Fate Flip: Washed Ashore Review

boardgamequest.com:

You wake up on a sandy beach. The sun is shining down, your skin is itchy, and you are in a rough state. The last thing you remember is being washed overboard from your ship. You know you are lucky to be alive, but what do you do next?

Welcome to Fate Flip: Washed Ashore, a new solo card game published by Alley Cat Games. You’ll need to manage your resources and make the right decisions if you hope to survive and see your homeland again.

Washed Ashore takes place over up to three chapters. On your turn, you’ll read the top card of the play deck and make a decision based on the choices it gives you. For example, the first card will ask if you want to lie down and rest for a while or start exploring your island. Whichever choice you make will cost you some of your precious resources (three in total). It will also tell you what to do with the card. You might discard it, flip it over (either on the short end or the long end) and then move it to the back of the stack, or sometimes it will go right to the front to be the next card you resolve.

Some cards may also grant you items, which are retrieved from a separate stack and kept on the table. Some entries will give you bonus options if you possess a specific item. You’ll keep churning through your cards until you reach one of the game’s 13 possible endings.

Washed Ashore reminds me a bit of a mash-up between Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger and Palm Island. The main draw here is the narrative and what choices you make, while the flipping mechanic feels straight out of Palm Island. But that’s also where the similarities end.

At its heart, Washed Ashore is a resource management game. Each chapter will start with a few of 3 different resources. For example, in Chapter 1, it’s Safety, Energy, and Food. If you run out of a specific resource, you may be instructed to add some cards to your deck, or it may also be an ending (i.e., you ran out of health and died). There is no benefit for hitting the max on any