Forget the Flippers

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call Steven Aramini one of our hobby’s finest designers of small-format board games. Whether we’re talking about microgames like Sprawlopolis and Ancient Realm, or Fliptown, still perhaps the finest flip-and-write game ever designed, Aramini has a keen talent for compressing big ideas into small packages. Flip Voyage, then, is his followup to Fliptown by way of Nemo’s War — although in a rare Aramini miss, this one surfaced too quickly and contracted the bends. We all live on an ordinary blue submarine. If you’ve played Fliptown, the basic conceit behind Flip Voyage will be familiar, if perhaps also baffling in its pared-down nature. Like that game, Flip Voyage is a combo-heavy flip-and-write that sees everybody at the table — whether one player or fifty, with the box providing enough dry-erase boards for four — turning three cards at a time from an ordinary deck of playing cards. Everyone uses that trio according to their own individual goals and…