Flash Point: Fire Rescue - First Play!

10th August 2023

Gaming night round Simon's continued with Flashpoint.

So move aside make way for fireman Sam
Cause he's gonna save the day fireman Sam
Cause he's brave to the core
Sam is the hero next door

Victims to rescue, fires to extinguish, buildings to save. All in a day's work for the brave first responders in Flash Point: Fire Rescue, a cooperative board game.

---

What's in a game?
Board: Flash Point: Fire Rescue has a double-sided board and each side displays what is ostensibly an apartment.
The majority of the board is given over to displaying this apartment which has a 8x6 overlaid on top of it. There are also icons which indicate where doors may be found - some doors also display '2 cubes'.
Along the outside of the board are spaces to place rescued people (or not rescued people!), fire engine and ambulance tokens etc.
Finally a series of fairly discrete dotted red lines separate the board's map into individual quadrants.

Game board.

Markers: The game comes with a lot of differing card markers, all of which are round and many of which are double sided.

• Threat markers: These markers are double-sided, respectively showing either smoke or fire.

Both sides of a threat marker.

• Point of Interest markers: There are 18 of these Point of Interest (POI) markers, they are also double sided. One side depicts a '?' while on 12 the other side will show a victim, which could be a person or possibly a pet! The other side on the remaining 6 are blank indicating they are false alarms.
• Door markers: More double-sided markers used to track whether doors are open or closed.
• Action markers: These show a running individual in white against a green background. They are essentially a form of action point currency.
• Heal markers: These round tokens each display a red cross and are used in conjunction with one of the specialist firefighters; more on them below.
• Hazmat markers: These tokens depicts things like fuel cans and aerosol cans and are used to represent explosively dangerous materials in the game.

Hot spot tokens: These round tokens are noticeably smaller than the other tokens and they depict a flame against a black background.

Numerous different tokens and markers.

Vehicle tiles: There are 3 of these rectangular double-sided tokens, 1 side shows a fire engine while the other depicts an ambulance.

Fire engine and ambulance, ready to go!

Damage counters: Curiously, the game uses acrylic opaque black cubes to represent damage instead of card tokens. They're also much larger than the acrylic cubes you typically might find in a game.

Acrylic black cubes seem a left-field choice for component to track damage but it does the trick.

Dice: There are 2 dice in the game, a normal six-sider and also a eight-sided die.
If you noticed that the 2 dice correspond to the map's 8x6 grid; good spot!

That's column 1 and row 3 (I think?).

Specialist cards: There are 8 specialist cards, each one represents a different playable character which has their own unique ability and illustration.

• Action points: Each specialist also has individual action points (AP), most have 4 APs but one character has 5 and another 3.

Specialists.

3d firefighters: There's a plastic 3d miniature of firefighter in each player colour.

Sample of firefighter models.

With card tokens and tiles, plastic models and acrylic cubes, Flash Point: Fire Rescue is a bit of an eclectic mix of components and none of them would considered low quality.
The dice are plastic but roll well enough.
The standout components are probably the firefighter models. They look a little cartoony and stylised but I'm sure that's by design. They don't look like the kind of mini that is meant to be painted and meant to serve as playing pieces.

The artwork and illustrations on the game boards is straightforward and uncluttered which is a good thing as the playing area will become quite busy during play. The same can be said of art that can be found on tokens and tiles.
What looks like fully painted art is used on the specialist cards giving each one an individual high quality appearance.

The game's iconography is all self-explanatory and easily understood. None of it should prove a problem for players.

---

Player aid 1.

Player aid 2.

---

How's it play?
Note: Flash Point: Fire Rescue comes with 2 modes of play, a simpler 'family game' and a more rules heavy 'experienced game' mode. furthermore, the experienced game has 3 levels of difficulty.
This blog discusses the experienced game which essentially also incorporates the family version.
Setup
Board: Choose which side of the board to use, the 'front' side of the board is considered the easier side.

• ​Doors: A door icon (with the closed door side up) should be placed on all door icons that also display 2 cubes.
• Explosions!: A number of explosions should be triggered on the map, the amount is determined by the chosen difficulty.
  ​This is done by rolling the dice and placing a threat marker (fire side up) on the resulting space, then adding a hot spot marker to the same space.
  Each fire token then 'explodes', more on explosions below but basically, a explosion causes the fire to spread.
• Hazmat tokens: Also determined by difficulty, a number of hazmat tokens are placed into the burning building, again determined by rolling dice.
• POIs: Remove POI markers as required, then shuffle the remaining ones into a face-down stack. Roll the dice 3 times to determine where 3 POI tokens are placed face-down, they cannot be placed on a space containing fire.

