I went to a carnival a few weeks ago with the kids, does that count?
No.
Well, we don’t have to leave the comfort of our house; because now we’re going to the Flip Circus!
This is a SNAP review for Flip Circus.
Game
Flip Circus is a game for 2 players by Julien Gérard, and published by Iello. Using both memory and deduction skills, it’s best for ages 10 and up, and it takes about 15 minutes to play.
Art
Even though the game packs into this small pouch, the art in Flip Circus has lots of detail. There are five kinds of performers on these cardboard poster tiles. They feel like vintage circus posters to me, except for the fact that they’re a little bit smaller.
The performer portraits are also on these tokens – along with a sixth performer, the clown. There’s some helpful graphic design here to remind us of what each performer’s special power is, and what performer could possibly be on the other side of the token.
There are also two small player aids and these cute little wooden “Applause” tokens.
Mechanics
Now that we’ve talked about the tokens and the graphic design, let’s explain the mechanics of Flip Circus.
Every game starts by building the poster with the five poster tiles, then laying out the performer tokens. Place the five clowns face-up in a loose ring; then shuffle the remaining five tokens and put one between each pair of clowns.
The second player gets an Applause token, then the first player starts.
Your goal in Flip Circus is to collect three performer’s posters. If both players have two posters, you can also win the game by getting all the clowns face-up.
On your turn, you must take two actions – but you can take the same action twice.
You can:
Swap two adjacent performer tokens,
Flip a single performer token over, or
Use a performer’s ability.
You can also spend an applause token to take an additional action, or to secretly peek at the back of a token.
Your goal is to line up a set of three matching performer tokens. If all three tokens for a performer are face up, and adjacent to each other, you have gotten that performer’s autograph! Flip over the middle token of the three after taking the performer’s poster tile. You keep the poster until the end of the game – the other player cannot take it away from you.
If you create (or add to) a group of Clowns, you won’t get a poster – but you do get an Applause token. Remember, you can use that for an extra action.
So let’s talk about those performer abilities. Anitra, you already talked about the Clown.
The Strongman and the Animal Tamer have abilities that affect how and when they can be moved.
But the other three Performers have abilities you can use instead of a normal action:
The Acrobat can swap places with the performer directly across the ring.
The Magician can swap the two tokens that are adjacent to himself.
And the Fortune Teller allows the player to secretly peek at the back of both tokens adjacent to herself.
Don’t forget! There are two ways to win this game – collect three posters, or get all five Clowns face up when there’s only one poster left unclaimed.
Expectations
So that’s how to play. What did we expect from Flip Circus?
With games like this, I always feel like I’m going to really like it or really not like it. So I expected to have some stronger opinions about this one, which I do. We’ll talk about those in a minute.
I also like the art style and generally I like the graphic design a fair bit as well. As far as gameplay is concerned, I had no idea. Obviously we’d be flipping the poker chips – that seems obvious with a name like Flip Circus, but that’s really all I had.
I liked that this was in such a small pouch, and when I first picked up the tokens, I really liked the feel of them.
From the name, I also thought we’d be flipping the tokens for random rewards, or trying to hit things with them like a dexterity game or something.
Surprises
But that is not at all what this game is about, as you know! So, let’s talk about what surprised us.
Me personally, I expected this to be a way more casual game than it is. That’s not to say that it’s not a short game, or an easy game to understand (because it is). But there’s a ton of strategy in the different performers and how they all move.
Even once I found out this was a memory game, I was surprised at just HOW MUCH I need to constantly pay attention. I can use deduction to figure out some information, but I need to keep track of the tokens that I know. And I can’t do that if I look away from the table, becasue tokens are moving or flipping on pretty much every turn!
This is a game that is pretty simple in concept, but I feel like I’m really exercising mental muscles – especially if I want to be competitive against you.
Recommended?
OK Anitra, do you recommend this game?
Flip Circus is a sort of memory duel against another player. If you like memory and deduction, this is going to be a great fit for you. It’s really portable, but it’s not the kind of game that I would normally bring places. Because this is not the kind of game I can play with distractions around!
I loved this game and the mental puzzle of trying to remember, more or less, the status of all ten tokens.
I will say that sometimes, especially because we have our dates during breakfast, I could tell my head was just not – like, this is not the game for this morning. So I definitely know when I’m ready to play a game like this, because I feel like I have to be all in for it.
Of course, that means that maybe it’s NOT a good date game – even though it’s a two player game – if you really want to focus, because that means less brain space for small talk.
Or not! Is distracting your opponent by flirting, like, a next level strategy?
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