Tabletop: Flashpoint!

Today’s Tabletop is Flashpoint: Fire Rescue! It’s a heavily-themed cooperative game that lets us pretend that we are sexy firefighters who have to take time away from posing for our sexy calendar to fight a sexy fire.

 

Discover more from WIL WHEATON dot NET

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

14 thoughts on “Tabletop: Flashpoint!”

  4. Really glad y’all got around to this one. It’s one of my favorite co-op games.

  5. Great episode! Good timing with the Flash Point:Tragic Events Kickstarter as well. Watching this convinced me to go all in on the Captain pledge level, can’t wait to play it myself!

  6. You guys got owned pretty hard by that fire. I think it’s Seth’s fault for making the meth lab also a frat house.

  7. We played the “Second Story” expansion (two floor layout) last night. Managed to get five victims out before the building collapsed. Good fun, though. We had a decent spread of roles but just were really unlucky that all the fire was concentrated in one area so kept exploding and damaging walls.

  8. Inspired me to bring this to our game night and play for the first time in a while – in fact, after totally walking through the intro game since everyone but me was new, we played again on Recruit level – the first time I ever made it past that ridiculously easy “family” game setup and got to play the full game. As the commander, I basically stood in one place and kept extinguishing the fire that kept reappearing in front of me while moving everyone else around the board, but despite losing three victims and having one hazmat explode, we managed to eke out a win. Great game.

  9. Oh, and the Urban Structures expansion adds a specialist who can repair damaged walls. So useful!

  11. Some comments from someone who’s played the game a few dozen times. You may have been screwed by the dice, specifically the black one. If you take a look at the black die included in the box set, it is probably defective. Opposite sides should add up to 9, that one most likely does not. A whole lot of them that were included were defective, every single one that I’ve seen were bad. I’ve replaced mine. A later map, Dangerous Waters, adds a submarine which adds a d8. I believe that die was made correctly.

    You made one definite mistake, and maybe one other. The definite mistake was spending a point to turn fire to smoke. If it’s adjacent to fire, it immediately reignites and turns back to fire without delay. It’s a waste of an AP. Either extinguish it, or don’t do it and bank the AP. Kelly should have been banking more APs, which makes the CAFS very formidable. It looked like there were multiple smokes next to fire in the sped-up sections, I’m not certain.

    Also, under the Frequently Asked Questions of the rules, if you run out of Fire markers, the game doesn’t end. It didn’t happen in your recording, and I’ve never seen it in actual play: you’ll probably lose due to structure loss before that happens. And you gave yourself an additional handicap under the Unmarked Hazards rule where a blank POI becomes a HazMat: it says that if you use that rule, DO NOT deploy the initial three HazMats! That might have crippled your game. We’ve never used that rule: we view a blank POI as a little bit of breathing room, like a pair of boots next to a pile of clothes that resemble but aren’t a real body.

    Strategy critique: you might have done better if you had done both actions of the Driver/Operator instead of banking points on your first turn. A better way to look at the tactic for that role is to view the initial die roll, if it doesn’t hit well right off the bat, as an initial target for the x,y coordinate and which die you can re-roll to improve. Since you can re-roll both dice once, choose the one that is most likely to walk the value to the range that you want for best effect. Then re-roll the second die if you need to. But I think you should have rolled both your first turn. Another possible strategy would have been for you to take your first turn, Kelly saves her 3 AP, Clare either casts Reveal All and been ready to switch roles on her next turn or saves her 4 AP, and Seth can run in as he’s not in the same quadrant and stays out. Next turn, Wil does another double-douse on that quadrant, Care and Kelly can run in like meth-pumped fiends having known exactly what fueled the fire in the building and be absolutely amazing fire fighting fiends with an abundance of banked APs. That quad would be much easier to handle at that point, and Kelly and Seth could more easily have handled that fully-engaged central core later.

    Another strategy is the need to break up long lines of fire because of the way that shock waves propagate when explosions occur, especially when POIs or HazMat sit at the end of the string. If you can get a firefighter in there with just enough points left to extinguish one square, that might be enough to prevent catastrophe, and that will provide an opening to get in there the next turn and widen that breach and break that maelstrom.

    You had a decent mix of starting characters since you were restricting yourselves to the basic box set. Obviously the structural engineer being able to repair single cube structural damage and remove hot spots, but not fight fires, is a tremendous boon from one of the early expansions. The fire captain and the generalists are my personal favorite roles, and it’s also easy when you have two or three people to play two roles apiece. I’ve played the game solo playing three or four roles. When you want to get really crazy, get the Dangerous Waters map and try the submarine, or the expansion that has the airplane. Or the expansion that has the science lab with barrels of toxic waste. I WOULD NOT recommend the paramedic role in a three player game as they pay double the cost to extinguish fire: that can really cost you.

    A final strategy tip is when starting with the Fire Captain, he should be the last player since there’s no advantage to his two Radio points if he’s the first to go in the game. Let the other people develop a little, then get the captain involved. And wait until you see the Veteran and the Rescue Dog!

    The Urban Structures expansion added the Structural Engineer and the Brownstone and High Rise maps including elevators, the 2nd Story expansion added a Villa and a Hotel with two stories and portable ladders and stair cases, Honor & Duty added a Subway Station and Airfield map, Extreme Danger gave us a Laboratory that can be three stories with an optional attic or basement and a Garage that is also extensible with huge hazmat potential, and Dangerous Waters gives us a Merchant Ship of standard dimensions and a Submarine that is a 3×16 grid and uses a d8. Each expansion changes the rules a bit, sometimes the rules apply only to the maps of that expansion.

    And a compliment. BEAUTIFUL minis! I can’t paint worth crap, those figs were gorgeous! I would pay money for minifigs like that.

    VERY fun episode, I really enjoyed watching it and will be recommending it to friends!

  12. Wil,
    One thing to consider for future shows. My eight year old daughter asked me what b@kk@k@ meant after watching this show. That is definitely not a PG-13 joke. It’s one thing to have bleeped out profanity, which I’m fine with, but there are some things that I don’t want to have to explain to my elementary school kids. Anyway, this is coming from a big fan of the show. I’m going to need to screen them before watching them w the fam. Maybe include a not safe for families disclaimer like for Cards Against Humanity?

Comments are closed.

Related Posts

Recent Posts