| 👨👩👧👦 | Players: 2-5 |
| ⏳ | Time: 20 minutes |
| 🎂 | Ages: 8+ |
| ⚙️ | Mechanisms: Tile placement, push your luck |
To flip or not to flip, that is the question!
Captain Flip is a family weight tile placement game for two to four players, where as captain you’re trying to recruit the best crew for your absolutely reputable and not at all dodgy ship.
On your turn you simply draw a character tile from the bag, making sure only to look at one side. You can place it on your board as is, or take a risk and turn it over to use the character that’s on the other side instead.
When placing a tile on your board, you have to fill from the bottom upwards. There are four different designs, each with slightly different bonuses on offer. As soon as any player has filled up four columns the game ends, and whoever has the most coins wins.
While we’d worried that it might be a little too simplistic, it only took a single game to win us over. Every turn has something going on. Not only are you deciding if you should keep the tile you drew or not, you’re working out where to put it as well.
There’s a lot of variety in the character tiles and many of them interact with others in terms of scoring, so you’re constantly hunting for just the right ones to fill up your ship. Sure, not every tile you get is going to work that well, but the puzzle of trying to make the best of each one is a lot of fun.
There’s a really good mix of immediate and endgame scoring on offer too. Certain tiles give you points right away, but are then useless for the rest of the game, while others don’t offer anything until the game is over, but if placed right can swing the game in your favour.
It’s one of those rare games that we think we could teach to pretty much anyone, but there’s enough in it to keep us interested as well. You wouldn’t think that something so simple could be so tense and engaging, but it really is that flippin’ good!
You can see this post on Instagram here and if you are interested you can find out more about the game on the PlayPunk website!
The copy of Captain Flip used for this review was provided to A Tale of Two Meeples by VR Distribution
The Boardgame Detective 