Flatline

In Flatline, you have survived a bomb explosion unscathed, but some of your crew members were not quite so lucky. There is significant damage to your ship, there are injuries among your crew, and the life support systems are failing. As the ship’s Medics, you must work together to treat the injured crew, while dealing with other incoming emergencies. You need to work co-operatively, against the clock to help treat your crew members’ injuries before time runs out!

Flatline is a sequel to Renegade’s hit game Fuse, where you were working to defuse a bomb. Unfortunately you failed at that game and now Flatline reflects the consequences for your ship. Flatline is a game of real-time dice rolling where you need to work together quickly to make the right dice combinations to treat your patients, deal with emergencies and buy yourself time to ensure that you complete all of your tasks before the power runs out.

Flatline Gameplay

Flatline takes place in a series of rounds, each with a preparation phase, a real-time phase and a conclusion phase. Each round you lose a cube from the power supply, which acts as the game timer. After that you draw a number of crisis cards equal to the newly revealed number on the power bar. Crisis cards are either standard blue cards, which have negative effects and form a numbered track, or emergency orange cards which need to be dealt with this round or they start to trigger a failure state.

After drawing crisis cards you roll the two crisis dice and resolve associated crisis cards. Then comes the planning phase where you can take stock and talk to each other for as long as needed to decide what you want to achieve this round.

Once you decide you are ready, a one minute timer starts (there is a free Renegade Games app with a soundtrack, though any timer would work). You each roll your dice and assign them to various different action spaces. Different places will need different combination of dice faces and may need dice to come from different combinations of players too!

Patients are the main priority, as you win the game when you cure enough of them, however if you ignore too many orange cards then you will lose, so you have to assign some dice to them. There are a couple of power generators which give you extra power, and therefore extra turns, but you also might want to get rid of some of the particularly nasty blue crisis cards before they trigger.

Once your minute is up there are a couple of phases where you clean up all your completed cards, mark off partially cured patients, and replace fully cured patients with new ones. Should you cure all the patients before you run out of power, or before you fail too many orange crisis cards, then you win the game!

Amy’s Final Thoughts

Flatline is a great combination of real-time gameplay and turn-based planning and resolution. The minute that you have to roll, assign, re-roll and collaborate with your fellow players may be very intense, but the gaps in-between give you some time to unwind a little bit and take stock of what you are doing.

Since Flatline is a dice game it is naturally very luck-based, especially with lower player counts when you have less dice being rolled (though less patients to cure). Bad luck can be an issue if you both draw and roll a particularly nasty crisis card that undoes all your careful planning. However that’s why you get a planning phase to discuss what you can do to overcome these new problems.

There is a lot of strategy in Flatline for when to do certain actions (for example if you use the generators at the right times you can repeat turns with a low number of crisis cards), but even when things are going well there is a constant feeling that you need to do more. I can only imagine that is exactly how a paramedic would feel in an emergency situation.

Once you have played a few rounds you quickly get into the flow of the game and Flatline becomes a really quick game to play. Ultimately it’s quick, chaotic fun that will be sure to get you shouting at each other!

Fiona’s Final Thoughts

We’ve been enjoying Flatline as both a two-player game and with friends as a four-player game. We love to play co-operative games and find that adding real-time elements often fixes the problem of one player making all the decisions. For players who find real-time stressful, I also think that games like Flatline, which have a real-time element following by a more relaxed period of resolution and planning can be the perfect mixture.

With two players, Flatline is no exception, although with four players it does seem as though someone tends to take control, shouting to all the other players to ask about different dice faces to complete different objectives, all within the one minute time frame.

The theme is quite a unique one, however, even though you are supposed to be treating people with injuries from a bomb blast, it has been completely sanitized with faceless capsules representing the patients, so that it’s not a gory, or upsetting theme. It’s definitely an immersive game in spite of this, with a real sense of achievement as you progress and win.

The level of difficulty is high, but we have been pretty successful on the tutorial level and I’m looking forward to increasing the difficulty and seeing how efficient we can become at the game. Of course there is luck in this game which is all about dice-rolling, but there’s many ways to make the best of what you’ve rolled and if you’re really struggling, there are ways to re-roll your dice or even change the face when you’ve solved some emergencies.

Flatline is a quick game and the balance of luck and mitigation is just right for us so that we feel in control, but the game is not too predictable every time, and I can see us playing it over and over again.