First Time Playing: Flash Point Fire Rescue

This is a game that I've heard mentioned in various gaming videos online, so I was really excited to finally get to try it out when my gaming group bought the game recently. In Flash Point Fire Rescue we play as a team of firemen, each with a special ability, who together have to keep a fire in check while going through the house, rescuing the people trapped within it. If we manage to rescue enough people without the house collapsing on top of us, we win the game.

Each turn a player has four actions (certain roles have more and/or specialized actions) that they may use to move within the house, attempt to put out fire/smoke, move hazards or victims out of the house, even knock down walls if necessary. If the player is located in the fire truck, they may use their turn to put out fires by using the truck's hose.

After doing their actions, the player roll on where smoke will appear in the house. If the roll lands where there already is smoke, it flares into a fire, same happens if the smoke develops at a tile adjacent to a fire. If the roll hits a hotspot or a hazard, that situation has to be resolved before the turn passes to the next player.

I'm unsure what happens if the fire hits a hazard, as that didn't happen in our game (strangely enough), but if it hits a hotspot, the fire spread in all directions (damaging walls/doors if they stand in the way), and a new fire/hotspot develops somewhere else in the house (I'm unsure about the logistics behind that, but never mind). If four or more people are killed by the fire, or the house collapses (we run out of black cubes that mark the damage to the walls), the game is lost.

We ended up joking a lot while playing the game. The one that came up the most was the questioning of the intelligence of the people we were rescuing, as they kept wandering into a burning house (granted, they were being discovered, but when people keep showing up in the same room over and over again, it does begin to look a bit suspicious). The other was the questioning aim we seemed to have with the fire truck hose (you have a room almost entirely lit up and you end up aiming the hose at the part of the room that isn't on fire). And I have to have been the worst fire captain in the history of fire captains, as my smoke rolls had a tendency to knock down walls (we lost the game by having the house collapse on top of us).

But all in all it was a fun game, even if we did mess it up a bit with how we placed the new hotspots (rolling for a new place to put them instead of putting them where the fire erupted), which I think was a contributing factor to why we ultimately lost the game (that and the fact that we had the firemen drive the ambulance as well as the fire truck, wasting precious action points). Like with a lot of other co-operative games, it's easy to learn, as you can easily lean on the other players to figure out what to do during your turn, so I would say this game is very newcomer friendly.