Firefighters on Duty is a cooperative real-time game for 1-4 Player about being firefighters putting out fires and saving civilians!  This is a game all about rolling dice and moving firetrucks as fast as you can! This was on Kickstarter back in Nov/Dec 2023.  It promised delivery in November 2024, but it arrived at my house in late September 2025 … so it’s almost a year late.  Well, at least it made it.

Apparently, this is similar in many ways to the original real-time game Project Elite!  Project Elite (see BGG link here) was a real-time cooperative game where players moved around and rolled dice … but players killed aliens instead of fire!  Firefighters on Duty is by the same designers as Project Elite, but BGG does NOT list it is as a re-implementation … so it is different.  Unfortunately, I have never played Project Elite, nor do I have access to it, so we can only discuss the Firefighters on Duty by itself.

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing/Gameplay

See Coke can above for scale.  This is a pretty standard sized board game box.

Each player takes the control of one of four firetrucks: red, blue, green, orange.  And yes, everyone wants the red firetruck first!

Of course you need water to put out fires, and water in this game is represented by little blue dice!  See above! When you try to put out a fire, you roll the blue dice!

You carry water in your firetruck, and you decide (when you fight a fire) how many water dice to roll!

Each Location has a little blue water drop; in order to take out a fire at “this location”, you need to roll higher than this number!  See the 3+ and 4+ above … if there’s a fire there. you need to roll 3 and above (or 4 and above).

The game is controlled by action dice!  You can only do what the action dice tell you!  Each player has two dice (the solo player has three), and they are just constantly frantically re-rolling these dice for each 2 minute chunk (4-minute chunk for solo player).  What do these dice do?

Firetruck: move any vehicle one space.  Besides your firetruck, there is also a water truck (to bring more water to you) and an ambulance (for wounded civilians) that you can move
Water: Add one water to the fire station well
Fireman: Move one of your firemen (carrying one thing only)
Gear:  Do an action; usually try to put out fire, but sometimes chip with axe or turn off electricty.

The game lasts six rounds (the round marker is in the Hospital above).  During each round, you have a two minute spurt of activity where you roll-and-execute-as-fast-as-you-can!  A timer marks the time (on your cell phone, the game doesn’t include a timer).  After the real-time phase ends, you have to suffer the consequences of what you couldn’t get to (fires burning, fires exploding, people dying).

Fire is represented by little red wood markers on the board.  There is a little bit of a Pandemic element to the game as spaces with “too much fire” can spread to itself or adjacent spaces!

How are fires set-up initially?  There are 3 scenario booklets (see above), one for each of the player counts!

There are multiple scenarios per book for some variety.  Each Scenario (see one above) shows how to set-up the map and how to put out the people, fire, and hazards!

Guided by the scenario book, you set-up fires, fire hydrants, hurt civilians, hazards, trapped civilians, and the general map!  See above!

Your goal is to put out all fires (usually) and save civilians! You are “docked” points for things you don’t do, and as long as you have a positive score AND have put out all the fires, you win!

The game is all about getting your firetrucks and firemen to the dangerous places!  You can’t put out fires unless your firemen and connected hoses (back to your fire engine) are on fire spaces!

This game is about rolling as fast as you can to get your firemen and firetrucks to the right space!

The components are all very nice and very readable.  They have to be!  You are looking at stuff in real-time and can’t second guess yourself!

Rulebook

The rulebook is a little daunting at a 20-page large rulebook for a real-time game!

The game gets about a C on the Chair Test: see above as the pages droop over the edges when I try to put the rulebook on the chair next to me! Luckily, the font is pretty big and the pictures do a good job of describing things.

The components page up front is good. See above.

The game set-up starts …

.. and then goes to the next page!  Set-up is a little bit of a bear in this game.  Your first time through, it might take you a good 1 to 2 hours JUST to set-up!  Luckily, once you get going, it goes much quicker.

The rulebook is good enough.  The game does have a lot of rules for a real-time game, but don’t worry; it does sink in pretty quickly once you’ve played a game or two.

In general, this was a pretty good rulebook except for the form factor.

Solo Game

Perhaps a little surprisingly, the game does support solo play (thank you for following Saunders’ Law!).   The solo play is not true solo play; you will be taking control and operating two firetrucks.

The solo rules are outlines near the back of the rulebook (see above).  Basically, the solo player has to operate two firetrucks, but has twice as much time per round (4 minutes instead of 2 minutes).

The solo player also gets three action dice (instead of two); it makes it a little easier to roll what you need.  The solo player also gets one more scenario point, and “failures” by the solo player cause fewer deductions for scenario points.

The solo player gets twice as much time because he has two firetrucks!

Let me tell you right now; you will almost certainly lose your first game.  If there is ever fire on a space with wounded civilians at the end of a round, you just lose.  See above.

That first game is ALL ABOUT learning how the systems work;  you learn that trucks can block other trucks (the hard way: “MOVE THAT TRUCK! I gotta get up there!”), you learn how to put our fires, you learn how to move the firemen, you learn to think about how to stock the truck, when to use the water truck, etc, etc, etc.

In my first game, I would stop the clock a lot to look up rules. “Okay, I moved my firemen.  How do I put out a fire again?”   To be clear, there are a fair number of rules and you won’t get everything the first time you play.  I think it’s totally fair to stop and start the timer as you learn the game.

