Flash Point is an awesome cooperative fire fighting boardgame. Everybody takes a role: Fire Captain, Rescue Specialist, Generalist, Rescue Dog, etc. Every role has a special ability. The Veteran has a sixth sense about explosions and can dodge if they have a saved action point, and anyone in line of sight also has this ability. The Captain has two points that he can use to move other people on the board, in to or out of danger. The Structural Engineer can't fight fire, but can prevent the building from falling down and can also fix Hot Spots which help slow the spread of fire.
You get the idea.
The game was initially funded via Kickstarter and all of its expansions were funded that way. Each expansion added a map, some also added more roles to play.
My dear friends Dave & Kris turned us on to this game several years ago and I/we were rapidly hooked. It is definitely my favorite game. And to add to its awesomeness, you can play it solo! When it's just my wife and I playing, we typically each play two roles.
Another great thing is that you can adjust parameters to make the game more difficult. For example,Dave & Kris thought the game ended if three victims were killed, after my wife gave me a copy I learned that it's actually four. So we were handicapping ourselves and still winning.
The normal turn sequence is you spend your action points moving, fighting fire, carrying people to safety, whatever: each activity takes a certain number of points. Then you roll to advance the fire by rolling X,Y coordinate dice. If the square you roll is empty, you place smoke. If it has smoke, it ignites to fire. If it had fire, it EXPLODES, and bad stuff happens. Any smoke that is adjacent to fire ignites and turns in to fire, but does not explode. There are also markers with a question mark. These are POIs, Points of Interest. It might be a person, it might be blank. If it's blank, it's a false alarm, like a messy pile of blankets that resembled a person but still had to be checked out. If it's a person, then they need to be rescued and gotten out of the building to an ambulance.
If an explosion flashes across a POI or smoke on top of a POI ignites in to fire, then it's funeral time.
You win if you rescue seven people, you lose if four die or if all of the structural damage cubes are used and the building collapses. Explosions cause structural damage cubes to be added to the board when the shockwave hits an interior or exterior wall. Structural Engineers can remove them as part of their special ability (they're the only character who can repair damage), but only if there's one point of damage: once a second point is added, a wall is breeched and cannot be repaired.
The normal setup of the map is there are three POIs, three HazMat tokens, and three explosions. So you have lots to deal with as soon as the game starts.
Tonight my wife and I played a pretty tough scenario, sort of an expert level. First off, the map that I selected (Russet was working online with the observatory, juggling a schedule) had seven interior doors. I decided to randomly throw in three of them as locked. But you don't know they're locked until you try to open them! So it costs you a point, only to find out they're locked and you then have to spend two points to use your axe to bust through it!
So that was interesting.
The second part was that the fire was started by an arsonist! And the HazMat tokens? We had to remove at least three of them to outside of the building: evidence! You see, the HazMat Technician's special ability is to spend points to neutralize hazmat in-place, that way it doesn't have to be carried out and saves movement. But in this case, it
must be carried out because it's evidence. But worse still, remember the blank POIs? The false alarms? Well, they aren't false alarms in this scenario: they're more hazmats left behind by the arsonist!
It was a tough fight. The map in question has two entrances to the building somewhat close together, and it just happened that there were three hazmat tokens near one entrance! We put two firefighters at that one entrance had had the three pieces of evidence out amazingly fast. And in fairly short order we had the fire beaten down to manageable size.
And that was when I said something that translated to "It's quiet out there.... too quiet."
A corner of the board blew up big-time. We got two firefighters in to it pretty quick with a third on the way, and then it blew up again, knocking both firefighters out and to the ambulance. With some discussion we figured out a good move: the fire captain with his ability to order movement ordered the ambulance to move around the board with the two formerly unconscious firefighters to a breeched exterior wall: you can move through a breeched wall, giving us direct access to the thoroughly engulfed area.
We fought our way back in, but in the end, we were too far behind the curve. I think our strategy and tactics were as good as they could have been, it was just that the dice gods eventually noticed and smacked us down. The structural engineer fell further behind, then when we were down to our last two cubes, an explosion happened that killed the final POI and also collapsed the building.
Still, it was a good fight. As it turns out, the initial explosions blew apart two of the three locked doors, so they weren't much of a problem.
This is what the map looked like when everything literally came crashing down. If the photo displays sideways, clicking on it should display it in the proper portrait orientation.
(click to embiggen)
To be specific, the explosion hit at Red 5, Black 1, which killed the guy at Red 5, Black 2 and did one cube of structural damage to each of the two adjoining walls. And that was all she wrote. So we got the evidence, but lost the building and four more deaths were added to the arsonist's tally, plus injured or dead firefighters. I count it as a marginal loss since we accomplished one scenario goal, preserving evidence against the arsonist, but we lost the building and four victims.
The white firefighter was the Compressed Air Foam System tech, blue was the HazMat specialist, red was the Fire Captain, and green was the Structural Engineer. And yes, a puppy was one of the POIs that we rescued. There are also kitties, gold fish, and ferrets. Early edition were drawings, one of the expansions added photo-realistic people.
Adding more characters/roles doesn't necessarily improve your odds of winning the game, all it does is increase the time between when each character acts. The fire changes during and after each character's turn, so it takes a very flexible approach and a constant re-evaluation of strategy and tactics to win.
The game is available at finer game stores everywhere, also at Target and Barnes & Noble. The base game was, IIRC, around $40-45, the expansions were typically $15-20, and sometimes go in and out of print. They recently completed a Kickstarter that had enough funding to get some of the out of print expansions back in to print, so we'll see. That Kickstarter was not for a map, it was for a deck of cards that replaces the 'roll to advance the fire' mechanism, which should arrive by the end of the year, it promises to be interesting! They're also promising an expansion map Kickstarter in the near future: I can hardly wait to see what they come up with!
The maps are double-sided, so you get two boards to play on with each. The most recent expansions featured a cargo ship and submarine, a subway station and an airplane, and a garage and a bio lab. The initial maps were condos, apartments, a floor in a high-rise, etc.
LOTS of fun. And not difficult to learn: I taught it to a freshman in high school. I tend to steer young newbies towards the Generalist, it's the easiest role to play.
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