Players: Players now choose a specialist card and take the fire fighter in their chosen player colour.
More hot spots!: Dictated by difficulty and player count, even more hot spot tokens are added the map on the board.
Furthermore a number of hot spot tokens are kept to the side to be potentially added to the board during the game.
Firefighters: Players now choose which spaces outside the building to place their firefighters, more than 1 firefighter may occupy the same space.
Vehicles: Players now choose where the fire engine and ambulance start the game.
First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
Flash Point: Fire Rescue uses a fairly typical turn order for a cooperative game. The active player takes their turn (Spending their action points.) and when their turn is over, the board activates and performs its automated actions. After that, the game progresses to the player to the left of the active player.
3 phases are resolved during the active player's turn.
Actions: During this phase, the active player now performs actions by spending the APs for their selected specialist. Available actions include:

• Change crew: Unusually for a cooperative game, if the active player's specialist is at the the fire engine, they may swap their specialist out for one that is currently not being used by spending 2AP.
• Chop: A firefighter always carries their trusty axe and can use it to break through doors and walls which can be useful to create shortcuts but can also possibly represent a risk. It costs 1AP to inflict a point of damage (represented by a black cube) on a door or wall. Usually when a door/wall takes 2 points of damage, it is destroyed.
• Extinguish: Firefighters can fight the fire! The active character may spend 1AP to remove an adjacent smoke marker from the board or spend 1AP to flip a fire marker to the smoke side.
• Move: A firefighter may spend 1AP to move 1 space orthogonally, they can also move through spaces containing fire markers but this costs 2AP per space. Additionally, firefighters cannot end their movement in space containing fire.
  POIs: If a firefighter moves on to a space containing a POI token, it is flipped to reveal whether it is a victim or just a false alarm.
  Move with victim: A firefighter may bring a victim with them when they move but it costs 2AP to move 1 space, furthermore, a victim cannot move through fire.
  Hazmats: Hazmats can cause explosions if caught in fire, so firefighters can try and move them out of the building before that happens. Moving a hazmat token is identical to moving a victim.
• Open/close door: APs can be spent to open and close doors, sometimes this is more beneficial than simply destroying them.
• Vehicles: If the active character is on the same space as a vehicle tile, they can spend APs to move the vehicle. any other firefighter on the vehicle can also move for free.
  Each type of vehicle also has it's own action which the active character may perform.
  Ambulance:  In the experienced version of the game, a victim is only considered 'rescued' when they are brought to a ambulance.
  Fire engine: The active player may spend APs to use a fire engine's hose, although this costs 4APs! It allows the firefighter to extinguish multiple fire and smoke tokens in a adjacent quadrant.
• Pass: The active player may choose to pass instead of spending all their action points. For every unspent AP, the player take an action marker. These may be spent on later turns to gain action points.
  A character may have no more than 4 action markers at any one time.
• End of player phase: Once a character has spent all their APs or passed to retain some of them, their turn is over and the game goes to the next phase.

Advance fire: In this phase, the fire will spread which is done on a basic level by adding a marker to the board and this can have several consequences.

• ​Roll the dice: The active player rolls the dice and will place a new smoke marker on the space as indicated by the result of the dice roll. However, depending on where the smoke marker is meant to be placed, it's probably not over yet...
  • Empty space: If a space has no smoke or fire marker and is not adjacent to one, simply place the smoke marker on the allotted space.
  • Adjacent to fire marker: If the smoke marker is placed orthogonally adjacent to a fire marker, immediately flip it to the fire side. Smoke is never adjacent to fire, it always becomes fire! This is called a flashover.
  • On a smoke marker: If the smoke marker is to be placed on a smoke marker already in play. Do not add the marker, instead flip the smoke marker already on the board to the fire side.
    Potentially, this can then turn any other adjacent smoke markers to their fire side!
  • On a fire marker: If the smoke token were to go on a fire marker already in play, it causes an explosion instead! The smoke marker is discarded and the explosion is resolved.
• Explosion: When an explosion is triggered, fire will expand 1 space in all 4 orthogonal directions from the point of origin, what happens will depend on what is in the space it expands into.
  • Open space: If the explosion expands into a empty space, it stops there. Place a fire marker on that space.
  • Smoke marker: If the explosion hit a fire marker, flip it to the fire side.
  • Fire marker: If the explosion hits a fire marker, it triggers a 'shockwave', this means the explosion continues to the next space and will continue until it encounters empty space or smoke marker.
    Closed doors and walls will also stop a explosion expanding, at least they will until they are destroyed.
• Damage: When fire expands into a space either via flashpoint or explosions, there can be an effect.
  • Barriers: When fire hits a door or wall, it does damage in the form of putting black cubes on it (Much like when a firefighter uses the chop action.), when a door or wall segment takes 2 damage, it is destroyed.
    Destroyed walls and doors (And also open doors.) do not stop an explosion expanding.
  • POI: If the damage hits a POI marker, that marker is destroyed, if it was a victim, that victim is killed.
  • Hazmat: If fire enters the same space as a hazmat token, another explosion originating from the spot is triggered. Exploding hazmat markers also add hotzones to the board.
  • Firefighter: If fire expands into a space with a firefighter, that firefighter is knocked down and moved to the closest ambulance tile.
• Hotzones: When the 'advance fire' roll targets a space with a hotzone marker, another advance fire roll is made after the current one is resolved. It is possible for multiple hotzones and thus multiple advance fire rolls to be triggered.
  Flare up: Additionally, when a hotzone is the target of an advance fire roll, it also adds another hotzone to the board, thus potentially creating a loop of destruction!

