Flapjack Flipout

• Designer: Peter Newland
• Publisher: Mind the Gap Studios
• Players: 2-6
• Age: 10+
• Time: 20-30 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by designer

Flapjack Flipout is a dexterity and memory race for the position of short order cook for Flappin’ Jack’s restaurant. Grab your griddle and may the best flapjack flipper win!  The first cook to fill three orders gets the job and wins the game.

Each player gets a griddle, and the bell is placed in the middle of the table.  The flapjacks are shuffled face down around the bell.   There are 5 types of pancakes in Flapjack Flipout and each Order Card indicates type and number of pancakes required. 

To start play, an order card is revealed and read aloud.  Then, on a signal, players grab pancakes from the random community stacks, place them on their griddles face down and then must flip them up to see what type of pancake they are.  If they fall on the floor, they must be discarded (because surely you can’t serve pancakes off the floor to hungry customers!)  Once you see what type of pancake it is, you place it facedown on the table in front of you.  You can use whatever organization style you like…

Players need to remember where they keep their cooked pancakes and ring the bell as soon as they think they can fill the order. All players immediately stop when they hear the bell.  Now, it’s time to check if the order is right.  The player that hit the bell now chooses facedown pancakes from in front of him to fill the order, and then they are all flipped up.  If correct, the player earns the order card as a point. All of their remaining cooked pancakes are discarded.

If the answer is wrong, that player sits out until the order is correctly filled.  All of the pancakes which were correct from the first guess remain near the order; the other players merely have to finish the rest of the order correctly.  

When an order is complete, all players who did not win the round get a chance to decide if they want to save any of their cooked pancakes or not.  Of course, you aren’t allowed to look at any of them, so you have to remember where things are!  Any discarded pancakes are put into the community pile and shuffled in before the next round.

The game continues until someone has filled three orders correctly. That player wins.

My thoughts on the game

This is an interesting mix between dexterity and memory.  And I’m not sure which of the two skills here was harder for me.  Let me tell you – it’s not as easy as you think to flip these cardboard circles up and then catch them flat on the other side on your little black wooden skillet.  Let’s just say that plenty of our pancakes ended up in the trash after they hit the floor! 🙂

The game here is simple enough; see the order, then race to flip over flapjacks until you find the ones that you need.  The table ends up being a bit confusing as you start with facedown flapjacks in the supply, then you flip them over, and then once you discover them, you have to put them facedown somewhere else on the table.  If you have enough players playing; this can lead to a fair bit of confusion with all the different facedown piles (and a trash pile) all on the table.  Definitely figure out where you are going to put your cooked cakes – and make sure people don’t place their own cooked pancakes on top of your stacks – or else you’ll be quite surprised when you go to fill an order!

Speaking of filling an order, the rules around a partially filled order are pretty wonky; it says that the pancakes which fill part of the order correctly stay in play, and the next player only has to provide the missing pancakes.  However, this happens nearly instantaneously, and often by multiple players – there’s not a good system for figuring out the timing here.  It might almost be easier just to say that the order has to be filled in full by a single player.  

But… the game is supposed to be about frenetic fun, and maybe for some, quibbles about the rules are less important.  There is also a rare take-that pancake that makes an entire stack of pancakes moldy.  We assume that you are to play this on an opponent (making it a totally random weapon) as opposed to playing it on your own pancakes (where it would be a totally random penalty).   In the future, I’m probably just nerfing the moldy pancakes from the game as I’m not a fan of the random attack/penalty – the game is hard enough just trying to catch the blasted flipping flapjacks.

As you would expect, this is not a serious game. It about laughing and having fun; and if you’re lucky with your draw and flip – maybe you’ll finish an order too.  We certainly had our share of laughs – and in the end, that’s probably what is best about game – that everyone has fun.

Until your next appointment,

The Gaming Doctor