Emberfall — Light the flame, steer the wind, let the fire hunt

What is Emberfall — Light the flame, steer the wind, let the fire hunt

Emberfall is a turn-based puzzle played on a nine-by-seven field of grass, stone and villages. You never attack anything directly. You spend a torch to light one tile of grass, pick one of the four wind directions on the compass, and press BLAZE. The turn then resolves: every flame steps one tile downwind, the monsters take their move, and anything standing in fire or walking into it burns. A flame lives two turns and leaves ash behind it. Ash cannot be lit again and stops fire dead, so every lane you burn is a lane closed for the rest of the floor.

Each floor hands you three torches — four once five or more monsters appear — and a Nightfall bar that is simply your turn budget: the first floor grants sixteen turns, and the allowance grows with the monster count. Burn every monster to climb; let Nightfall empty, or lose your three lanterns, and the run ends there. Villages deserve twice the care, because a brute that reaches one leaves a ruin and costs a lantern, and your own fire destroys it just as happily. The Daily Trial is three floors on a field seeded from the date, identical for everyone.

How to play

1. Tap the compass arrows to set the wind — it costs nothing and you may change it as often as you like before the turn resolves.
2. Tap a grass tile to spend a torch and light it. You may light several tiles in the same turn, but Undo only refunds the last one.
3. Press BLAZE to resolve the turn: flames advance one tile downwind, monsters move, and anything caught by fire dies, leaving ash behind.
4. Burn every monster on the floor to climb. Keep your three lanterns and finish before the Nightfall bar empties, or the run ends there.

Strategies that work

• One torch is not a bonfire: it is a two-tile front that walks exactly one square per turn, in a straight line, then dies into ash. Light the first column of a row with an east wind and it sweeps all nine squares of that row over nine turns. Pick the busiest lane.
• Monsters burn when a flame lands on them and when they step into one, so you rarely need to hit a moving target. The brute always walks toward the nearest village, which makes its next square knowable: put the burning line there and you save a lantern and a monster in one move.
• The shade takes the move that keeps it furthest from the nearest fire, and stands still if that is safest. Light upwind of it so the flames push it against stone, ash or the board edge, then close the last gap with a second torch. Chasing a shade with one flame never works.
• Torches are the only way to start a fire and ash never lights again. Burn a wide swath too early and you can end the floor with one survivor, no torches and nothing to ignite — from there you only watch Nightfall run out. Always keep one torch back for the last monster.
• Kills in one turn stack: the first is worth a hundred times the floor number, the second twice that, the third three times, so a triple is worth double three separate kills. The clear bonus is larger still — sixty per torch kept, forty per village standing, twenty-five per unused turn.

A little history

Emberfall was written for puzzle-me.com and has no older ancestor to borrow from. It sits in two puzzle families at once. The first is fire propagation on a grid, the kind of cellular automaton physicists have used since the early 1990s to study how a front advances through fuel and how burnt ground halts it. The second is pursuit and evasion, where the question is not how fast you move but which ground you force the other side to cross. What is unusual is that you never steer the fire — only where it starts and which of four directions it takes.

Frequently asked questions