Burning Down the House: Flash Point Fire Rescue
An apartment building has caught fire. Multiple explosions have occurred inside. At least seven lives hang in the balance somewhere amidst the inferno. It's up to your team to rush in, fight the raging fire inside and carry the people out alive. You'll encounter a few obstacles along the way such as hazardous materials set to explode should the fire get too close, structural damage that can allow fire to travel quicker through the building and potentially bring the building down on top of you, and the chaos of locating the survivors inside amidst the thick smoke and flames. The longer you take, the bigger the fire could get, the weaker the building, and the more victims the fire might claim. Choose your operative, put your skills towards the task, and work together to save all those inside and escape safely.
Flash Point is a cooperative gaming experience brought to you by Indie Boards & Cards. It plays anywhere from 2-6 players and can be played as a solo experience by controlling more than one firefighter on your own. The base game comes with a double sided board featuring two different structures as well as both family rules and advanced rules so that you can cater the difficulty level to one that your group is more comfortable with. Each level of difficulty provides a challenging and tense scenario that puts your team to the test.
The board is set up in a grid like structure with two included dice to represent the different coordinates that can intersect on the grid. In the initial start of the game, using the advanced rules, a number of random explosions are set to occur inside the structure. When explosions are assigned, a Flame token is placed in the initial spot (as well as a Hotspot token). From there, you place Flame tokens horizontally and vertically beside the initial Flame forming a plus sign. Once all of these Explosions are placed, you roll to place additional Hot Spot markers, Hazmat tokens, and Point of Interest tokens. Point of Interest tokens are question marks that appear on the board and must be traveled to in order to flip them and see what they are. They can either have a blank side (being a false alarm) or they might contain the image of a person who must be carried or led out to an ambulance to be rescued.
After the initial setup, all players choose their specialists out of a varying selection of fire fighters. There's the Fire Captain who can help move other specialists an additional amount of spaces each turn, the Hazmat Technician who can quickly dispose of dangerous hazardous materials before they explode, the Medic who can treat people and get them moving quicker to the ambulance, and many more (Imaging Specialist, Driver/Operator for the Deck Gun, CAFS Firefighter, Generalist, Rescue Specialist). Each role has their own unique strengths and abilities and some also come with major drawbacks. Players can change roles during the game as well by moving out of the structure and ending their turn in the Fire Engine.
After initial roles are chosen, all players work together to determine where the Fire Engine and the Ambulance get parked as well as which specialist should be the first to take their turn. Strategy makes a major difference in this game, because after each player takes their turn, they must then "Roll for Smoke" with the result of the die roll determining where a smoke token will be placed next. If Smoke is placed somewhere by itself, it's not such a big deal at the moment, but any Smoke token that exists next to fire will flash over to fire, and any Smoke token that gets placed on top of fire will cause a new explosion. Explosions can do violent things like blow doors off of hinges, blow holes through walls, and create new avenues for fire to travel. Shockwaves can even occur sending fire down an already lit path creating a violent reaction. If a Firefighter ever gets hit by fire, they are knocked down and start their next turn at the Ambulance. If a Point of Interest ever catches fire and it is flipped to reveal a person, that person dies. If you lose more than 3 victims, you lose the game. If the structural integrity of the building exceeds the amount of damage cubes in the game, you lose the game.
Flash Point is such a thrill to play and can be an absolute blast when you have a team of individuals utilizing the strengths of their characters and working together to complete the objective. But like many strategic cooperative games, it can suffer if you have an "alpha player" involved who directs what everyone else should do on their turn and takes the fun out of you playing. With the right crowd, this will hit your table quite a bit and prove to be an exciting and challenging coop experience. Indie Boards & Cards has put out multiple immersive expansions for this game that feature new maps, new characters, and new mechanics that build off of each other and continue carrying the franchise into a new direction.
Flash Point: Fire Rescue gets TWO HOOVES from WYLD Gaming and is a definite part of our MANE Collection when it comes to cooperative board games. As it has been out for a while, it is a very affordable game to purchase, as are the expansions. We love Flash Point so much we even bought Matchbox/Hot Wheel Firetrucks and Fire Rescue Ambulances for the game as well as a collection of toy Fire Fighter figures, although the ones included in the game are really neat. The Extreme Danger expansion is highly recommended for its custom miniatures for each character as well as a bunch of new exciting additions.
"Did a solo run through of Flash Point Fire Rescue tonight. It started off so nicely, then a fire flashed over, killed a civilian, ignited the last hazmat, caused an explosion through two hotspots creating another fire and another explosion and brought the whole building down on top of the entire squad and two more victims that were right at the door. And I only needed one more victim out to win... love this game!"