Flashpoint: Fire Rescue

The first time I came across Flashpoint (called Záchranáři in Czech) was at the Czech yearly board game convention Deskohraní. It was one of three games I played there with random people (the others were Pandemic and Dorn), with a man and his little daughter in this case. The game was explained to us by an attendant and then we decided to try it on our own. Me – a seasoned gamer, them – casual players, we took on roles of three fire-fighters who had to rescue trapped persons from a house in flames. My co-players had to leave before we finished the game and I couldn't find anyone interested in the game at the time, so I moved on to another table with another game. Flashpoint, however, stayed in my head.

As I already mentioned, the players take roles of an emergency rescue team of fire-fighters  The goal of the game is to rescue trapped civilians from a building in flames before the it collapses. The fire spreads quickly between each player's turn so the more people play, the more they need to be careful or their fire-fighters might get caught in fires before their turn is up. Each turn, a player has a number of action points (AP) that he can spend on movement, extinguishing fires, opening and closing doors and carrying a victim. There is not enough APs to cover every emergency, so players must coordinate their collective actions to, for example, douse fires so that the next player may move to a point of interest which might turn out to be a person in need.

this is how it starts

These points of interest are places that the fire-fighters must investigates. They are randomly placed on the board and may be a person or a false alarm. The players must get to the tile with the PoI marker to flip it over and see if it is a victim of the fire or not. The victims must be carried outside of the building (or if playing with the advanced ruleset, to an ambulance) and once the 7th person is out, the game can be considered won according to rules. Doesn't matter that there are 10 people in total...

However, it is possible for the players to lose the game if there are 3 casualties or if the house collapses due to the fire damage. As the fire spreads, the chance of a dangerous explosion increases. I already said that the fire spreads between each player's turn. The player rolls two dice (a 6- and an 8-sided die) to locate a place on the rectangle board where the fire appears. If the tile is empty, smoke appears which doesn't hinder the movement but makes the tile flammable. When a tile with smoke on it is rolled, the smoke token is flipped to show fire and every smoke token on neighbouring tiles flips as well. On the other hand, when a tile with fire token is rolled, the fire explodes and  immediately spreads to all four neighbouring tiles, following the rules mentioned above (flaring up all the places covered in smoke). If an explosion hits a wall, a damage marker is placed on it. If all of those markers are placed, the house collapses.

I must say that it happened to us only once during our several plays. We weren't especially slow and we were a turn away from winning the game - the last survivor was standing right in front of the door, waiting to be carried outside the next turn. An explosion happened in another part of the house and it collapsed on us. We were probably just too careless about the fire in the kitchen and focused on other things. But it was our first time playing with the advanced rules and that had a noticeable impact on the game.

this is how it ends

See, there are two versions of the rules. The "family version" is good to play with casual gamers, your parents (this game passed the parents test ;)) or simply people new to the game. It has the core rules of the fire spreading, movement and rescuing process. However, once you are comfortable with them, I highly recommend incorporating at least some of the advanced rules. They include hot spots that ignite very easily, hazardous materials that need to be carried out of the house before they cause an explosion, additional rules for the movement of the ambulance car and the fire truck (along with spraying a part of the house with water) and specializations for the fire-fighters.

After several plays there are some things I'd like to point out. I like the cooperative aspect of the game (I’m not a highly competitive person, see A Touch of Evil), I like the original theme, the idea of having different specializations for the players and I love the scalable difficulty (perfect into every occasion). What I don't like is the somewhat muddy rules that need VERY careful reading (the explosion rules or transporting the victims), a huge load of various markers, tokens and stuff that's just not very sightly, and that there are only two maps - two houses and... well, the game just turns out quite same-ish. I'd imagine more maps, maybe even a DLC map (Flying Frog production have free DLC scenarios for their games) or something. I know there are expansions that try to play with the map layout (one of them is a two-story building) but it just seems to me that it's not enough. This game could use some kind of a modular board to keep it fresh for longer time.

I'm still gonna recommend it to anyone as a great gateway game (for its family version of the rules and non-fantasy setting) or as a fun and not too crazy game that doesn't take too long to finish - we were usually done in about 90 minutes.

An interesting fact at the end - the Czech version of the game was partially funded by the National Fire-fighter Association. Even the professionals agree that the game is good.