Flip Freighters is exactly what it says it is, no less and no more

 I’ve been looking at Flip Freighters really since it came out. More than anything else, having to put together a deck from two decks of traditional playing cards got it sidelined compared to games that just required grabbing dice.

However, Flip Freighters promised me something that I’ve been wanting, a Roll and Write Pick Up and Deliver experience. And, yes, Flip and Write is close enough.

(And I have played some games that featured the mechanic. Voyages, Recycling Route and Gryphon Delivery Service are the ones that immediately come to mind. However, none of them quite hit the mark for me as a Pick Up and Deliver game, a miniature Empire Builder on paper. I would play them all again, though, particularly Voyages. Voyages is awesome)

During one of my periodic binges of BGA, I noticed that Flip Freighters was in their library. That took away the biggest hurdle that I had, being too lazy to put the deck together.

Honestly, Flip Freighters turned out to be pretty much what I thought it would be. And it does give me the Pick Up and Delivery experience that I thought it would. But, in some ways, it might be too much on the nose. 

Take two decks of cards and make a deck out of only aces through sixes, plus all the jokers. Shuffle and make three decks of fifteen and set the rest aside. Everyone get a play sheet with nine trucks and a distance track for each truck.

The game takes place over three five-day work weeks. Each stack of fifteen is one week and you reveal three cards each turn to represent a day.

You can use cards to either load a truck or move a truck. The trucks hold four or six cards with different rank or suit requirements. All that matters for moving is the rank, moving that many spaces on the truck’s track. You can move a truck that isn’t fully loaded but you can’t add anything to it once it’s moving. And the more stuff on a truck, the more points it’s worth when you make the delivery.

You score your finished deliveries at the end of each week. So, if you make a delivery by the end of week one, you’ll score it again on weeks two and three. There are also overtime boxes that you can use to modify cards but are worth points if you don’t use them.

At the end of three weeks, high score wins.

Flip Freighters is a game that you can figure out most of the game play by looking at the play sheet. It may be the most bare bones, basic, what-you-see-is-what-you-get Pick Up and Deliver I’ve seen. 

Which is a con and a pro. 

Against it, there is nothing surprising going on here. There isn’t any clever twists or novel mechanics. The theme is just what it says on the tin. Flip Freighters is so straightforward that it’s kind of dry.

I can’t help but think that if Flip Freighters had come out twenty years ago, when Qwirkle was making the industry reevaluate Roll and Writes as a medium, it would have been revolutionary. But Roll and Writes and Flip and Writes have seen a lot of development.

On the other hand, Flip Freighters does deliver exactly what it says that it does. It gives you a distilled Pick Up and Delivery experience. If that’s what you want, you’ll get it from Flip Freighters. It’s also very accessible, both from a mechanical standpoint and from the Cheapass philosophy of using cards people already own. (James Ernst would have given it a wackier backstory, though)

Ultimately, from a mechanical standpoint, Flip Freighters doesn’t do anything special. If you have a closet full of train games, it will do absolutely nothing for you. On the other hand, from a budget gamer standpoint, it’s very solid. From the standpoint of doing what it says it will, Flip Freighters does a great job.