FLASH POINT: FIRE RESCUE
Indie Boards & Cards - 2011
picture from BoardGameGeek.com
Flash Point: Fire Rescue is a purely cooperative board game. There’s no backstabbing, no individual winners, no points tallied at the end. You either win as a team or fail as a team. It’s not the first board game designed this way but it’s the one I’ve played the most. My first experience with cooperative board games was with Pandemic, which plays similarly to Flash Point.
Pandemic pits the players, as you can imagine, against a global pandemic. Actually, there are 4 viruses or diseases spreading around the world. Each player takes control of a different specialist. Maybe you excel at helping other players move around the board or maybe you can share information more easily, that sort of thing. A player takes their turn using action points to move and hopefully remove virus markers from the board. When they are finished it’s the board’s turn to act. You draw cards from a deck which tell you were to place new virus cubes. There are also event cards which may cause additional cubes to be places or maybe no cubes at all! If you get too many cubes in one region you have an outbreak, which causes the disease to spread faster and wider. if you’re especially unlucky you could chain together outbreaks and then you’re in serious trouble. The players win if they are able to eradicate all 4 viruses. The game wins if you run out of cubes or if the deck of cards depletes.
Flash Point operates in a very similar fashion. Each player assumes the role of a fire fighter. There are two modes of play you can use - one where everyone is just a generic fire fighter with no special abilities and in the other everyone has a unique role with specific actions they can take. I prefer the latter because I think giving a player special actions makes them feel important and can help keep their interest in the game. The former may cause one player to assume control of the game in an attempt to optimize play.
This leads me to my biggest issue with cooperative games, it’s very easy for an experienced player to push others aside and take command. Everyone wants to win and to win often requires performing the optimal move, so I completely understand why someone might try to tell others how to take their turn. However; player autonomy is important. Without it why play with your friends at all? Discussing moves as a team is encouraged, of course, but one player taking control is a problem.
Between these two games I’ve always preferred Flash Point because it was subject I could wrap my head around. I didn’t know what it was like to be part of a pandemic but I could very easily imagine being in a house fire. Of course now I know exactly what being in a pandemic feels like but even still I think I prefer Flash Point mostly for reasons I would normally look over in other games. Pandemic uses cubes to represent the various diseases whereas Flash Point uses tokens with graphics and miniatures. Don’t get me wrong, I love games with cubes. Many games I’m going to talk about in future posts are mostly just cubes you move around. Both games have very similar gameplay so really the pieces are the tie breaker and, lets face it, moving around a little fireman and flipping fire tokens is more fun to look at than a pawn and some cubes.
Flash Point: Fire Rescue is often game I’ll break out for people who haven’t played a modern board game outside of Settlers of Catan. People love the cooperative aspect, it’s so different from the board games we grew up with. Much like my biggest reason for loving Betrayal at House on the HIll, Flash Point: Fire Rescue creates an amazing narrative in your mind. It’s easy to imagine you’re a fire fighter actually running in to the building and doing heroic deeds. Or being so brazen to smash down a wall only to realize later that had you just gone around and used the door maybe the building would still be standing. I have so many fun memories with this game it’s impossible to choose just one, which is all you can ask for in a board game.