FlipToons was designed by Renato Simões and Jordy Adan, the latter of whom gave us Stonespine Architects and Cartographers, but the real star of the show is Diego Sá, whose animated characters make me want to rate the game significantly higher than I would otherwise. Just look at those little dudes! The camel is two seconds away from winding up a punch. The rabbit wouldn’t feel out of place leaning in for a kiss, only to be rebuffed when the ostrich hides her head in the sand. The sheep is just is out there boppin’ to her tunes.

As a game? Oh, it’s pretty good. Clever at points, nice to play, the usual. My larger reservation is the way it makes me feel during and after a play.

Six cards. In theory.

FlipToons is a game of two halves. Two halves which, when hinged like an aquatic bivalve, form into a united whole that conceals an unexpectedly tasty muscle within. Okay, so I skipped breakfast. Point is, FlipToons is hard to discuss holistically without first establishing how its components function apart from one another.

The first part is the deck. When the game begins, you have six cards in total. Two caterpillars, each worth bupkis, but easily dismissed. One skunk, a utility card for winnowing your deck. One bee, worth a single pip of purchasing power. One snail, worth double the bee’s value, making it the single most precious card in your starting lineup. And one dragonfly. Ah, the dragonfly. This guy gives you one point for every unique adjacent card.

What this means requires some explanation. Every round opens with you shuffling your deck and then dealing cards onto the table in front of you to create a three-by-two grid. If you have extra cards, too bad, they remain in your hand. If you have too few cards… well, don’t do that.

Some cards may stack. Rabbits, ostriches, turkeys, these are your chance to get more than six cards into your grid at a time. Others, like sheep or monkeys, trigger benefits if they occupy a particular row or column. Some cards flip, others compare values against other players or the market, and a few, like the pig, are traps that can be gifted to rivals to subtract from their tally.

That tally, then, is taken to the market to shape your deck. Since you’ll only use six-ish cards at a time, keeping your cast trim is a good idea. Fortunately, unlike most deck-builders, the ability to dismiss toons is inbuilt in FlipToons, always available for the low cost of five points.

The toons on display, meanwhile, adjust in cost according to their relative ranking. This ensures that something is always available, and if you’re lucky it’s possible for something unusually precious to slip down in cost. Of course, the opposite often also proves true, with low-value cruft sometimes overwhelming the market.

Regardless, you take your purchases and/or dismissals, shuffle your grid back into your hand, and begin all over again. Bit by bit, your cast improves. That measly starting five to six points becomes twelve, then sixteen, then you break twenty and flip your little tally card to its opposite side. The goal is to score thirty.

Costs are adjusted dynamically, which can result in little surprises.

Okay, not quite. Your actual goal is to score the most on the final round. Hitting a tally of thirty is how you trigger the endgame, and there’s a small plus-three advantage if you’re the one to bring it about, but that’s no guarantee luck will be on your side for the last flip. So, then: hit thirty to lock the game into one final pull of the lever, then hit the jackpot.

The slot-machine analogy is apt here. FlipToons is to deck-building what Balatro was to poker. The titular flip of FlipToons is devoid of decision points. You turn cards in order, left to right and top to bottom, until you’ve produced that three-by-two grid.

There’s more going on in the market portion, but these are minor choices rather than a vast menu. There are five cards available at any given moment, and even when you’re flush with cash in the late-game, you’re limited to two purchases. (And dismissing a card from your deck qualifies, so no double-dipping.) This keeps everyone at the table more or less bungee-corded at the hip, which is probably the right decision for such a light game, but also prevents the table from launching the exponential bottle rockets that were Balatro’s core pleasure.

But about those pleasures…

I have my reservations about these sorts of games. The art and market purchases, while pleasant, aren’t far removed from the lights, illusory choices, and “theming” of a slot machine. I remember as a kid on a trip to Vegas, walking past a slot machine that leaped out of the crowd. I think it was based on Aliens, with those sleek oily monsters I had yet to witness on the screen for myself, but which my friends with the cool parents, the ones who let their kids watch R-rated movies in elementary school, spoke of as the scariest things they’d ever seen. My Dad traced the object of my interest and leaned down to whisper, “That’s how they get you.” It was like somebody had roused me from hypnosis. In that moment, my Dad — who suddenly struck me as cooler than those other dads, or at least cannier — had broken through the social programming of that cigarette-reeking hellhole.

And, look, I don’t think FlipToons is some sort of evil artifact. It isn’t the equivalent of a casino, with its fine-tuned odds to ensure the house always wins and your kid’s college fund becomes another rounding error in a billionaire’s high score. But it produces a similar daze, all submersion and dulled perception. It’s a far cry, too, from some of the sharper auto-battler board games, titles like Tag Team, with its emphasis on attention and preemption, or One-Hit Heroes, which requires constant input from its players. Here, the gameplay comes pre-loaded. All you have to do is pull the lever.

It doesn’t always take much effort to reach those 30 points.

I mean, there’s more to it than that. Just not by as much as I would prefer. Certainly not by enough to make me want to play it more.

Because in the end, FlipToons is a pleasant enough diversion. It’s well-crafted, pretty to look at, and feels good to play. When it hits the table, the fugue it offers is dreamy and warm. But when it’s done, I feel like I binged on steakhouse butter in place of an actual filet. It lacks what brought me to the table in the first place. It doesn’t spark my imagination or help me appreciate my friends. It doesn’t teach me anything. It barely even makes a win feel different from a loss. Most of the time, I hardly remember how I spent the past twenty minutes.

But yeah, the art is lovely. Those lovable goofballs. Those scamps. That’s how they get you.

A complimentary copy of FlipToons was provided by the publisher.

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