Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Captain Flip is a simple game with a simple premise: you’re a pirate putting together a crew in order to acquire the most booty before the game’s end. And the gameplay matches that simplicity. On your turn, you’re going to reach into the drawstring bag, pull out a tile, and place it into your tableau. If you’re not happy with the tile you’ve drawn, you may optionally flip it to its reverse side before placing it. But, once you’ve flipped the tile, you may not flip it back over. You’re stuck with what you’ve got.
Even the setup is simple. Everyone agrees on which board they’ll be using (there are a total of four distinct boards) and each player takes one, ensuring that at least one player takes the board with the pirate flag on it that indicates the starting player. Create a pile of coins where everyone can reach them. Then, the tiles get tossed into the bag and mixed up. And, with that, you’re ready to begin.
The game centers around the nine character types, each of which earns you coins (points) in some unique way. Your player board is divided into several columns. When you draw a character tile, you’ll select a column in which to place it and place it into the lowest open spot in that column. Some of these characters earn you points immediately, like the Cook who awards you coins for itself plus every character tile in the same row as itself. Others, like the Lookout who earns you points as long as it’s at the top of its column at the end of the game, score during final scoring.
Players keep taking turns drawing and playing until one player has filled up their fourth column. At that point, the current round is finished and final scores are tallied to determine the winner.
There are 72 tiles featuring one of the nine different characters on one side and a different character on its reverse face. Each character appears 16 times throughout the game, and none of the tiles feature the same character combination twice. That’s 36 different combinations times two. So, there’s a slim chance that the exact tile you’re looking for is out there somewhere, but unless it’s been flipped at some point, you’ll never know for sure. And, even if it has been flipped, unless you’ve got an eidetic memory, you’ll have a hard time pinpointing who has it or where it was placed. This creates a lot of delicious tension as you look down at the nearly useless tile in your hand debating whether to trade your known misfortune for the unknown. There’s as much potential for disaster in flipping a tile as there is in not flipping it.
Consider the Gunner, for instance. Placing a Gunner into your crew will earn you an instant five coins. However, this windfall comes with a cost. If there are three Gunners in your crew at the end of the game, you automatically lose. So, if you’ve already got two Gunners in play and you draw a useless tile like a Carpenter—who only awards coins at the end of the game if there are no Gunners in the same row or column as themselves—because you can only place them into the same row or column as one of those aforementioned Gunners, should you flip the tile and hope for something useful? There could be a Gunner on the other side. Then again, maybe there isn’t. Only one way to find out.
Captain Flip isn’t all press-your-luck, though. There’s a healthy dose of memory game sitting just beneath the surface. Consider the previous example of the Gunners. If you can recall what was on the flip side of the existing Gunners, maybe you can use a Monkey—who immediately rewards you with a coin and the option to flip an orthogonally adjacent tile when it appears—to flip one of them over later to something more useful, like a Parrot who, even though it’s worth -1 points at the end of the game, lets you immediately draw a new tile from the bag and play it. In that case, maybe flipping your Carpenter to a Gunner and gathering those five coins could be worth the risk.
Another important factor to take into consideration when playing Captain Flip is timing. The game end is triggered once someone has filled in their fourth column. Do you spread out your efforts to try to milk as many points as you can? Or, do you race towards the finish as fast as possible? Each board has several columns that reward people for finishing them, creating a further impetus to fill in columns as soon as possible. For the simple act of drawing a tile from a bag, there’s a lot to consider.
Captain Flip is loaded with these kinds of nail biting, micro-decisions. In other games, this might be a recipe for the dreaded analysis paralysis, but not here. In Captain Flip, the turns go by quickly and the game moves along at a quick and easy pace. Couple that with the interesting decisions and the simple ruleset, and it’s no wonder that Captain Flip was an official nominee for the coveted Spiel des jahres award in 2024. There’s a lot to like about this game!
I’ve probably played Captain Flip at least 20 times now at various player counts and it’s been universally enjoyed by all. The only gripe I’ve heard so far is more of a missed opportunity than an actual issue with the game. Multiple people have made a comment that they wish there were tiles that would allow you to interact with an opponent’s crew in some way. They’re not wrong. Thematically, it makes sense that one group of pirates might square off with another.
This missed opportunity isn’t a deal breaker, though. Captain Flip is pretty amazing. My six-year-old agrees. The fact that my young kid is able to sit at a table full of adults and enjoy this game is perhaps its finest selling point.
Captain Flip details
- Designer: Paolo Mori, Remo Conzadori
- Artists: Jonathan Aucomte
- Publishers: Game Harbor, MIPL, PlayPunk
- Release Date: 2024
- Player count : 2 - 5
- Age range : 8+
- Time range : 20 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Advantage Token, End Game Bonuses, Grid Coverage, Memory, Multiple Maps, Push Your Luck, Tile Placement
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.09721 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 3.5.
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