Flotsam Fight Card Game First Impressions

In Flotsam Fight, your treasure is about to be lost at sea! Can you recover as much of your treasure as possible?

If not, can you at least get the really valuable stuff?

A group of explorers have sailed around the world amassing a mountain of treasure, but on the voyage home, they’re hit by a massive storm! The ship and all its treasure are going down!

The explorers, in an attempt to save their hard-earned treasure from sinking to the bottom of the sea, begin to feverishly load the lifeboat. You may want to save all your treasure, but the other explorers will be trying to save theirs as well.

Which treasure should you load into which boat? You must plan your moves carefully!

Flotsam Fight Game Play

Simple one this…

You have a bunch of tokens representing lifeboats that are numbered. Each player has a hand of cards representing treasures of unique value. Each of these cards shows you which lifeboat they can be loaded into. These are multiples of the lifeboat numbers. For example, 52 is only divisible by 4 so can only go it lifeboat 4. The number 36 card can go in lifeboat 3, 4, 6 or 9.

Players take turns playing cards from their hands into a lifeboat but the played card MUST be higher than the last card placed in that particular lifeboat.

There is only a number of lifeboats available depending on the number of players. So once that many lifeboats have had cards assigned to them, you flip the other tokens face down changing their colour to show they can’t be used.

So you take turns either playing or dropping out of play if you can’t play a card. Once everyone but one player has passed, you discard the cards from lifeboats, flip them all back available and play again. Play continues from the player that didn’t pass.

Once a player has played their last card they win the round and gain a 2-point token. The player with the ‘lowest high card’ remaining in their hand gets 1 point and the player with the highest card remaining gets -1 point.

Play a new round, the player with the most points after 3 rounds is the winner.

Theme

It’s an interesting theme to give a game, but it is very abstract. You’re just playing numbered cards in numbered spots.

Setup

Put some tokens out and deal some cards, simple.

Components & Artwork

Cards and a few tokens. Typical stuff from Oink Games and all in a tiny box.

It has a cute look and adding the lifeboat numbers the cards can be played on is a nice touch that speeds up gameplay.

Ease of Teaching & Accessibility

It’s very easy. It does play like one of those games you would play with a standard deck of cards.

There are so few rules which make the game an accessible one.

Flotsam Fight Summary

This game reminded me of 6 Nimmt! the most. A game where you’re playing numbered cards into piles and hoping not to take any of those piles of cards. There it’s simultaneous so your chosen card can turn from good to awful before you get a chance to play it.

But here, you’re just trying to empty your hand. Not as nuanced, but it’s not as easy as just playing the lowest card available that you can.

You also have to look at which lifeboats you have the most in. If you have a lot in one boat you might want to play one to make sure that the lifeboat will be open this turn. Or, maybe you want to wait and do that a bit later after everyone has passed the first time.

I really enjoyed this and for a 30-minute game, it took me 10 minutes to get into it so I look forward to playing it again. I THINK it will be as fun on multiple plays and not feel repetitive, that’s my only worry.

Jesta ThaRogue