FlipToons is back for a second season, with all new characters!
Note: Since the gameplay is largely the same as the first season, the components and how-to-play section of this review are mostly a repeat of my review of the original FlipToons, with some additions about changes to the new season.
What Is FlipToons: Season 2?
FlipToons: Season 2 is a deck-building game for 1 to 4* players, ages 10 and up, and takes about 15–30 minutes to play. It retails for $19.95 and will be released at Gen Con 2026, with pre-orders open now that will ship before August. The game is a mix of deck-building and auto-battler (more on that below), and is pretty easy to learn, so the game is family-friendly but isn’t just for kids.
* While you do not need the original FlipToons to play this, there are rules to combine the two sets to accommodate up to 8 players.
FlipToons: Season 2 was designed by Jordy Adan and Renato Simões and published by Thunderworks Games, with illustrations by Diego Sá.
FlipToons: Season 2 Components
Just like the first season, FlipToons: Season 2 is entirely cards:
- 24 Starting cards (6 per player)
- 4 Fame cards
- 4 Reference cards
- First Player card
- Critic’s Choice card
- 53 Toon cards
- 5 Price cards
The bulk of the cards in the game are toon cards, done in the old rubber-hose style and depicting various animals. Each card has a rank and indicates how many are in the deck. Below that is a fame amount, and often some additional card effects. For the most part, the card effects are pretty easy to understand, but there is a section in the rulebook that provides further details about specific animal abilities.
The fame cards are a simple double-sided chart, two columns per side, numbered 1 to 40. The player reference card has a turn order on one side and an icon glossary on the other, but also includes an arrow at the top of the card—you use it with the fame card to indicate your current fame each round. Other cards are pretty self-explanatory: price cards just have a big number on them from 3 to 15 indicating the price of a card in the market, and there’s also a first player marker and a Critic’s Choice card that shows a “+3” on it.
If you order FlipToons from Thunderworks Games, you’ll also get the Big Button mini-expansion, which comes with 4 Big Button cards and 2 Platypus cards—I’ll explain how that works at the end of the “How to Play” section. My preview set did not include this mini-expansion, so it isn’t pictured here.
The whole thing comes in a box with a small footprint, just big enough to hold two decks of cards side-by-side, with a little extra room in case you sleeve cards. I usually associate deck-building games with big boxes and hundreds of cards, so it’s always fun to see something like this that’s very compact.
How to Play FlipToons: Season 2
You can download a copy of the rulebook here.
The Goal
The goal of the game is to score the most fame in the Final Flip, which happens after any player reaches at least 30 fame.
Setup
Lay out the price cards in order. Shuffle the toon cards and reveal five cards below the price cards for the market—arrange them from lowest to highest rank so the lowest rank card costs 3 and the highest rank card costs 15. Set the Critic’s Choice card nearby.
Give each player a set of 6 starting cards, as well as a fame card and a reference card. The player who most recently watched a cartoon takes the first player card.
Gameplay
Each round has four phases: Flip, Check Fame, Market, and Cleanup.
Flip: The flip phase is done simultaneously by everyone. Shuffle all of your cards, and then play them out face-up in a grid: two rows of three cards each. Some cards have abilities that are triggered immediately when played, though none of the starting cards do. These could result in more than 6 cards being played. Once you complete the grid, you stop flipping cards even if you have cards left over. If you run out of cards before you fill your grid, you just stop. During this phase of the game, you don’t make any choices—you just play the cards in the order they come up.
Check Fame: Everyone checks fame simultaneously. Add up all of the fame shown on all of your face-up cards. Some card abilities will let you stack cards—all face-up cards count, even if they have other cards stacked on them. Mark your fame using your reference card and the fame card. If anyone generated at least 30 fame, the player with the most fame this round takes the Critic’s Choice card, and the next round will be the Final Flip.
Market: In turn order, each player gets two market actions, which can be used to hire or dismiss toons. To hire a toon, pay the fame cost shown above that card in the market. To dismiss a toon from your grid, pay 5 fame and then place it in your own personal “dismissed” cards pile. (You may only dismiss face-up cards in your grid; cards that have been turned face-down or that are still in your deck cannot be dismissed.) Note that unspent fame does not carry over to the next turn, so use it or lose it!
After both of your market actions, refill the market if needed, making sure to arrange all the toons by rank order.
Cleanup: Collect all the cards in your grid and add them to your deck, and reshuffle your entire deck. (In a 2-player game, you also discard the leftmost and rightmost cards in the market and refill.) If nobody reached 30 fame this round, pass the first player card clockwise and start a new round.
Game End
When a player has achieved at least 30 fame, the next round will be the Final Flip. The Critic’s Choice card, which is given to the player who had the highest fame during the round, is worth +3 fame in the Final Flip. The player who earns the most fame during the Final Flip wins!
In case of a tie, tied players collect all their cards and flip again. Continue until there is a winner!
Big Button 2 Expansion
If you order FlipToons from Thunderworks Games, you’ll get the Big Button 2 expansion included for free. During setup, give each player a Big Button card, and shuffle the 2 Platypus cards into the toon deck.
