Flash Point: Legacy of Flame

Elznir Games · 2025

Translation, English to German

This one takes all the mechanisms of its predecessor Flash Point: Fire Rescue and uses them to build a legacy campaign game. It’s a cooperative game, in which players take on the role of firefighters, trying to evacuate as many people as possible from a burning building. The game uses a clever terrain escalation mechanic to spread smoke and fire, with various added effects increasing the risk of explosions and collapsing ceilings that players need to keep an eye on, with the building’s impending total collapse acting as a final but only marginally predictable timer. The legacy campaign, which tracks players’ firefighter careers from rookies to vets across a story with crime novel elements, works by stripping down the game mechanics and then reintroducing them bit-by-bit with each subsequent scenario. There’s no component destruction as such, but you get a whole bunch of secret envelopes to open with stickers that modify the rulebook. By the end of the campaign, you have a rulebook that has all the game’s rules covered, and from then on, you can play the scenarios as one-shots using all the mechanics. This project came together because the translator originally tasked with the job simply let an AI translate everything and then handed off the job without post-editing anything, which is just downright disgraceful (for some reason, the publisher still saw fit to include them in the credits under “preliminary translation”). The layout designer thought some of the wording was strange and spotted inconsistencies, at which point the chief editor got on the phone to the translator and it call came out. This resulted in me being brought on board to “iron out” the translation. In effect, I had to rewrite pretty much everything, but because time was critical, we decided I should do so in the final layout files. It was the first time I worked with InDesign and basically my baptism of fire in terms of layout editing. My translation was received with praise, but my pretty amateurish efforts to maintain the layout ended up doing more damage than helping, and the files needed a fair bit of “repairing”. The project taught me a lot about InDesign, albeit more in the debriefing than during the actual work. And the publisher and me also found out first hand that LLMs still aren’t quite ready to replace translators when it comes to more complex boardgames.