As much as I love a good “heavy” game, one that fills my tabletop with decks of cards, a sprawling board, and colorful assortment of components, I also appreciate a small games that I can bust out at a moment’s notice, that I can teach in just a minute or two, and have a great time with. The newest game in my collection that fits that role spectacularly is Flip 7, a card game we’ve featured as one of the best cheap games you can buy. It was also nominated for the prestigious Spiel des Jahres, and won Board Game Geek’s Party Game of the Year during their Golden Geek Awards 2024. It’s very good.
Flip 7
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Designed by Eric Olsen and published by the OP Games, Flip 7 at its core is a push-your-luck game where players race to be the first to reach 200 points by playing cards blindly from a deck of cards that range from 0 to 12. For all the numbered cards (except zero), each card has as many copies as its value – there’s a single 1-value card, two 2s, etc. A player’s turn immediately ends if they ever pull a duplicate value card, they choose to pass their turn and take the points they have earned in that round, or if they manage to flip seven value cards, which also earns the player bonus points. Rounds continue until one player has reached those 200 points.
Despite being a simple game, Flip 7 is visually striking with an Art Deco aesthetic and cards featuring bright colors and large numbers. Each number has its own color, with the modifier cards a bright honey-yellow that contrasts with the more tan-centric backgrounds of the number cards to avoid confusion. As a pleasant added touch, some of the frills and decorations on the cards connect seamlessly to one another, allowing you to create a lovely, rainbow-like collage of cards with each one you pull.
Flip 7 has such a low barrier of entry, really only requiring at least one of the players to be able to do simple math (even that you can mitigate somewhat thanks to the free tracking app), and with games only taking maybe 15 minutes, it makes it an easy recommendation for basically anyone. It’s a game that I could just as easily recommend for my friends I play heavy board games with, or my mom, who is more comfortable in the land of solitaire, and know that both audiences would have fun with it. The fact that this game scales up incredibly well, too, for parties is just an added cherry on top.
Where Flip 7 may be a bit of a turn off for some folks comes from the fact that this game is, at its core, a game of pure luck, with the only strategy coming from whether or not you’ll risk drawing another card to try for more points. Ideally, I would have loved if there was a smidge of a hint of an element that lends itself to strategy in here. Flip 7 fills very much the same spot as, say, an UNO or Skip-Bo, simpler games that appeal to a far broader market – but in those games, players have more choices they can make, as opposed to Flip 7’s only real choices it provides players is to either to draw a card or not play.
Among my collection, I have a very elite selection of games, my Glove Box Collective. These are games I like to keep in my car’s glovebox so that I always have them on hand when I go places. These are games that I can bust out at a moment’s notice, when I have a few minutes to kill, when I’m meeting friends at a local brewery, or am simply visiting family. Flip 7, thanks largely to its quick-to-teach and easy-to-play nature, has earned its spot among this most prestigious collection of mine.
I do wish that there was a bit more player choice involved but the tense “should I or shouldn’t I” nature of the game has led to some great moments of celebration where taking that risk has resulted in me winning a game, and those of frustration where I blew through all of my extra chance safety cards back-to-back only to still lose. But such is life in games of luck.
