Shipwrecked but alive

Do you usually take games with you when you travel? While we were ready to fill up our suitcase with new and shiny stuff at Gen Con, we also couldn't resist packing some games for our trip. 🤭 One of them was 🏝FateFlip: Washed Ashore, a new title from @alleycatgames , which is basically an adventure book packed into a deck of cards! It is a solo game, however that didn't stop us from discovering together what fate awaits us on this strange island we are shipwrecked and stranded on.

Instead of going from number to number like in an adventure book, you will always hold several cards in hand and go through them one by one. However there is a reason “Flip” is in the name of the game! 🧐 As you make decisions on each card it will tell you what to do - sometimes discarding or adding new cards; or other times flipping them on their short or long side, either reading them immediately, or putting them at the back of your hand so you have to work through your other cards before finding out what the consequence of your decision was.

So even though the deck itself doesn't look very thick, each card holds 4 pieces of the story depending on how you hold it.

The setting is an evergreen one: you are stranded, thirsty, hungry and the sun is blisteringly hot… oh, and you have no idea where you are or how you could get home. 😁

An important part of the game is resource management. ☝️You will track stats like Food and Energy with a clip 📎 on a separate card, doing your best to avoid your impending doom. (These stats will vary depending on the chapter you are playing.)

One thing that is bothering us is how you read all the choices before making a decision, which show what resources you will gain or lose. Even though you don’t know what’s on the other side if you flip the card, sometimes the resources might dictate your decisions, disconnecting you a bit from the narrative. This seems like a necessary trade-off though, to make this into such a portable experience. You could easily play this on an airplane table for example! 🙃 Multiple paths and endings are possible, which helps with replayability. So if you like story games, you might want to give this one a shot.