We recently had the pleasure of trying out Flip Pick Towers, an incredibly charming new title from Osprey Games. It is a 1–6 player flip and write game that does something we absolutely adore: it actively encourages artistic creativity while embracing a wonderful touch of Welsh culture. 💪
The premise is delightfully whimsical. A magical blip has caused the royalty’s grand estate to completely vanish! You have been tasked with designing and drawing an extravagant replacement home using nothing but magic, ingenuity, and your drawing pens.
The Lowdown
- Players: 1–6 players (features an excellent solo mode)
- Time: 20–30 mins
- Mechanisms: Flip-and-Write, Line Drawing, Resource Management, Set Collection
- Publisher: Osprey Games
🥄 Low Spoon Approved! – The rules are incredibly straightforward to grasp, turns are entirely simultaneous, and you can take the drawing aspects entirely at your own pace.
👩❤️👨 Played at: Solo & 2 players
How It Plays
In Flip Pick Towers, players are simultaneously drafting card features to sketch out a series of increasingly ridiculous and magical towers on their player sheets.
The flow of each turn is beautifully simple:
- Flip: Reveal 3 tower cards from the deck.
- Pick: Everyone chooses one tower card to use. Multiple players can choose the exact same card, so there is no hate-drafting to worry about.
- Draw & Mark: Draw the chosen architectural feature onto your tower sheet, and mark off the corresponding resource on your tracking columns.
If you ever find yourself in a tight spot where you legally cannot draw any of the available features on your sheet, you must cross off a section of your family crescent. Once any player fills in three of these crescent sections, it triggers a final card flip, and the game immediately ends.
Watch Out for Dragons! 🐉
If a card is flipped and a dragon appears, you have a crisis to manage. You must either physically draw the dragon resting on top of one of your unfinished tower floors, or cross out a precious bag of gold to drive them away. If a dragon settles on a tower, you cannot build any higher on that structure, and you won’t be able to score that tower for its height at the end of the game!
Managing Resources & Scoring
Your resources (windows, beanstalks, banners, and money bags) are tracked in vertical columns. As you mark these off, filling a column unlocks the ability to actually sketch that feature onto your active towers.
The game is played over two fast-paced rounds. Once the tower deck runs out the first time, you conduct a mid-game scoring phase, reshuffle the deck, and do it all over again.
When the final round concludes, points are tallied across several categories:
- The physical height of your finished towers.
- Flags proudly waving on your roofs.
- Decorative banners draped on tower walls.
- Collected gold bags and towering beanstalk heights.
- Placed windows and individual scoring criteria from unique royalty cards.
What We Think
My very first play of Flip Pick Towers was solo, and I genuinely fell in love with it. One of my biggest pet peeves with flip-and-writes is when the solo mode requires a convoluted flow chart of AI rules. Here, the rules remain entirely unchanged for solo play (barring a minor, common-sense adjustment to how windows score), making it an incredibly relaxing, smooth experience.
What makes this game truly special is the freedom it gives you. I loved that I could go as creative and detailed as I wanted with my little tower sketches. The theme perfectly matches the breezy gameplay, and the cultural nods throughout are a wonderful touch.
The replayability is also massive. The game features a hefty deck of unique royalty cards that dictate scoring variations, and because the order of the tower cards changes every single time, no two skylines will ever look the same.
Final Thoughts
Flip Pick Towers is a brilliant, whimsical addition to the roll/flip-and-write genre. It strikes a beautiful balance between cozy, creative sketching and clever, low-stress resource management. It is a total joy to play, a certified low-spoon gem, and a game I cannot wait to get back to the table with a group.
Huge thanks to Osprey Games for sending over a review copy! All thoughts and sketches, as always, are entirely my own.
