Flash Point: Fire Rescue Review

 Flash Point: Fire Rescue

The alarm goes off! You throw your boots on, slide down the pole, and hop on the engine, siren blaring... As you near your destination you can smell it first, then you see it: smoke! The engine screeches to a halt and you pile out with your team... 

This is where the action kicks off in Flash Point: Fire Rescue, a cooperative game that puts you and up to 5 other players in the boots of a team of firefighters. Your goal? To rescue at least 7 victims scattered randomly through the burning building before it collapses!

Game board. It's double sided!

The Basics:
Setup is mainly taken care of with two dice (a red 6-sided die and a black 8-sided die), determining the locations of initial explosions, hazmat materials, and points of interest (potential victims). Each player then picks a specialist card with their own individual strengths and weaknesses, places their firefighter on a starting point, and the game is ready to begin!

Gameplay starts with a mutually agreed on player, who uses a set amount of action points (noted on their specialist's character card) to take any combination of actions, including moving through the house, extinguishing the fire, and carrying victims to safety.

Fire, Hazmat, and POI tokens

After each player turn, there is a roll to advance the fire. This can have the innocuous result of a little smoke cropping up in a nearby room, or a more mayhem filled result like fiery explosions that can take out victims, blow firefighters clear of the building, or even ignite hazmat containers, creating deadly secondary explosions!

Play continues around the table, alternating firefighter/advance fire, until one of three things happen:

1. 4+ victims are lost to the fire (players lose)

2. The building collapses due to structural damage (caused by a combination of explosions and firefighters chopping down walls; players lose)

3. 7 victims are saved (players win!) 

To make things more exciting (difficult?), victims are marked by 15 point of interest (POI) tokens. These tokens remain question mark side up until a player moves into their space, then identifying if it's an actual victim (10 possible) or false alarm (5 possible).

Difficulty:
Cooperative games are notorious for being extremely difficult, in some cases nearly impossible to win. Flash Point: Fire Rescue breaks that stereotype, providing varying levels of difficulty that can be chosen before the start of the game (Recruit, Veteran, and Heroic). These scale gameplay to provide the type of experience players are looking for, primarily by increasing the number of initial explosions and hot spots (board spaces that, when rolled while advancing the fire, will cause additional fire rolls). Recruit setup will provide a challenge with a fairly high chance of success, while Heroic will dump you out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Additionally, there is a Family version of the rules, which cuts out the more advanced parts of the game, such as specialties (everyone is a generic firefighter with no special abilities), hazmat containers, and hot spots. This is a very basic mode and works well as an educational playthrough, allowing for gradually increasing difficulty by adding individual mechanics back in as you become more experienced.

Firefighter meeples and specialist cards

Fluff/Flavor:
Flash Point is completely fluff-free. There is no story, no character background, just a team of firefighters saving faceless (literally) people from a generic building. There is, however, plenty of flavor to draw you into the game and, for me, the game and mechanics create the feeling that you are actually rescuing victims from a blazing inferno! You're the fire captain? Use your experience to command other firefighters around the board on your turn. Rescue specialist? Get those people out of harm's way faster with your extra movement action points! Each specialist card effectively gives every player a specific job they can complete better than another player's specialty, helping reduce the other stereotype of cooperative games where one (typically more experienced or outspoken) player takes over the game and just tells everyone else what they should do.

Recommendation:
Flash Point: Fire Rescue is one of those simple to learn, difficult to master games. With easily scaled difficulty depending on the audience, mechanics and imagery that work well to convey the theme of the game, and gameplay that provides close calls and twists that can force last minute changes to any plan, this is currently one of my favorite light, quick games. If you're looking for a new cooperative game for your group, I would highly recommend adding Flash Point: Fire Rescue to your collection!