Once during the game, you may push your Big Button (flipping it over to the broken side) to refresh the market. Shuffle your grid back into your deck and flip again.
The Platypus is a Rank 26 card (the highest so far) worth 5 fame; when you hire it, everyone immediately resets their Big Button if it has already been used. The Platypus is worth 3 bonus fame if your Big Button is face-down.
Combining Seasons
If you have both sets of FlipToons, you can combine the two, and then play with up to 8 players at once. For the market, you’ll use the price cards from the first set, plus the 3 and 15 from Season 2. If you have four or fewer players, flipping these two over so the little “X” is seen at the bottom. All of the toon cards are shuffled together into one big stack, and you still lay out the market as before, ordered by rank. Since it’s possible that you’ll have different cards with the same rank (like the Crow and Rooster in the photo), the more recently drawn card goes further to the right.
Each player gets one starting set of cards (don’t mix and match these!), and gameplay proceeds as normal. The one other change is that during cleanup, if you have four or fewer players, the first card and last card in the market (below the “X” price cards) are both discarded and refilled.
The Season 2 cards have a very tiny “2” in the bottom right corner for sorting purposes.
FlipToons is GeekDad Approved!
Why You Should Play FlipToons: Season 2
FlipToons: Season 2 was announced at the beginning of July, and will get its official release at Gen Con. As with the original, I got an early media copy and I’ve already played it a bunch, and I’m enjoying it as much as I did the first. It’s a quick, snappy game that takes a popular game mechanic—deck-building—and combines it with one that may not be as well-known: auto battler. Auto battlers are games in which you make some decisions about how things are set up, but then there’s a portion of the game that just plays out on its own. Challengers! is another example of a favorite game that uses a similar mechanic—you add cards to your team, but when it comes time to play a match against another player, you both just play out your cards in order.
There are 25 different animals represented in the toon deck, and I like the variety of powers, which can make for some cool combos. There are a couple that will flip other cards face-down, nullifying them, but they usually provide a lot of fame themselves. In Season 2, there are several fish cards (seen in my gameplay photo earlier) that tend to flip other cards face-down—but they’re immune to being flipped themselves, making for a powerful combo if you can collect them all.
Some cards can stack on top of face-down cards (and each other), giving you several cards’ worth of fame in a single grid slot, and the Gorilla seen above lets you play the next card in a separate third row, giving you even more cards in your grid. The Capybara and Hippo both give you bonus fame based on cards remaining in your deck, which encourages you to hire more than you fire—but that also makes it harder to make sure your best cards actually get played into the grid.
The cards are always arranged by rank in the market, so that the weakest card is cheapest and the most powerful card is the most expensive—but that does mean the specific price of any given card is not set. If you’re lucky, the market is full of high-ranked cards, and you could get a rank 20 card for only 3 fame. If you’re unlucky, you might end up being unable to afford even a rank 8 because it has been bumped up to the higher prices.
Dismissing a toon always costs 5 fame, so that’s always an option if there isn’t anything in the market that you want. And as with many other deck-building games, it also matters what you get rid of. If you hire a bunch of cards but don’t dismiss anything, then your fame levels can vary wildly from round to round, particularly if you’re only drawing a small portion of your total deck. And, of course, your starting cards are typically weaker and won’t provide as much fame or powerful effects compared to cards you can hire from the market.
The new season provides a lot of fun new animals and abilities. Some of them are similar to the first season, but just tweaked in different ways, and overall the set injects some novelty into the game. If you like a bit of unpredictability, there are some cards that will randomly dismiss other cards (or even themselves). Even the starting set of cards has been changed, with cards that gain extra fame based on their positions in the grid, or the Firefly that gives you a small fame bump if you’re in last.
The one brand-new card effect is “return”: returning a card means it goes back to the bottom of your deck, so if you have a lot of cards then it may not get played this turn. Most of the return cards help you get to your more powerful cards, but the crab is just picky and will only stay if it’s on one of the sides of your grid.
Combining the two games is fun in theory but does make for some wacky outcomes. Both sets have some cards that combo well, and there are certainly cross-set combos, but there are others that may get diluted—for instance, some of the fish cards in Season 2 score based on other fish in your grid, so those aren’t strictly equivalent to the Season 1 cards that can’t get flipped. As far as adding more players—I do appreciate that I can occasionally play with more than just 4 players, but I think if I had 7 or 8 people I’d personally recommend playing two separate games of FlipToons. Although the flipping portion is simultaneous, the market is in turn order, and with a bigger market, I could see a lot more opportunities for analysis paralysis, and I imagine the game would easily run more than twice as long. One of the things I love about FlipToons is how snappy it is, and I fear that you’d lose a bit of that at the high player counts.
I gave the first FlipToons our GeekDad Approved seal because I felt it was a fantastic game, fitting a quick deck-building experience into a small box. FlipToons: Season 2 is a terrific sequel that lives up to the original—a good intro to deck-building for new players but still satisfying for experienced players who love to optimize their decks. Chasing after that perfect flip is so much fun—especially when you actually achieve it!
Visit the Thunderworks Games website to pre-order a copy of FlipToons: Season 2!
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Disclosure: GeekDad received a copy of this game for review purposes.
