you can build other entrances, you can build a helipad and basically like fly people in to a higher level on your board. If you have the, I think it's the triage special module built, uh, you'll get minus three on your movement costs, which is cool. But then we do business after that, and that's when we actually get to treat patients. And you get paid most for treating the sickest patients. I think a red patient, you get like $32 when you treat them. And also when you treat them, you get to move their car, remove a card car from your board because they went home. To treat a patient, you have to have the matching colored doctor in a treatment room, or have a number of nurses to offset the doctor to match that patient. And again, the treatment room needs to be adjacent to the service hub and also a supply room. Then you're gonna make money and you're gonna stash that money below your player board because next you have to pay expenses. You have to pay for your staff, you have to pay for maintaining all the modules and your garden and everything. So then you're gonna pay some money, your expenses, hopefully, have money left over, and then you can buy popularity, or I guess like make a commercial or advertisement to get more people to come to your clinic. It's very puzzly in that you're trying to manage your money pretty much besides some endgame scoring, the only opportunity you have, not the only, but the main opportunity you have to gain popularity is during this business phase when you treat patients and you have to think about like, hey, how much money do I want to spend to buy popularity versus how much money do I need to make sure I have to spend to take actions? Because everything you do during the action phase, aside from admitting patients, costs money. Like hiring doctors and staff costs money, building things costs money depending on which floor it's on. So you have all these like really, really cool decisions, but the general flow of the game, like I said, it's like three actions. Once you understand the placement rules, I don't know, it's it's not as nearly as complex as I thought it was gonna be. And it helps that it's so thematic. So then after you know, you treat your patients, you make some money, you finish your business, there's an admin phase. And at this point, you're gonna get some new doctors that you'll be able to recruit recruit in the next round. The patient pool kind of cycles out. And then if you have a lab, which is a special module, and you have a doctor in there, that doctor is gonna level up twice. It's in the that doctor's in the lab getting smart. And so if you have a white doctor in there, guess what? At this point in the game, that white doctor is coming out orange, a lot smarter. But for all of your doctors that aren't in labs, they get a little dumber. Maybe they're not dumber, like maybe they're like tired or something like that, but they downgrade. So that's another thing you kind of have to keep up with. It's like if you're just working a red doctor over and over, they're not gonna stay red, they're gonna become orange, and then later they're getting tired, can't get their work done as well as they usually do. So that's another thing you just have to like factor in. The other super cool thing about this game, there are all of these extensions or expansions that have tons of different modules, and I'm so excited to like explore the modules. Like, they have therapy dogs, they have CEOs, they have temp workers. Have you ever seen a pregnant meeple before? This game has it. It's like there are all these, like there's coffee, there are ambulances, all these different modules that kind of change up the flavor of the game. And I think that's so cool. And uh like I it's one of those things where I just want to like try them all. And I read on BGG that someone was saying, and I think actually it's included in one of the later expansions, but randomize your cards, so you can kind of pick which modules you want to play with to kind of make each game feel a little bit different. Sort of surprised that I like like kind of went gaga for this game, like just from reading the rules and playing it solo was yeah, I think I played it solo one and a half times because one time I didn't have time to like finish the game, but I kind of went through the motions and it's it's just fun, you know, like it's like city building games when you were starting from nothing and then you're customizing what you're building. And do I want to have two orderlies? Because orderlies are gonna reduce my expenses during the business phase. Do I want to build another building? And how am I going to park my cars and such that I can make that work? And the building, in order for that to score at the end of the game, you it needs to be functional. So you need to have like a treatment room and a supply room and all that good stuff. So anyway, Clinic is super cool. Now I need to track down the other expansions that I don't have. I haven't even checked out the new version crowdfunding to see if there's anything different. But I just wanted to talk about both of these games, Clinic and Emberheart, because I don't think they are getting enough love. Like, there's some love for Clinic because it's been around for a while, but I'm like, man, like Lacerda fans would probably love this because it's like crunchy and thematic. So yeah. So that's pretty much um all I have today was just to talk about how to save dragons and lives in your clinic. Thanks for listening. For those of you watching this on YouTube, if you haven't already, I would love it if you like and subscribe to my channel if you like what I'm doing and want to support me. If you're listening in podcast format, uh just keep listening. Thank you. Leave a review or whatever, tell a friend um anything to help spread the word about what I'm doing here. But thank you so much for listening and hope more people check out Ember Heart and Clinic.