Indie Boards and Cards IBCFPF2 Flash Point Fire Rescue Second Edition Board Game

Product Information

Flash Point: Fire Rescue is designed to encourage you to carefully manage the risks you take. Sure, you can run to that point of interest and find out if it’s a person, but if the fire spreads to them before your next turn you’ll just end up burning with them. I think this works well with the theme of a profession in which, by its very nature, you risk your life. A firefighter is no help if they run into an inferno and just become another body to save, but if they use the tools available to them to create a safe avenue then they can save lives, though perhaps not everyone. Continuing with our example from above, it’s now time for Yellow to roll the dice and see how the Fire advances. The Experienced Game takes just a bit longer to set up because there’s a lot more going on. It has three levels of play: Recruit, Veteran, and Heroic, with Recruit being similar in difficulty to the Family Game, and “Heroic” being (as you might imagine) very difficult. I played at the Veteran level just to get a good sense of how much more difficult the game becomes.

Flash Point Fire Rescue, from Indie Boards and Cards, is a thrilling game of fighting fire, rescuing victims and team work from the game designer Kevin Lanzing. For fans of Pandemic, you can expect similar mechanics (the spreading of disease/fires, player roles) but different since no one player can carry the team. The two-sided game board featured in Flash Point gives it an added replayability factor that Pandemic falls short on. Is Flash Point Fire Rescue easy to learn? Yes, the family mode is very easy to grasp but strips out maybe too much. I would suggest starting with the full mode unless your kids haven’t tried any similar cooperative games. Do you focus initially on putting out the fires, letting the victims wait until the fire is more contained? Take Action– Spend Action Points, moving, putting out fires, chopping down walls and door when necessary and, of course, rescuing victims. What else would a firefighter be doing?Flash Point is extremely easy to learn and teach. The game comes with rules for a simplified version of the game, which makes it easy for even young children to learn. It was designed to be a family board game, and it is one of the very best cooperative games for families in existence. There are only ever three POI (Point of Interest) tokens on the board at once. You need to rescue them before the fire engulfs them.

Before you bring the heat in Flash Point, there are some turn actions you’ll need to know. It’s vital that all players work cooperatively to save all the family members and Fido before it’s too late! Game SetupFire tokens spread, turning all adjacent smoke tokens into fire tokens, combine this with hot spots, which make you roll additional times when you roll them, and the house fire can soon get out of hand. Ultimately if you manage to save enough people from the fire then you win the game, however the game is lost if the house falls down or if too many people die in the blaze. Amy’s Final Thoughts But it’s Yellow’s turn first and, although she’d love to be able to assist Red, there’s just no way she can get near him. She decides to proceed with her original plan to save the kitchen victim, and spends her 4 AP as follows: After a player has taken all their actions they roll the dice, these give you a grid co-ordinate in the house. Should this co-ordinate be empty then you fill it with smoke, should it have smoke in it then the smoke turns to fire and should there be fire in it then there is an explosion, causing fire to spread in four directions.

The sequence of events is designed to create suspense and tension in the game, and it succeeds remarkably well. The firefighters move towards the victims, putting out fires along the way, only to have new fires pop up again. The firefighters must perform the right mix of actions to: Sometimes dice rolling takes away from a game’s theme, but not in Flash Point: Fire Rescue. Fires seem to spread randomly when they get out of control and the dice simulate that very well here. Feel free to chat, coordinate your starting locations, and plan strategies. It’s a “cooperative” game, remember? So you all either sink or swim together. To get started, place door markers, threat markers, and people of interest according to the number of players and set positions shown in the rulebook. The theme is where we had very different perspectives. My wife and both daughters find the thought of a house fire quite terrifying. While my youngest daughter was still willing to try the game my wife and oldest daughter weren’t interested in trying Flash Point at all. My son just doesn’t find the firefighting theme that interesting.The expansions to Flash Point add new boards, new rules and new characters as well, including a rescue dog - aww! The Spice Our 79 year old firefighter loved the game, but thought it went on too long (the Experienced game lasted just about 50 minutes). I think he would have considered a 30 minute session to be perfect. Flash Point: Fire Rescue falls under the broad category of “Euro Game”, and the narrower sub-category of “Cooperative Game”. A Cooperative Game generally pits all the players against a “system” of some type. In this case, the players represent firefighters working together to battle the fire (the “system”, in this case) and rescue the people inside. Simple enough, right? We’ll see… I would definitely recommend the Experienced version for older kids (13+), adults, or experienced gamers. I want to bring particular attention to the specialist cards. The illustrations are on fire, so to say. The art is very detailed and shows realistic firefighters in their unique roles.

In keeping with the “family game” theme, Flash Point: Fire Rescue Basic game can be set up and ready to go within minutes. The map board shows a bird’s eye view of a house, as if you’re looking down from above with the roof removed. It is a two-sided map, with one side designed to be more challenging as it has fewer entrances to the house (only 2 external doors vs. 4 on the other map). The part which may be a bit odd for some people is that when a point of interest is removed from the board it is then replaced by way of a random dice roll so there are always 3 on the board at each time. This means there is potential for a point of interest to appear in a room you just rescued someone from. I can’t explain how this fits thematically but it’s just the way it is. Flash Point: Fire Rescue is a thematic cooperative board game designed by Kevin Lanzing with the help of firefighters. [1] released in November 2011. [2] The objective is for players to work together to rescue people and animals from a burning building before it collapses. Since the initial release of the game several expansions have been published, which add additional scenarios for players experience. These include fires in a high rise building, a two-story house, and a submarine. In other cooperative board games, you’ll have a player who handles more responsibility than others. Flash Point makes sure that everyone plays an equal role in saving the day. Your special abilities may be lifesaving in one round, but completely useless in the next.Games are rated for how salty (competitive), tasty (replayable) and spicy (original) they are. The Salt To get victims out of the house you need to travel to one of the three points of interest tokens on the board. When you do you can flip them and determine whether it’s a victim or simply nothing. The fire can disorient fire fighters and I imagine a blank token is like a random noise being interpreted as a cry for help when in reality it was made by the building as it burns. If you do happen to find a victim, you must carry them out of the building and to the ambulance to save them. Unfortunately, this is tiring work and consumes 2 action points per move instead of the usual 1 action point.