Ladybird
RIV
- Joined
- Aug 13, 2017
- Messages
- 4,585
- Reaction score
- 12,914
It's like one of those "who lives in a house like this?" shows, except rather than some TV star, it's a family of idiots who store their petrol tins under the sofa and go and hide in the oven when the smoke alarm goes off, and rather than Lloyd Grossman you're a team of highly-trained and functionally immortal fire personnel.I picked it up at a thrift store. Is it good?
Also, everything explodes. All of the time.
More seriously, you're playing a fire rescue team, trying to save a family from their burning house; each specialist has a special power that makes them really good at certain aspects of the game - the CAS firefighter gets free action points for fire extinguishing, the rescue specialist can move faster and chop through walls, the fire captain can spend their turn getting the team into better positions, etc - and their goal is to get around the house, identify points of interest - could be survivors, could be a false alarm - before they succumb to the fire. Get enough out in time, and you win, but if too many die or the house collapses, you lose.
The fire itself pops up randomly around the house, but it's very deceptive; you can deal with the initial fire easily enough, but pockets of smoke are constantly popping up all over the board, and it doesn't take much for the smoke to catch, separate the team, and throw all your plans out of the window... and once that happens, explosions aren't far off. I find that a team that is really on it can keep the fire under control more easily than in, say, Pandemic, but when things go wrong, they go wrong fast and getting back on top of things is an uphill job. It's given me a lot more respect than I already had for the people that do this for real.
The expansions add in more maps - harder maps - and also more fire personnel; I think the team from the core game is hard to beat, but the expansions do add a lot of interesting play, including Rescue Dog, who is a dog, is REALLY FAST at getting around the house and checking PoI's, but can't do anything at all with the fire or doors. Definitely worth your time if you like the base game.