Everyone wants to be the next big breakout cartoon—assemble the best cast of characters and find fame!

FlipToons 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 2025, with pre-orders open now that will deliver in 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.

FlipToons was designed by Jordy Adan and Renato Simões and published by Thunderworks Games, with illustrations by Diego Sá.

FlipToons is entirely 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—I’ll explain how that works at the end of the “How to Play” section.

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 or they come out with several more mini-expansions. 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.

You can download a copy of the rulebook here.

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.

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.

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.

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!

If you order FlipToons from Thunderworks Games, you’ll get the Big Button expansion included for free. During setup, give each player a Big Button card, and shuffle the 2 Axolotl cards into the toon deck.

Once during the game, you may push your Big Button (flipping it over to the broken side) to redo your flip phase. Shuffle your grid back into your deck and flip again.

The Axolotl is a Rank 26 card (the highest so far) worth 7 fame; when you hire it, you may immediately reset your Big Button if it has already been used.

FlipToons is GeekDad Approved!

FlipToons hasn’t been released yet, but since I got an early copy back at the end of April, I’ve already played it over a dozen times. 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. The Rabbit 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 Bull gets an extra 7 fame if there are face-down cards. The Cat and the Tiger both get fame boosts based on how many cards you’ve dismissed—these can be particularly good with the Alligator and Snake, which will both dismiss cards randomly from your deck or grid. It can be a bit chaotic and unpredictable, but if you get that going early enough, those felines can be quite formidable. Several animals provide extra fame based on their positioning, so you’re hoping they turn up in the right place: the top row, the bottom row, the middle column, or next to particular animals.

As an example of how cards can combo in ridiculous ways, I set up the above photo with a whole lot of combos. We start with the Elephant, which flips the previous card face-down—but since it was the first card, it provides 7 fame with no downside. Next is the Monkey—if it’s in the top row, it moves up and creates its own row, leaving its original space open. Then comes the Turkey, which stacks on top of the previously played card so it’s also in that extra upper row. Then the Dragonfly, a starting card that can still be valuable because it awards fame based on unique adjacent cards. The Ostrich is next—only 1 fame, but the next card played stacks on it. That would be the Bull, which gives extra fame if you have any face-down cards. In the bottom row, the first card is the Eagle, which flips the next card face-down. Then come two Rabbits—they stack up on the face-down card—the Dragonfly is now worth 6 fame! Finally, there’s a Bear, which gives extra fame for every face-up card in the grid. Of course, it’s unlikely that you’d be able to get this exact build in your deck, and even if you did, the cards have to come out in just the right order, but you can get a sense of how different cards can synergize.

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 Turkey for only 3 fame. If you’re unlucky, you might end up being unable to afford even a Rank 8 Camel 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.

I know that a lot of game publishers have made changes to their 2025 lineup due to the tariffs, with many of them looking for smaller, often card-based games that are cheaper to print and ship, so expect to see a lot more small games hitting the shelves this fall and winter. FlipToons is definitely smaller than most of Thunderworks Games’ titles, but it has been a big hit with my gaming groups and I’ve had a lot of fun introducing it to folks. I think it can be both a nice introduction to deck-building for folks who are new to that, as well as a refreshing twist on the genre for experienced players. FlipToons is on the simpler side: you make decisions about what goes into your deck, but you don’t have any control over the order that they’ll come out. Flipping out your grid of cards feels a bit like pulling the lever on a jackpot, and hitting that perfect combo is a thrill!

Visit the Thunderworks Games website to pre-order a copy of FlipToons!

Disclosure: GeekDad received a copy of this game for review purposes.

Source: geekdad.com