Several of the roles can't really do much of anything with their abilities that's very "special" a lot of times. Finally, each player assumes the role of a firefighter, takes one of the colored pieces and sets up in the street outside the building. It does have good replayability as a family game, though, and the Flash Point expansions add a lot to the base game.

The board is pre-set with three trapped persons and ten initial fire markers, which in the Family version are placed in specified locations. Flash Point is great for small player counts where your turns come relatively fast, but at the higher player counts the wait between turns can be a little painful, it feels like your firefighter has completely lost any sense of urgency and is casually strolling around as the house burns and explodes around them. You’ll also have to contend with Hazardous Materials, which are items that EXPLODE as soon as fire touches them. The firefighters move towards the victims, putting out fires along the way, only to have new fires pop up again. Replenish POI Markers – There must be at least 3 POI markers on the board at the beginning of each player’s turn.

For me, the theme of Flash Point: Fire Rescue is universally appealing to all ages and all different types of gamers because it’s a real life scenario. Its basic level is great for starting or playing with children, then the additional playing steps create more challenge for playing further. Each round, each player has four action points to spend on their turn, to move, carry victims, get rid of hazardous materials, open and closing doors, extinguishing smoke and fires or maybe chopping their way through the walls driving the fire engine to another side of the house. The players take on the role of a team of firefighters trying to put out the fire in a house and rescue the people and animals trapped inside.

So the fire spreads east (from our perspective) into space Red:6/Black:4 where a Fire marker is placed, and stops there. Their primary objective is to save the lives of the victims, but how they go about doing that is up to them.If a space in the house has a fire token, you will first have to spend an action to flip it over to the smoke side, then another action to remove the token altogether. Should this co-ordinate be empty then you fill it with smoke, should it have smoke in it then the smoke turns to fire and should there be fire in it then there is an explosion, causing fire to spread in four directions. You can move around and carry victims, extinguish fire and smoke, open and close doors, chop some walls down, drive the ambulance and/or fire truck (not at the same time), and of course use the fire truck’s highly powerful hose. And with the cool picture of a firefighter rushing ahead with an ax, Caleb was anxious to open and play the game the moment he saw it. As the official digital adaptation of the acclaimed board game from Indie Boards and Cards you will experience the same excitement and challenge of the original in a light-hearted digital form.

The Urban Structures expansion was initially released in 2011 in limited quantities as a Kickstarter exclusive for the base game, but in a second Kickstarter, funding was acquired to re-release the expansion commercially. This is a perfect example of how anticipating the worst case scenario can pay big dividends later on. The younger ones felt that it could have been more exciting although it appeared to me that they were getting mini-adrenaline rushes here and there, while waiting to see if an Explosion was going to take them, and the hapless victim they carried, off to the afterlife.

FLASH POINT: FIRE RESCUE is a copyright of Indie Boards and Cards under licence to RetroEpic Software CC. It was designed to be a family board game, and it is one of the very best cooperative games for families in existence.