One of the series of small box microgames from Littlehouse Boardgames, Flipa is a word game played using the 18 double-sided hexagonal tiles. Each tile has a letter of the alphabet on one side and it shows at the top the letter displayed on the tile's reverse side. Some tiles also offer an alternative letter on one or both sides.
For the basic game, you shuffle all the tiles and lay them out to form a hexagonal shape. Players then take turns forming words by tracing a path through adjacent letters. You can repeat a letter and you can go back over letters you've previously used. You score a point for every letter in your word. You then flip all the tiles you used and the next player takes a turn. The game continues until a player scores a total of 20 points - so typically three or four rounds.
Flipa makes for an interesting and very portable word game, tho' in our plays at Board's Eye View we found the tile flipping could be fiddly as unless a player only used tiles at the edge it meant the grid usually had to be pushed back into place after each turn. The flipping also meant that players were unable to plan their word in advance of their turn because you cannot be certain of what letters will be available to you until the previous player has taken their turn. Tho' it does rather negate the Flipa USP, we preferred instead to play the Flip'Aint Repeat variant offered in Littlehouse Boardgames' downloadable rules where players made words as per the standard rules but without flipping the tiles used. Keeping the board unaltered through the game greatly speeds up play because players can all play simultaneously. Littlehouse Boardgames rules (which you have to download - they don't come in the box) suggest the core game takes 2-8 players. Using the standard rules, there's too much downtime so it's too slow at higher player counts but you can certainly play the Flip'Aint Repeat variant with up to eight players and with games running to no more than 15-20 minutes.
The letter tiles provide a versatile game resource, with several other word game variants offered, including a solitaire game. There are some oddities; for example, the Q is just that whereas in many word games Q offers QU as an alternative. We just wish Littlehouse Boardgames would include rules in the game box.