Image taken from https://boardgamegeek.com/image/6831437/fish-n-flip

Designer: Kevin Luhn
Publisher: Helvetiq
Artist: Dominik Wendland

For those that have never lived a full life, this review is named after Free Willy’s theme song. 😉

Fish ‘n’ Flip is a cute, ecologically minded, card movement and action selection game. There’s a spatial puzzle aspect as well, since the cards are laid in a grid pattern.

I did play one standard game to learn the rules, but after that, I printed the campaign mode from the Helvetiq website. In a standard game, four animals are chosen, while in the campaign, you are instructed which animals to use. Similarly, the number of waste cards included in a standard game is dependent upon your chosen difficulty level, while the campaign identifies the types and quantities needed. Besides that, the mechanics and rules are congruent. After choosing or discovering which animals and waste cards will be used in that game, the main deck gets constructed by combining the animal cards and the waste cards, then shuffling. It’s important to flip some of each animal before shuffling (you’ll see why soon). From the main deck, a grid of cards gets created – three rows by four columns in a standard game, and a varying number of columns in the campaign. A boat is also placed in row seven (it floats like it’s sitting on top of the water) for reference. Each animal also has a specific power card, so each of the corresponding special ability cards get added to the area for player use. Lastly, the action cards get shuffled, and each player draws three.

Each turn, a player uses an action card from their hand to affect the tableau of animals. The action cards range from flipping all cards of one color, swapping two animals, affecting certain rows, columns, or squares, etc. When an animal is affected by an action card, it obviously does what it’s supposed to, but then you check for two things. First, did that movement trigger a special ability, and second, do you have any groups of the same animal that are adjacent, (orthogonal, diagonal doesn’t count) and swimming in the same direction (this is why flipping some cards before shuffling is important). If you do have a group of animals fitting that description, those get freed. Some special abilities also trigger when certain species are freed. Once all groups of impacted animals have been removed, the cards in the tableau get lowered towards “the bottom of the net”. Then, the nets get refilled by adding one card from the deck on the top of each column. If any groups are formed in this step, they are NOT freed. Even worse, if you’re ever forced to add a seventh card to a column (where that boat is located), you immediately lose since you’ve reached the surface!

Play continues until the final card is added to the play area and the draw pile is empty. The fewer animals left in the net the better! Unfortunately, there isn’t really a win condition or goal for the standard game; the rule book literally just says the fewer remaining the better. In the campaign, however, there are specific tasks to achieve which helps, but it’s still odd to not have a score chart or specific win/lose condition.

The campaign, for me, was very necessary. The difficulty increases as you play, it introduces good animal variety, and it provides specific goals to work towards each game. That said, the last two chapters of the campaign (specifically the last one) are nearly impossible to achieve.

Even with the campaign, though, this game got a little boring for me. It wasn’t exciting or strategic enough to keep me interested and engaged, there wasn’t a whole lot of variety from game to game, and there’s quite a bit of luck involved in the card draw (as always with cards). I do appreciate, however, the theme of the game and the ecological production. I love a good eco-friendly game about something related to the natural world.

While I personally don’t have plans to play this much in the future, I have to give it credit for being reasonably priced, playing pretty quickly, and having a player count of 1-6 to accommodate variable group sizes.