Designed by: Tomoyuki Maruta
Flotsam Fight is a game where you are the panicking, monied upper-class clientele of a sinking ship. There are 8 lifeboats available and – rather than rescue each other – you’re simply trying to load all of your worldly possessions onto them.
Such a bizarre scenario deserves a bizarre system of play, and Flotsam Fight has that too. The lifeboats, numbered 3-10, are laid out on the table. The goods are represented by cards that each have a number value of their own, plus the numbers of which lifeboats they’re permitted to be loaded into: the boats, for reasons unknown, are rather picky about what they accept as ballast.
Players are dealt a number of cards, and take turns playing a card to a lifeboat, with the caveat that when there are the same amount of boats with goods in as there are players, no other lifeboats can start being loaded. You can keep adding more goods to the active lifeboats, however, as long as the number you add is higher than the previous card. In fact whenever you add a card to a boat, it must always be higher than the previous card…
Your goal is to get all of your goods loaded first, but if all players bar one pass – because they cannot or choose not to load – then the lifeboats are emptied and play resumes. If you get shot of all your cards first, you win the round! That’s a whopping two points. The other players compare their highest remaining cards to see who has the lowest high-card: that person comes second (1pt) and the player with the highest remaining card is last (minus 1pt!)
After three rounds, the player with the most points wins.
No direct hits or theft, but plenty of Oh No moments!
Minimal.
Low - it's less scattergun that it might appear on a first play, and you'll see that playing your cards in some ways represents more of a gamble than others. But so much information is hidden from you the game does have a degree of luck.
No neon signs hanging here advertising variety, but the game has a kind of odd appeal that might encourage repeated visits.
2-6
Players
10+
Years
15-30
Mins
Sam says
The story of the game seems like some kind of existential joke; a comment on modern society and the ultimately-futile trappings of materialism: even when you win, you're still left sat in a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean with a load of old tat. Expensive tat, but still... I like the inherent humour of that. As for the play, it's kind of fun too, albeit maybe not the sort of fun that either emerges fully-formed - you need a couple of plays to start to get that there are tactical decisions to be made here, and you need to be ok with the publisher Oink Games' standard modus operandi of weird themes, quirky mechanics and frugal scoring. It's not up there with the classic oxygen-starvation game Deep Sea Adventure or comical social deduction experiments of Insider and A Fake Artist Goes to New York. I dunno if it even compares to the bizarrely unintuitive, but weirdly appealing Maskmen... but it's very Oink, and I like it.