Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Silver Age Cartoons
I’m a sucker for an old-timey aesthetic, especially when it comes to cartoons. Growing up, my father showed me some of his favorites, like Popeye the Sailor Man and Woody Woodpecker. I think there’s still a real appetite for the animation style of yesteryear, especially in the modern age, as evidenced by the massive video game success of Cuphead and Mouse: P.I. for Hire.
The board game world is no stranger to this style either, with titles like Vagrantsong, Townsfolk Tussle, Vegetable Stock, Magical Athlete, and even the video game spinoff Cuphead: Fast Rolling Dice Game. Fliptoons from Thunderworks Games fits nicely into that ever-growing family, and I’ll always be drawn to every title in it.
Flip-Flip-Flipadelphia
Fliptoons is a fast-paced card-drafting game where the player who generates the most fame points after a final flip becomes the top toon.
Players start with identical decks of basic toons that are played one by one, creating a 3×2 grid of cards. Cards have various effects depending on their position, adjacency, game state, or other conditions in the grid, including other players’ grids. Some of these effects increase value, flip cards to void a previously played card, dismiss other cards, and so much more.
After all players have finished flipping, a fame check occurs to see if 30 fame was collectively achieved, which triggers the final round. If not, players move to the market phase, giving them the chance to add more fun toons to their cast of characters.
The market includes five choices with increasing costs. Players can either hire two new toons, dismiss toons from their deck, or do a combination of one and one.
When a player hits 30 fame in their tableau, they receive the Critics’ Choice Award, worth three final points, and one more flip occurs. That final flip determines the winner.
Flipping Good Time
Fliptoons is a breezy good time. I had the chance to introduce the game to a bunch of new players during my weekend at Gaming Hoopla. The small, compact size of the game, married with its short play time of 15-20 minutes, makes it a great pocket-sized experience to break out at conventions or whenever you just don’t have the time for something meatier. Did I mention you could likely teach this in about a minute?
The gameplay loop is satisfying: drawing, deck-building, and hitting high highs and low lows. Some pulls will be absolutely perfect, with toons aligning precisely to maximize fame points in a given round. Some pulls will be absolute trash, leaving you to sigh as you reshuffle in defeat and hope others share the same pain.
There’s a challenge in finding the right timing for dismissing the basic starting toons without hamstringing yourself so much that you can’t afford to buy new cards. I’ve made the mistake of eagerly dismissing cards when it’s cheap, only to tread water while trying to build my deck as others pull ahead.
While the interaction is fairly low, some toons trigger based on other players. Camels, for example, are worth more if you have more of them than everyone else. Then you have toons like Turkey, which stack on top of others, allowing more cards to be played. Then there are Rooster and Lion, which rapidly scale in fame if everything else is lower rank in the tableau. Each animal toon is unique, with multiple copies in the deck, and the scaling can come quickly.
Because the cards are so dynamic in their conditional triggering, no two games feel quite the same. And since games end quickly, it’s fun to reshuffle and go for different victory paths or try out new strategies. Though at its core it’s a deckbuilder, so it’s still luck-based. The decks are shuffled each time, and every card’s position can make or break the value it brings to the tableau.
I do appreciate the natural guardrail the game has to ensure that more powerful cards are expensive to purchase. Each card has a numerical rank, and the market is set from cheapest, or lowest rank, to most expensive, or highest rank. However, this can sometimes create a “the rich get richer” situation.
Fliptoons is fun, it’s wacky, and most importantly, it’s fast. The art draws you in, and the dopamine hit of drawing the right card in the right position at the right time keeps you coming back.
However, as fun as it is, its Achilles’ heel is the four-player maximum. For a game that feels like a great party-style experience, it doesn’t quite support the player count you’d expect from that kind of game. Hopefully, something down the line can fix that. The game also includes a solo mode, challenging one player to hit 30 fame before the deck runs out.
It’s no shocker that this game was widely out of stock for the longest time. It hits all the checkmarks of what a fast card game should be. Fliptoons is a wonderful cast of toons that will stay in my rotation, and the cast has expanded in Fliptoons: Season 2!
Fliptoons details
- Designer: Jordy Adan, Renato Simões
- Artists: Diego Sá
- Publishers: Geeks N' Orcs, Gémklub, Hobby World, Rawstone, REXhry, Strohmann Games, Sylex, Thunderworks Games
- Release Date: 2025
- Player count : 1 - 4
- Age range : 10+
- Time range : 15 - 30 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Deck, Bag, and Pool Building, Market, Open Drafting, Race, Score-and-Reset Game, Victory Points as a Resource
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.31517 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 3.5.
- More articles about Fliptoons.
