Players: 1-4
Playing Time: 10-30 minutes
The Components
Ablaze! comes with just two sets of bits:
The Hexes: These are all high-quality linen-textured cardboard tiles. The majority of them show burning forest labeled 1-6 on the front and firebreaks labeled 0 on the back. The fronts also have a variable number of spaces for pawns, from 1-3 (which is correlated to the fire size). Besides the main forested tales, there are also an airplane tile and a volcano tile, which are used for the second game.
The Pawns: A total of 48 plastic pawns in 4 colors: red, yellow, green, and blue. (I've always thought the shape of these pawns was kind of neat because it's unusual; it's turns out that they're all-around unusual because they're made from wood and plastics that are considered "unrecyclable". Pretty cool.)
Overall the components of Ablaze! are good quality. Beyond that, however, they're pretty simplistic. I've given them a high "3" out of "5" for Style. They're slightly above average.
The Gameplay & The Game Design
Ablaze! contains three games. I'm going to cover each in turn before giving my final thoughts on the game as a whole.
Wild Fire!
The object of Wild Fire! is to put out fires by laying down strings of firemen and keeping them connected to the best water sources. Like all of the games these general ideas are fairly abstracted, but you can see the themes in how the game actually plays.
Setup: The game starts with 4 tiles creating a small blaze in the middle of the table.
General Structure of Play: On your turn you draw a new fire tile, which is numbered from 1-6. You then place it where the fire is currently burning hottest. This the cleverest mechanic in the game. Basically, you look at blank spaces around the existing tiles and you count up the intensity of fires adjacent to each blank space. Whichever place is the hottest gets the new fire tile.
Afterward placing the new tile, you can place from 1-3 fire fighters on a single tile that still has spaces for pawns. However, you can never place more firemen, total, on a tile than it has "empty" (non-burning) hex sides. Among other things, this means that once a tile is surrounded by other fires, the fire men can't get there any more--though some may have been placed previously.
Scoring: At the end of the game, each player adds up the value of the tiles which are connected by a series of adjacent firemen. They then divide that total by the value of the lowest number tile that they're on that's at an edge of the fire. (This is what represents the water being brought to the fire.) The person with the highest score wins.
Variants: There are considerable variants for this game. The "firebreak" variant lets you place a "0" firebreak tile rather than placing a tile and firemen. It gives some additional control toward deciding where the fire goes. The "dry season" variant gets rid of all the "1" tiles, lowering the variance that can be caused by "good" draws of low tiles. The "solitaire" game sets up some rigid criteria for how firemen must be placed, and is both challenging and interesting.
The Game Design
Wild Fire! is a game that's both original and tactically interesting.
I already said that the rules for how the fire spreads were very clever. I think they do a very neat job of representing how a fire might genuinely move. Several of us were afraid that it might be too "mathy", but almost from the start we could all tell almost immediately where new tiles went.
There's also a fair amount of tactical play. It's really easy to lose control of whether you can connect your fire fighters up to good water sources, and there's a constant fight between taking high-value "5" or "6" tiles and between placing your firemen on "1"s or "2"s to get better scores from your existing pieces. Combine that with the fact that a fire can quickly overtake a tile, making it impossible to place more pieces, and there's some real tension in the gameplay.
There is still a fair amount of randomness in the game, thanks to those tile draws. However, the "firebreak" variant goes a long way toward increasing the tactics despite the randomness, and I'd suggest it for almost any game. I'm less convinced by the need for a "dry season", but if you're particularly random averse, it's there.
Overall, Wild Fire! is a very high-quality and thoughtful game for a 15-minute filler. I've given it a full "5" out of "5" for Substance.
Volcano!
The object of Volcano! is to put out fires by dropping water loads on them--with the most honor usually going to the player who finishes the job.
Setup: 36 tiles are laid out, with each touching at least two tiles. Then, one toward the center is replaced with the volcano.
General Structure of Play: On his turn a player chooses a row of tiles bounded by two gaps (or board edges). He then flies the plane over the row, dropping one pawn (water load) on each tile that has a space for a pawn.
