Round these parts, we mostly know Steven Aramini for his 18-card wallet microgames, fare like Circle the Wagons, Sprawlopolis, and Ancient Realm. Now he’s set up his own imprint, Write Stuff Games. While its inaugural title is rather compact, it’s downright massive compared to a wallet game. It’s also one of the best flip-and-write games I’ve played. Ever.

Dry-erase markers smell good. Goooooood.

The basic procedures of a flip-and-write have become standardized over the past few years. The defining characteristic is that of the shared input. As a group, the table flips a card (or rolls a die, or does whatever this iteration of the concept uses as its input) and works from that same source. Early on, it isn’t uncommon to see players taking the same action. Before long, everyone grows apart as their strategies diverge.

Fliptown leans away from the mathematics problems that dominate the genre. Instead, it digs into the root of the system, producing a card-arranging conundrum that feels like a natural evolution of Aramini’s previous work.

Here everything revolves around an ordinary deck of playing cards. The shared input is a trio of cards, the centerpiece of that hand’s puzzle, and you’re free to arrange them as you see fit. One sets the suit for your hand, another becomes the rank. The last gets jotted onto your board as a poker card. More on that in a moment.

That pairing of suit and rank determines the action you’ll pen onto your dry-erase board. There are five regions to consider, corresponding to spade, heart, club, or diamond, plus a spillover area in case you hate the current draw. These function as minigames, each offering their own opportunities and sometimes pitfalls. The simplest destination is the trail, where you guide a wagon train from one bonus to the next, freely skipping over any campsites that don’t appeal. There are two limitations. The first is that you can only guide the wagon train as far as your assigned rank; out under the stars, high cards are your friend. Next, you can’t turn this wagon train around — any campsites you skip are skipped for good.

As minigames go, this is dead simple. They all are. Visiting the mine sees you digging for gold, selecting a route depending on your card’s rank. In town, you select from a menu of businesses to patronize, purchasing perks for other actions or donating to the local church to cool off the sheriff’s interest in your activities. Out in the badlands, you can opt to engage in the game’s sole example of output randomness, selecting a target for robbery and then flipping an extra card to determine whether you were successful at knocking over a train, stagecoach, cattle rancher, or — and this one is embarrassing when the deck serves up a flub — a chicken farmer.

The boxed game includes a poker deck (and other cards), but everything can also be printed at home.

The ease of these actions showcases what Aramini is going for. Fliptown’s individual actions are straightforward, absorbing a few seconds at most, but it’s the way they come together that requires forethought. The game is only a brisk fifteen rounds in duration, so each draw needs to count. It isn’t long before combos present themselves, little one-two punches that open new windows of opportunity. Visits to the gunsmith and bandana shop tweak the chance of a successful robbery and hide your identity from the sheriff. Digging into the mine’s lowest reaches earns bonus points for all the trailblazing you’ve been doing. You accept a side-gig hounding bail-jumpers to wager on the cards revealed in future draws. Spending too much time at the cemetery gets folk speculating, so you apprentice with the undertaker to have free rein over all those free gold molars.

For a game that lasts half an hour, it’s a surprisingly broad sandbox to play in. And it does resemble a sandbox, especially once you break free of the deck’s whims. There are multiple resources in play, but the most fungible of them is gold. Gold nuggets are crucial because they can alter the rank or suit of any card, turning the vagaries of chance into delectable prairie oysters. Or, in more tangible terms, into cards better suited to your strategy.

This is doubly useful for that leftover card of each draw. Whichever card you don’t use for its suit and rank gets recorded on the board, and over the course of five rounds shapes into a poker hand for bringing home extra points and cash. It’s a brilliant framework to hang the game on, adding a rattlesnake’s bite to the card arrangement puzzle that opens every round, not to mention emptying your sack of nuggets as you hammer each draw into a more favorable configuration — and maybe a royal flush.

Despite these combo-building tendencies, Fliptown stays grounded in a way that, say, Three Sisters doesn’t. There are plenty of ways to build combos and even more ways to earn points, but they’re clearly arranged. Perhaps the one exception is that the suits for each action could have been more prominent — especially around town, where two icons are too close in proximity and size. On the whole, however, Aramini does a superb job of keeping the focus where it belongs. The initial draw directs everybody toward a handful of possibilities, while bonuses are clearly marked and don’t become overwhelming to consider even in sequence.

Heaven help me, I’ve even grown fond of the solitaire mode. Flip-and-writes are boons for large groups — so I’m a little bit uppity that there are only four boards in the box — but Aramini’s history with solo games is on full display. Fliptown’s is smoother than butter, pitting you against a robot cowboy that steals cards from the deck and generates a score threshold based on whatever you didn’t mark. The Calamity Jane cowbot, for example, earns four points for every trail space you didn’t visit. Playing against Billy the Kid is therefore a fresh challenge from tackling Black Bart or Wyatt Earp, forcing you to emphasize different approaches to bring down those thresholds. It’s as smart as it is effortless, a far cry from the complicated automas one finds tacked onto any number of other titles.

I’m yer huckleberry.

Fliptown is good. So good. There’s a very real possibility that it might be my favorite flip-and-write, and that’s considering some strong contenders like Cartographers, The Guild of Merchant Explorers, and Twilight Inscription. It sounds like we’ll be seeing more of these playing-deck-based titles from Aramini and Write Stuff Games. If they’re as good as Fliptown, this imprint is worth keeping an eye on. Maybe their next game will be even better.

Forget it, Jake. It’s Fliptown.

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A complimentary copy was provided.