Crown of Emara Review

Sire, the people are revolting.

Tell me something I don’t know! Have you seen the state of the houses I built them?

No Sire, I mean they don’t like you.

I’ve built all the houses in Emara!

Yes, but you never fed any of the workers. You don’t have any bread do you?

No! All I have is this collection of erotic lit-er I mean books.

That might just work…

Crown Of Emara

Players: 2-4
Time: 45-75 mins
Designer: Benjamin Schwer
Artist: Dennis Lohausen
Publisher: Pegasus Spiele


Crown of Emara is sort of the forgotten Euro from last year’s Essen. There’s always one mid-weight game that doesn’t have the big name designer attached that gets missed in the flood. Crown of Emara, with its classical art style and generically uninspiring cover and premise, was this year’s loser. Which is a shame because in all other ways it is far from generic.

Crown of Emara boards

Emara is such a prosperous kingdom it is spread over two, modular, boards. One is the countryside where you’ll get resources, and the other is the city where you’ll… get other resources! There are a lot of resources in Emara. But as always it’s how you get them that’s important.

Emara is all about movement. Each turn you’ll move one of your towering meeples around the segments of the board it calls home, triggering the action of the segment it stops on. One hammering out resources from the countryside, one spending madly in the city. The two boards are giant rondels. But the game dramatically squeezes your movement options to great effect. You trigger a movement by playing one of your cards to a slot below your player board.

Crown of Emara playing card

Each slot offers a different move and you will use each once in each round (of 3 turns). So each round is a question of what order, and which meeples, to move, making sure you get the right resources to the right place at the right time. You will definitely make a 1 space move, a 2 space move and a 3 space move. Which lets you access most spaces on either of the boards, but never the same one twice. It’s hard to get back to the space you start on. And that’s all before you try and ensure every move is used efficiently.

What is so brilliant is the arc that emerges as you play. The first couple of rounds feel utterly free, primarily spent collecting resources and investing in a mix of cottages (which makes the resource gathering more efficient) and maybe a character or two from the city. Both of which requires the right mix of resources and your meeples in the right spaces but it’s not so important what bonuses you get so long as you start getting some. But you quickly realise that now you have these helpers, you need to be getting the most out of them, and that always requires setup and positioning and suddenly that free and open youth has narrowed to a driven and focussed adulthood. One that demands a careful mix of the game’s ludicrous 8 resources.

Crown of Emara score track

Yet you are never forced into a single path. You may have chosen your tools but how you apply them remains up to you until those final rounds where mid game plans are rushed to completion. The game even forces you to explore multiple axes. There are TWO types of victory points: people points, for making the people happy, and house points, for making sure they actually have somewhere to live. Your final score is the lower of these two markers, resulting in a perfect tug of war over your attention. Yes you’ve got a good system going for earning the people’s favour but is now the right time to pivot to housing? Which of these two points do I most need to earn right now? It’s an almost impossible question to answer accurately at any point and that makes it constantly compelling.

The result is a game that for all its fastidiously dull Euro trappings features more groaning and laughter than a dad joke convention. Each round is perfectly possible to fully plan. You reach for goals and figure, ok if I do this first and then move here then I can afford to do that BUT oh no I forgot this and everyone else laughs as you release this strangled sigh, because you are all in the exact same boat. Then someone executes their first action and takes the character you wanted and you scream at them. There is not a huge amount of player interaction, but thanks to unique characters and some spaces with costs and rewards that change as players take them, there is enough to spice things up. To the extent that sacrificing efficiency in order to take a cheap bite out of other players plans is a worthwhile move.

Crown of Emara costs
Pay either 2 wood, 1 stone, 2 wheat or 1 pillow

The cards add a further wrinkle. Remember those? You’ll play one each turn to your player board to make a move? But there is also an action on the card that you also get, in addition to the movement action. Most of these are simple get-a-bonus-resource cards. But the others fundamentally mix up your round. There’s the card that gives you a discount on people or cottages, the bonus city action or the extra 1 move. When you draw one of these cards into your hand, it forms the lynchpin of your strategy for the next round. The little bit of randomness introduced by this small deck of action cards each player has keeps things from degenerating into a pure planning exercise. You can plan your round, but not much further beyond the broad strokes, which is just what you want.

Crown of Emara Player Board

It is easy to overlook Crown of Emara if you haven’t had chance to play it. But it is perfect mid-weight Euro fair. I have not had a game of it that has not been fantastically challenging and difficult to predict. The puzzle is a joy and only made better when shared with friends, whose efforts you absolutely care about. It hits the balance between interaction and personal puzzle, luck and predictability, square on the head… or perhaps the crown.

Rating: Crowning Achievement

Our copy of Crown of Emara was provided for review by Asmodee UK. You can get a copy for £44.99 RRP from your local hobby store.

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