Flash Point: Fire Rescue.

The cooperative boardgame Flash Point: Fire Rescue is Pandemic set in a burning building. While the setting and endgame conditions differ, the core mechanics are very similar, enough that it should be simple for Pandemic or even Forbidden Island players to pick up the basic rules and move on to the complete game. It’s enjoyable thanks to the same cooperative elements that make Pandemic fun (and stressful), but I don’t see anything terribly novel in Flash Point that advances the cooperative game field.

In Flash Point, the board is a giant rectangular building divided into 48 squares (six by eight), and it’s about to become enveloped by fire. The players represent firefighters who must enter the building and rescue seven victims before the building collapses or before they lose four (or more) victims to the blaze. Only three victims are on the board at any time, and some of the victim tokens turn out to be “false alarms” – blank tokens that can waste your time as you navigate the fire to get to them. Once a player reaches a victim, s/he must carry the victim out of the building to the ambulance parked outside, a slow process that puts both victim and player at risk from the advancing conflagration. When a victim is rescued or is lost, or a false alarm token is exposed, the players add a new token, called a point of interest (POI), to replace it, ensuring there are three on the board at the start of every turn.

When a fire starts to burn, right, and it starts to spread…

On his/her turn, each player gets four moves, called action points, to use as needed. Moving to an adjacent space costs an action point; putting out smoke in the space where the player stands costs one AP; putting out fire in that space costs two AP; carrying a victim to an adjacent space costs two AP. A firefighter can’t end his/her turn in a space that’s on fire, but a player can save any unused AP until the next turn. The basic “family” game has all players operating with the same four AP and restrictions; the full rules give each player a specific role, again similar to Pandemic, with bonus skills (e.g., flip over any victim token for 1 AP to see if it’s a false alarm or an actual victim) or additional AP to use in certain ways (e.g., three bonus ones per turn that can only be used for movement and can’t be saved).

After each player takes his/her turn, he rolls the two dice, one six-sided die and one eight-sided, to spread the fire somewhere in the building. If the space indicated by the roll is empty, and isn’t adjacent to any space with a fire token in it, then the new space gets a smoke token and no real harm is done (yet). If the space is already smoking, or is adjacent to a fire token, then the space ignites and gets a fire token. If the space is already on fire, however, an “explosion” occurs, similar to an outbreak in Pandemic, where the fire spreads out in all four directions, blowing off doors and damaging walls. Each wall segment can take up to two damage tokens before it is destroyed, and if players must place all of the game’s 24 damage tokens on the board before rescuing their 7th victim, the building collapses and all is lost.

The full rules create ways for the fire to spread even more quickly due to hazardous materials and hot spots places on the board at the beginning of the game. When fire hits a hazmat token, it causes another explosion like that described above; a player can carry a hazmat token out of the building for 2 AP per move, although the hazmat just has to be taken to the outer track rather than brought to a specific point as a victim does. When fire hits a hot spot, the player must roll the dice again to place yet another smoke or fire token, which may cause another explosion and hit another hot spot, so the process can continue for several iterations. These advanced rules come with one major bonus for the players, however: For 4 AP players can use the fire engine’s deck gun to spray water into one of the building’s four quadrants, hitting one random square within the chosen quadrant and dousing fire and smoke in that square as well as the two to four adjacent squares. I’ve found this to be essential to beating the game when using the full rule set.

With just two players, we found that limited cooperation was required because we could get victims out of the building quickly enough to avoid the fire. With four players, teamwork becomes essential for that reason: Someone has to control the fire to keep a path clear for the player(s) carrying victims out, and to make sure the building doesn’t collapse too quickly. Choosing where to focus your firefighting efforts is similar to choosing where to head in Pandemic – you’re practicing containment, as eradication, difficult in Pandemic, doesn’t exist here. Even if you were able to put out every fire token on the board, the building will just reignite on a future turn. You have to move quickly and efficiently to beat the game, as rescuing seven victims takes a lot of turns and the fire moves more rapidly as the game progresses.

A full game takes 45 minutes to an hour, depending on how quickly you make decisions as a group and whether you choose to use all or merely some of the full game’s features. It’s essential if you love cooperative games and enjoy the mechanics of Pandemic, but I find the game a little derivative without enough new twists to distinguish it from its predecessor and would always reach for simultaneous global epidemics over the burning building.