FlickFleet sees you flick your Fleet, and dice too!
Just get ready to catch things coming off the table.
For 10,000 years the Imperium of Earth has ruled the stars with an iron fist but now The Uprising have thrown off their totalitarian yoke and are gathering a following and a fleet. An Imperial battle fleet is dispatched from Earth to end them…
The fate of the fleet is in your hands, literally. Flick your ships to move. Flick dice to attack. Raise your shields and get your flicking finger ready!
FlickFleet Game Play
This is a brief overview of how the game plays, including the flicking and important bits. But it’s far from comprehensive, just so you know.
There are several game types including scenarios and things like that. However, we just took some ships each and quickly got to shooting each other. We played in two teams with one player in each team controlling a large Carrier ship and the other controlling two smaller Destroyers.
This is actually quite similar to the introductory scenario so we weren’t far off!
Each of the 5 different ships has a dashboard where white shield cubes and disks that show locations go on the ship. Those locations also have a matching D6 side next to them which I’m sure will come into play later.
Each ship also has a purple activation cube on it, I mean physically on the ship on the table not its sheet. Now you’re good to go.
So players take turns removing the activation cube from a ship and activating it. The cubes’ sole purpose is so everyone knows which ships are left to activate in a round. I approve of the use of Purple.
Each turn you have 2 action points to take any number of the 5 available actions.
Main Actions
Move by flicking the rear of a ship… That’s it.
Fire by placing either a D10 (Laser) or D6 (Bomb/Nuke thing) on top of the ship and flicking it at the target. The first thing hit is hit and if the value on the die is under 6 it will deal damage if it hit a ship, which of course means a Nuke always damages on a hit. A Laser, not so much.
You can combine a move and attack by declaring a Ramming action before you flick your ship. Accidental ramming during an errant flick doesn’t count, only specifically declared Rams.
Other Actions
Remember I said Carrier ships have a white shield cube? If they get hit they can remove one of those instead. Otherwise, you remove a disk from the ship from the location matching the value on the die, assuming it landed on 6 or under. If a location on a ship doesn’t have any disks on it, the related action can not be used.
If the ship still has its Shield Generator active, it can spend an action to return a spent Shield cube back to the board.
Carriers can launch a Wing from their Fighter or Bomber Bays. Wings are their own ship and activate individually so they have their own activation cubes. They can only move and fire and are each made up of 3 individual, linked pieces. When hit they lose a piece but when firing they fire once for each piece they have remaining.
Engineering lets you return a disk to a location making it usable again.
The reason you would do this is that if a ship is hit and doesn’t have a shield or a disk in that location, it’s destroyed.
We played until only one side had ships left but the scenario will vary.
Theme
Space n stuff… The ships are fighting for the Imperial against the Rebellion so… nothing new here really.
Setup
The setup is OK the way we played it by just dishing out ships but the scenarios look pretty straightforward to set up.
General one-off games are points based so there are a few bits to sort out if playing by the intended rules I believe.
Components & Artwork
The plastic ships are great as are the meteors and stuff dotted around the table which I believe is part of an expansion.
There are some other cool bits such as the ship that has Stealth mode and turns invisible…
Ease of Teaching & Accessibility
It’s easy to teach obliviously with some little rules I missed out on above like what happens if things fall off the table etc
But it’s all open information and at each turn, a player’s possibilities can be talked through until it sinks in. The basics are not complicated.
FlickFleet Summary
There are of course plenty of flicking games around with Ronin of the Reach a similarly themed game but played by flicking cards. Flick ’em Up has the flicking and scenario setup like FlickFleet too.
It does have its flaws as there is a loophole where you can just knock ships off the table with certain attacks, much easier than shooting them.
Also, that Stealth ship, as fun as it is just kept hiding making it almost invulnerable for the entire game. I know that’s the point but hitting is hard enough as it is!
Speaking of which, not only is the D6 a more powerful weapon as a D10 misses if it lands on a 7+, something a 6-sided dice can not do. But its shape is easier to flick as well. The D10 is rounder but kinda curves whereas the D6 just goes forward.
Bomber Wings can shoot 3 times with a D6, super powerful.
I mean, FlickFleet is a decent and fun game but not one I would choose to play. I’d rather play a shorter dexterity game like Pitchcar or Kung-Fu Zoo.
Give me Crockinole any day.
Jesta ThaRogue