It’s sorta funny, when you lose …  you feel like the experienced Fire Chief is looking back at you and saying “Ok newbie, what did you do wrong?”  Then you realize all the things you did wrong.  There’s actually quite a bit of strategy in the game!  When do you bring out water trucks? When do you return? When do you bring out ambulances?  How do you deploy trucks so they don’t block each?  How do you deploy firemen so they can reach all the fires?  There’s quite a bit of strategy here that isn’t self-evident when you first hear “Oh, this is just a real-time game”.  Nope!

The biggest mistake I made in my first game is setting up the game on one side of the table. See above.  Nope nope nope nope nope.   The problem is that you need to kinda “move around” and “be flexible” as you roll, and place stuff!  Being constrained and squished behind my chair caused me to lose precious time.

In my second game (and believe me, after losing horribly in your first game, you WILL want to play a second game), I set-up around the edges of the table, making sure all chairs were clear so I could easily get to all sections of the board!  See above!  Much more mobile!

And all the stuff that you have to deal with “between real-time rounds”? I put out of the way, away from the action. You DO NOT want these cards and others tokens to get in the way while you are playing!

For the record, this scenario still didn’t “quite” fit around the table!  You need a LOT of space to play this game!  The fire stations (see above) are supposed to be longer, but then they don’t fit on the board!  You may find yourself adjusting the map slightly so it still fits on your table.  So, yes, this game takes a LOT of space!!  Both ON and AROUND the table!

In the end, I won my second solo game (after lots of readjustment), but I still remember stopping the timer at least once to look at the rules.  It’s gonna take at least two tries to get this game.

Let’s be clear; I wanted to play a second time to try to win!

Like usual, I think it’s important to play the game solo before teaching it.  There’s a lot of rules, and it’s better to have a sense of the game so you can teach it and run it.  A lot of questions come up when playing, and I think it’s ok to be able to “stop” the timer occasionally to explain the rules.

Cooperative Play

Teresa and I played a 2-Player game!

After learning my lesson in my solo games, I set-up the table so we could both people could stand easily around the table.  And yes, Teresa wanted the RED firetruck.  I think you need to prepare yourself for people fighting over the red firetruck in the cooperative game 🙂

After a few rounds, Teresa got the game!  Before each round, we’d discuss our strategy: “What am I doing?  What are you doing?  What are you concentrating on? ”  And then we’d start the real-time part of the round, and roll-roll-roll!  We’d deal with the consequences of our actions: watch fires consume stuff, and start with a new strategy for the next round!

We did lose our first round (the ambulance blocked the street and the firetruck couldn’t get through), so we had to learn from our mistakes!

To be clear, we played second game because we WANTED to!  It was fun, and we wanted to learn from our failure, and we wanted to set the course right!

The real-time phase tends to be a little more multiplayer solitaire, as each player concentrates on their region/responsibility, but later in the game, you both realize you need to coordinate in real-time phase to handle fires that are far away!  (One truck with two men isn’t quite enough for some of the faraway fires)  This seemed to work well; as we got our “sea-legs” for the game, then we started realizing: “We need to cooperate more”.

There is a quite a bit of cooperation in this game!  In between the real-time phases, players work together to come up with strategies to defeat the fires!  And players start being multiplayer solitaire in real-time phase, only to realize they have to cooperate in the real-time phase in the later game!

This is a game where cooperation really shines through!

Reactions

Teresa: I liked this! I wanted to play again!  I also liked this better than the other firefighter game we played (you can actually see the other game Teresa is referring to: Flashpoint: Legacy of Flame behind us above!)  Firefighters on Duty is probably a 7.5/10?

Rich:  This was different than any cooperative game I played in a while!  I think the game is much more fun cooperatively than solo, but the solo game worked!  6.5/10 for solo, maybe 8/10 for cooperative?

Conclusion

So I went full in and got EVERYTHING for the Firefighters on Duty Kickstarter: see above!  And you know what?  I don’t think I’ll ever play the extra stuff!  I am not even sure I needed the sleeves (and they didn’t even give me enough sleeves??!)!  The base game has more than enough content for quite a bit of replayability!  If you are thinking of getting this game and you are considering the extra content, I’d hold off!  If you play the pants-off this game, sure, you can pick up the extra stuff later, but I don’t think you need the extra stuff!

This game really invokes a lot of cooperation!  You start off only cooperating in the non real-time strategy phases, but then end up cooperating intently in the real-time phases too!  As a cooperative game, this is fantastic!

Firefighters on Duty is quite a unique event!    When you play it, I almost guarantee you will play twice!  You will lose the first game, then want to replay it to redeem yourselves!  I didn’t expect myself to like this so much (since it’s a real-time game), but it worked really well!   The game started multiplayer solitaire, but the cooperation unfolded as we played more and more!

This is a really neat game; the solo game works well, but it’s not my favorite … but you absolutely need to learn this game solo beforehand to teach it!  And the solo mode works really well for that teaching.   The cooperative mode is really neat; 2 to 3 players seems best (there might be TOO MUCH going on for 4 players?).  6.5/10 for solo game, 8/10 for cooperative game.

I don’t want to play this all the time (real-time games sometimes require me to be in the right mood), but when I want a real-time cooperative game, this is a fantastic choice.