When a tile is completely watered and lying toward the edge of the board, it's given to the player who has the most pawns on it--or the current player if there's a tie. In addition, any tiles which are isolated from the volcano are given to the player with the most pawns on it--or the current player for a tie.
Scoring: At the end of the game, each player counts up the value of all of his tiles. The player with the most points worth of tiles wins.
The Game Design
Generally, Volcano! is a much more simplistic game than Wild Fire!. You can try to set yourself up for good moves, but there's sufficient chaos in the game (because so much happens between your turns) that the results can be pretty uncontrolled. Nonetheless, when it gets to your turn, you can sometimes spot a very clever move that will give you lots of points--usually by isolating an area that you've already seeded with your water loads.
This game also plays very fast. I think our two games lasted 5-10 minutes each.
I don't have anything against Volcano!, but I'm not particularly excited by it either--other than the fact that it's very nice to have another game you can play with the exact same pieces as used in Wild Fire!. I've thus given Volcano! a "3" out of "5" for Substance.
On the Run!
In this last game you try to get poor innocent animals to safety as a wildfire spreads.
Setup: Four tiles are laid out in a rhombus.
General Structure of Play: As with Wild Fire!, in On the Run! the fire spreads every turn, but the rules for how it does so are slightly different. This time the fire spreads to a "flash point", which is adjacent to one of the hottest (highest value) hexes on the edge of the fire. Since you're only looking at a single value, there's considerable more choice about where a tile goes.
Then the active player either places animals (1-3 on a hex) or else moves animals (all of them from one type of hex, based on hex values), to adjacent hexes. Animals can also move off the board, and that's largely the point, to get animals to "virtual hexes" adjacent to the board where the fire doesn't spread to them. One trick: there's only space for one animal in each virtual hex.
In addition, animals get killed (returned to the player) if they can't move when a move action is taken for them or if the fire spreads into their virtual hex. These burned animals can be placed again later.
Scoring: The game ends after all the tiles are placed and all players are done moving animals. Each player earns a number of points equal to his number of animals who have moved to virtual hexes minus the ones which are unplayed.
The Game Design
On the Run! definitely feels to me like the most abstract of the games, a bit of a brain-burner as you try and figure out how to best position your pawns for the endgame and when to pull them off the board altogether.
Though you have a bit more control over the tile placement than you do when you use the basic rules of Wild Fire!, it's still somewhat limited; when a high number tile goes down, it has to be entirely surrounded before you can start placing around lower numbers. In this regard, the overall movement of On the Run!'s fire can actually be a bit less controllable than Wild Fire! Nonetheless, there's still some ability to push fires toward your opponents and away from your own pawns.
I think it's overall a fairly strong entrant, even though the theme comes across a bit less than with the others, and thus I've given it a "4" out of "5" for Substance.
Relationships to Other Games
The "Wild Fire!" game was previously published in Germany as Feurio!, while the "Volcano!" game was previously published in Germany as Vulkan! The "On the Run!" game has never been published before.
I was a bit amused when playing On the Run! by the loose thematic resemblance to The Downfall of Pompeii, another Mayfair Game where you place pawns upon a board as a disaster occurs, then try and get them away in time.
Final Thoughts
Having played all the games, I' struck by the fact that they seem to be of somewhat different styles. I thought Volcano! was a bit simplistic, but it'd probably play best as a family game. Similarly, I thought that On the Run! would be enjoyed the most by those looking for thoughtful abstracts. As primarily a Euro player, Wild Fire! appealed the most (though I also think it the strongest of these games within their own classes).
Beyond that, I'm really impressed by the fact the Heinrich Glumper put three games together in this single box, and that they all play quite a bit differently. If Ablaze! had just contained Wild Fire!, it would have been a great release. Having additional games beyond that is just gravy.
As a result, I've given Ablaze! a full "5" out of "5" in Substance, with the caveat that I think it'll appeal most to players who like Wild Fire!, which is a sort of middle-ground game: not too simple and not too complex. Players looking for particularly complex or simple games might not get quite as much bang for their buck.
Conclusion
Ablaze! contains three abstracts. Wild Fire!, clearly the best of the bunch, is a terrific, original filler. There's also a lighter game and a more thought-provoking game that non-Euro audiences might prefer.
