RogerBW's Blog

The various markers in Flash Point Fire Rescue work pretty well, but they're a bit dull and cardboard. Well, they can't help it, poor things. Here's a replacement.

My first experiment was with Points of Interest. In the standard game these are tokens which are shuffled, some of which have real victims on the underside, while others are false alarms. With the various expansions, and with wear over time, it's often possible to tell tokens from each other without flipping them; so instead I put the tokens for a particular game into an opaque bag, and place these "Point of Interest" markers on the board instead. When a marker is revealed, the player draws a token from the bag.

(This also makes it easier to remember to add new victims when they're needed: there should always be three PoI markers on the board, until you've run out of PoI counters in the bag, and if there are some off to the side where they've been removed during the turn it's easy to see that they should go back on.

Extinguishing fire in the game is a two-stage process, from fire down to smoke and then from smoke down to nothing, and the new smoke/fire marker makes it easy to keep track of that as it's in two parts. First the smoke part:

Then the fire marker, which sits inside it:

(Thanks to my wife for the design idea. If you buy these, she will get some of the money.)

I may well modify this to make a hotspot marker, though it would need to be rather smaller.

While I haven't run off a hardcopy version yet, I also modified smoke to make foam markers (used in Honor & Duty):

Examples in play:

I will charge 19p per smoke token; 8p for fire; 11p for a PoI; 19p for foam. A base game has 33 double-sided smoke/fire markers; my fully-expanded edition has 57. You probably don't need as much fire as you do smoke, and you won't need more than three PoIs.