Fliptown

Flip Town is a flip-and-write game that can be played solo, or competitively. Over three rounds, each round consisting of five turns, you’ll choose how to allocate three flipped cards from a standard deck – two of them determining what your cowboy (or girl) gets up to in the game, and a third being put towards a poker hand that will score at the end of the round.

Fliptown’s quirky driver is those three cards. One you put aside for your poker hand and of the other two, the suit of one will decide if you go to the Trail, Badlands, Mine or Town, and the value of the other will decide what you do there – ‘doing’ in this case meaning crossing off locations on a dry-erase board (see pictures). When you cross a location off, you gain the rewards! These might be stars (which are points) gold (which allows you to modify the suit and/or value of cards) and cash, which may be needed for some locations and almost undoubtedly needed, at some point, to bribe the sheriff, who we’ll come to shortly.

Loosely speaking, the trail is – unsurprisingly – a trail that rewards more the further you go, but demands a higher card for every subsequent step along it. The Mine is also a trail of sorts in that it works a similar way, but going downwards, with optional branching paths. The Badlands are where you can risk some outlaw behaviour, but can mitigate the risk to some extent: it’s less risky stealing a chicken than holding up a stagecoach, for example. But chickens don’t carry much in the way of cash, so there’s a very palpable risk/reward dynamic on the Badlands.

Finally the Town offers a bounty of different rewards depending on which card you ‘spend’ there. It can mitigate risks in the Badlands by providing you with a gun, say, or boost you up the trail with a horse. Or you can just turn gold into points at the prospectors club.

Dotted around all these locations are the bounty of cash, gold and stars. But many of them also push up your Wanted status, and this is where bribing the sheriff – a hidden card – can be helpful. At the end of each round – after cashing in your poker hand – you can choose whether or not to bribe the sheriff, before this card is revealed. If the value of the ‘sheriff’ is lower than your Wanted status, you have been arrested, and lose a bunch of cash or points! However you can avoid this fate by bribing him, paying one cash for every level of Wanted you currently have.

After the third round ends, points are tallied and the player with the most points wins!