Wrath of Fire Mountain
2-4 players | Ages 10+ | 30-45 minutes
Publisher: Gamewright, 2024
Co-designer: Eric M. Lang
Art: Christopher Lee
Welcome to Fire Mountain, a primordial land of ever shifting terrain where tribes vie for control using the power of their dinosaurs and the blessing of the volcano. Each turn in Wrath of Fire Mountain, you roll dice Yahtzee-style, then take actions with the die results. Place and move your cave people, hatch a dinosaur, or try and win the favour of the volcano. Score points by gaining control of regions, and use the volcano to change those regions by shifting a row of map tiles. Use your dinosaur friends to take special actions and go for the win!
One of my earliest game design ideas was to make an area control game on a “slide puzzle” board. So not only are you trying to win majorities in regions, you can also change the regions themselves. I pitched the first version of this way back in 2011 on my first ever trip to Essen. Another version placed third in the 2014 Hippodice design competition. However, there was always something incomplete about the design, and multiple publishers passed on it. I put the idea aside until Eric M. Lang and I decided to collaborate on a design years later. As Eric has made some amazing area control games, it felt only natural to suggest it to him. We quickly became absorbed in trying to make the idea work. Eric’s intuition that we needed to tap into the way it felt to play Risk as a 10 year old proved right. The game was never meant to be a family euro, but a dice chucker!
Links
➚ Wrath of Fire Mountain at BoardGameGeek