Flip Pick Towers
- Board's Eye View
- 16 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Flip Pick Towers is a 'roll & write'-style game from Osprey. It's designed by Rob Fisher and Adam Porter, with art by Beatrix Papp - tho' this is a game where the players will be adding some art of their own. Tho' we used the term 'roll & write', this is one of those 'flip & write' variations on conventional roll & writes that substitutes cards for dice, like Blue Cocker's Welcome To... games and WizKids' Your Best Life.
In Flip Pick Towers, players are building royal castles. Each turn, three cards are flipped from a castle deck of cards that mostly show various castle features or characters. Players simultaneously choose one card to use, and they draw that feature on their sheet and mark off the resource shown at the bottom of the card. Players don't actually take the card they use, so any or all players can choose to use the same card.
You'll certainly need to add floors to your castle as one of the many things you'll score for at the end of each of the two scoring rounds is the height of your towers. Floors have to be numbered as shown on the card and you will ordinarily need to ensure that floors are only added on top of floors with a higher number. When you add a floor you're always adding a space that can accommodate one other feature. You can accommodate one of the royals - adding that royal personage's randomised scoring opportunity - or you can incorporate features that you can claim by marking off columns of specific resources. A column of glass lets you draw in a window; fabric lets you add a banner; beans let you grow a beanstalk beside your towers; and coins let you add a bag of gold. All of these are potential ways of adding points, and bags of gold can also be deleted to ward off dragons when they appear; when a dragon card is flipped, all players must otherwise draw a dragon atop one of their towers - preventing any further floors from being added.
Flip Pick Towers has its own distinct magical charm. Tho' it's easy to play, it offers players an array of tempting choices but you soon realise that the choices you make also potentially limit what you can do in future. And when magical creatures are flipped, you can choose them in order to make use of their special rule-changing abilities. You're drawing quite a lot of different features on your sheet, so there's scope for players to show off their individual artistic ability - tho' there are no extra points on offer for intricate filigree!
Osprey have included a hefty pad of double-sided sheets, so you won't run out of those in a hurry. You can play solitaire or with any number of players; the game comes prepackaged with six pencils but you only need to add more pencils of your own to add to the number of players. And because players are all simultaneously choosing and drawing, the game doesn't take any longer with six or more players than it does with just one or two. Flip Pick Towers is a game you can play in a filler-length but satisfying 20 minutes.