Replenish POIs: Once the advance fire roll and all resulting effects have been resolved, the game proceeds to the final phase of a turn - replenish POIs.
There should always be 3 POI markers on the board, if for any reason, there are less than 3, roll the dice and place a POI marker face-down in the resulting space. There are some restrictions, a POI marker cannot go on a spot with for example, in this instance roll the dice again until a appropriate space is rolled.
Repeat this until 3 POI markers are on the board.
Next turn: Once all the required POI markers have been replenished, the turn is over and play progress to the player to the left of the active player.

That's pretty much it for most of the rules, I've skipped some details that go into how some elements of the fire expanding are managed and also the special actions attributed to individual specialists but this about is the gist of it.

Endgame
Play progresses until 1 of the following conditions is met.

Losses: If 4 or more victims are killed, the players collectively lose.
Damage: If all the back cubes are placed onto the board, the building collapses and the players collectively lose.

Rescued!:If the players between them manage to rescue 7+ victims from the fire, they immediately win the game.

---

---

Overall
The board displays a recognisable location that firefighters move around to rescue people while it is inevitably filling with fire at a dramatic pace that causes explosions and damage in a race against time.
All of this makes Flash Point: Fire Rescue thematically a strong game.

On a basic level, in Flash Point: Fire Rescue characters navigate a landscape using action points having to balance the need to complete objectives - in this case rescue victims with the need to prevent or slow the spread of fire.
Players of cooperative games will recognise a lot of the mechanics employed here, it presents them with a classic dilemma that can be found in a lot of cooperative games.
There are a couple of unique elements here though.
Hazmat markers provide an extra risk and thus, extra facet to take into account: Should characters try and remove them from the board at the cost of less focus elsewhere, or ignore them in favour of concentrating on other risks?
The spreading fire also provides an unusual extra conundrum to face. While the spread of fire can be halted or even reversed, the explosions that get triggered cause damage that cannot be removed. The same is also true of hotspot markers.
Ultimately, it means that this is not about trying to put out the fires, I don't think that can ever happen and characters can only hope to hold them back long to rescue victims. It makes this a game of maximising effective use of action points and trying to gauge how much risk can be taken by ignoring fires.
As with many cooperative games, luck plays a not insignificant part here in the form of the dice rolls and this is just something the players will need to react and adapt to.

In terms of gameplay I found Flash Point: Fire Rescue a bit of a mixed bag.
The sense of being in a burning is pretty strong and the game has a genuine urgency regarding the spread of fire. It's actually pretty scary to watch as a single dice roll can lead to a series of events and explosions that wreak havoc and damage across the entire board.
But while the mechanics for the fire feel fast paced, the same is not quite true of player actions. Players typically get 4AP per turn and it can seem a little plodding at times, e.g., if a character has a victim they're trying to get out of the building - they'll get to move 2 spaces in their turn and that's it! It felt a little contrary to the atmosphere.
Although maybe that's the point, contrast the speed and danger of the fire with the relative slow actions of the firefighters to create tension? regardless of that, it made the gameplay feel a little 'off'.

I can't fault Flash Point: Fire Rescue and think overall it's a well constructed game but having played a fair few cooperative games over the years, I found the action point system a little uninspiring but that could simply be down to overfamiliarity. It didn't help that despite being mechanically solid and providing meaningful decisions to make, the game didn't quite gel with me. At the same time though, I'm going to reserve judgement on Flash Point: Fire Rescue. I want to give it at least another go or two.