Rogue Review - Flip Ships

Have you ever wanted to play Space Invaders but as a board game? Of course, you have! Who hasn’t? It’s every kid’s dream. Now you have your chance with Flip Ships from Renegade Game Studios.

We first played this at a friends house at a Halloween party. My son fell instantly in love. There are spaceships. Aliens. And its a physical game that involves flicking tokens at the invading aliens. What’s not for a kid to love?

The set up for the game is very much like the classic arcade Space Invaders! You are protecting a city from alien attack. There is a mothership and several rows of alien ships. Each round, every player takes turns flicking their ship tokens at the rows of aliens. If you land on one, you destroy it. After every player goes, the alien ships all move down and get closer to your vulnerable city. You have to destroy them before they destroy you.

The concept is simple enough but there are enough wrinkles to keep things interesting. First, the actual process of firing on the alien ships isn’t easy. At least for an uncoordinated old man such as myself. It’s very easy to have your ship token either go almost nowhere or go clear across the room.

Fortunately, the game takes player ineptitude into account. The first section of the board is the “atmosphere.” If your ship token lands there, you can reflip it (up to three times). That’s really helpful when you’re trying to go for a real close attack. Either you land in the atmosphere and get a reflip or you likely land on one of the ships about to do some damage to your city.

Second, each ship token has a special ability. Some abilities are incredibly powerful, such as one which lets you hit a nearby ship using the Targeting Computer (a card with a range line on it). This is really helpful when the alien ships have been thinned out and are scattered. Or if you really, really suck. Other abilities are kind of blah, such as one where if you hit the mothership you get to reflip. You do need to hit, i.e. get your ships to land inside the mothership box, in addition to destroying the smaller ships. That is pretty hard to do, so trying to do it normally just wastes shots you could be using to protect yourself.

You start out with two small ships. As the game progresses and your city inevitably takes damage, you gain access to more ships and more powerful ships; the medium and large ships. All of the tokens are, unfortunately, the same size but the abilities get more and more powerful. For instance, one of the large ship abilities is to use the long Targeting Computer (about twice the distance as the small) and hit two ships. One of the mediums allows you to reflip if you miss. All of this helps to ease the pain of player ineptitude.

In addition to ship abilities, the game also keeps things interesting by giving the alien ships some personality. Each alien ship has a speed and a damage rating. They can move up to three spaces and do up to three damage. When your city only has twenty health to start, letting those three damage ships get through can turn the game around real fast. You go from worrying about just being able to hit any ships to needing to try and aim for specific ships.

This gets even more complicated when shield ships show up. These ships make all of the ships beside, behind and in front of them immune to damage. These nasty buggers can really throw a wrench into your plan. Fortunately, some of the ship abilities can be used to combat this, such as abilities that let you hit an adjacent ship instead of the one you landed on or allowing you to destroy even shielded ships.

Overall, Flip Ships is a fun, quick game that’s great for parties with kids or adults, is not complicated to learn, and–unless you’re really coordinated at flicking discs–has lots of replay potential.