Flip Voyage and Fliptown: New Frontiers are on Kickstarter now, two small boxes that expand on the world of Fliptown, a popular western sandbox game from 2023 that works great solo and is played entirely using a standard deck of cards.
Maybe you've heard the term "roll-and-write" before: a style of boardgame where you use random results of dice to fill in spaces on player sheets. Fliptown and its follow-ups use the term "flip-and-write" to describe themselves, because instead of dice, you're using a deck of playing cards to generate some randomness that you'll have to deal with strategically in order to find fame and fortune doing all sorts of deep sea and/or western frontier activities.
The campaign combines two new offerings: Flip Voyage is a full-blown sequel to Fliptown, taking you deep under the sea in a Jules Verne-style antique submarine, and Fliptown: New Frontiers expands the original game that takes place in the old American west.
In Voyage you'll be using your cards to fill in spaces and values to take such actions as navigating the ocean floor, researching new science, and even waging war with other aquatic vessels. While in Fliptown the action centers around all the things you might associate with a western frontier town: trails, trains, saloons, cattle, gold mining, bounty hunting and more.
The Fliptown games are advertised to support 1-4 players, but what I understand from the community is that these games are really designed to make a great solitaire play experience. They're big and involved enough to give you some satisfying crunchy thinking time deciding where to make your next move on your sprawling board of possible adventures, aiming for as high a score as possible. The designer Steven Armani is a well-known name in the modern growing space of solo board and card games.
If you'd like to get an in-depth look at the original Fliptown game to see how these things play, I'll recommend this video: Monique from Before You Play does a great job explaining rules and then dives into a session, and they've got great camera angles and quality to really get a good look at what a physical game is like.
You can back the Kickstarter now to pre-order either the new Flip Voyages or the expansion Fliptown: New Frontiers, and there are add-on options to also purchase a copy of the original Fliptown.
These boxes come with dry-erase player boards and custom decks of cards themed around the games, but one of the most attractive reasons to recommend a campaign like this is the print-and-play option: for just $5 you can get PDF versions of the games, and since they function using standard decks of cards, the only other thing you'll need is a way to print them out and you can play good old pen-and-paper style.
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