In Frank West and James Tomblin’s latest title, fully clothed animals travel between forest clearings and initiate battle in order to restore their chosen power structures to the woodland. Hmm… where have I heard this before? Ah, I remember — it’s Defenders of the Wild!

I kid, I kid. To be fair, Emberleaf bears only the most superficial of resemblances to Root. I wouldn’t dare invoke Foucault to describe its depiction of biopower or sexuality, for one thing. On a somewhat less onanistic spectrum, Emberleaf is an optimizer’s board game, jam-packed with sequences of actions that spool into other actions, resources that must be spent in precisely the right order, and conflicting objectives that each award their own variable numbers of victory points. It’s an intriguing, persnickety, and sometimes gummy title, either a deeply flawed masterpiece or a mess with pretensions. I’m still trying to determine which.

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