Burgle Bros.

*Snick!* your team of cracker jack thieves has evaded guards, hacked keypads, dodged lasers and finally cracked the safe. You tremble with excitement as an eerie fog rolls out of the vault, to reveal: a small chihuahua… What kind of bank is this?!

Burgle Bros. is a cooperative game (1-4 players) where you and your team need to find and crack all of the safes in a bank and then escape the building without getting caught. I have played with 1-3 players.

Setup
To set up the game, you must randomly select a character for each player. Each character has different abilities to help you get the loot. A character card has 2 sides with different abilities on each side, one side is “advanced”. The 7 characters are similar to characters in heist movies and offer a lot of different combinations and strategies for getting past tough rooms, tricking guards and cracking safes. Characters start with 3 stealth tokens which are essentially health. The character is able to hide from a guard 3 times but will be caught on the 4th time and the game will end since the thief will rat out his buddies.

After picking your characters you need to set up the bank. You can play with 2 or 3 floors. Each floor is a 4×4 grid of room tiles that are shuffled and laid face down, the only thing you know for certain is that each floor has a “stairs” tile and a “safe” tile. The other rooms could help or hinder your progress. After laying down the room tiles you place walls in between the rooms either using the room generator website or by creating something on your own. These walls prevent most travel and block sight in most situations. Then you lay out the loot deck, event deck, and tools deck.

Finally you set up the guard deck. The guard deck is a series of cards that tells you where the guard is, or where he is moving. The guard will only move on the floor where the player is active, so to start the game you reveal where the guard starts and set its movement die to 2. Which means after each character turn the guard will move 2 spaces. Once a guard reaches his destination, a new random destination is pulled and he starts to move to the new room. Guards always move the fastest route or the most clockwise route and ignore room abilities. If a guard is in the same room as a character, that character loses a stealth token. When the guard deck runs out it is reshuffled and the speed is increased by 1. If an alarm is set off, the guard moves towards that room and the speed is increased by the number of alarms going off. We play that you can’t look at the guard discard deck, but the rules say you can.

Gameplay
To start the game, the characters enter the building anywhere on the first floor (they tunnel in) and then on your turn you have 4 action points to spend. You can: peek at an adjacent room to see what it is, move into an adjacent room, hack a computer (if in a computer room), add dice to a safe (if in a safe room), try to crack the safe, use a tool or a special action, among various things.

Basically you are trying to find the safe and the stairs, crack the safe, and move up to the next level all while avoiding the randomly moving guard. Peeking reveals the room so you know what your character is getting into. You can move into an adjacent tile without peeking but run the risk of setting off an alarm, losing an action because you run into a deadbolt or keypad, or even falling down to a lower floor. Knowledge is power in this game, the more you know about the rooms the more you can use them to your advantage or plan ways to work around them. If you spend 2 or fewer actions you trigger an “event” which means you pull an event card. These could be good or bad for you.

Finally, after finding the safe you need to crack it. To do this you need to reveal each room that is in a straight line horizontally and vertically from this room (hard to explain but once you see the game set up it makes total sense). You spend actions to add dice to the safe room and then spend actions to roll the dice in hopes of getting the correct numbers. Once you crack the safe take a tool card which are usually very helpful) and a loot card (you don’t have to play with the loot deck but we do) and make your way to the next floor. Where you reveal the guard (who moves 1 space further than the guard below him started as moving) You keep doing this until you crack the final safe and escape the building by going up the last flight of stairs onto the roof where a helicopter is waiting.

Pros/Cons
Pros:
Awesome art
Game is very well made and good quality
The whole game makes sense, very intuitive
Exciting! The game gets more tense with each floor
Lots of meaningful decisions
Random floor and wall set up makes a different game each time
Different numbers of floors allows for different game lengths and difficulty
Fun to explore the different characters and strategies with them
Theme is exectued wonderfully
Teamwork is definitely needed to succeed

Cons:
-Can be fiddly, lots of things to remember to do each turn.
-Alpha player could take over, or at least make the game less fun
-Can get super unlucky with guards and tiles, but usually unlucky on one floor means you get lucky somewhere else.
-for people who want total control this game can be frustrating.
-with 3 levels, it can take up quite a bit of space, unless you buy or make the tower.
-Some character more interesting/fun than others.
-Box BARELY fits the game.

Overall
I kickstarted this game expecting a really fun and engrossing game. I wanted to feel like I was pulling off a heist. That is exactly what I got. My wife LOVES this game, she will not turn down a game of it when there is time. The art, theme, simple turns, meaningful decisions, and building suspense makes this game a hit with us. It is kind of like a more complicated Forbidden Island. The strategy with how to use the characters to mess with guards, evade traps and get around obstacles is fun and mostly different each time. Some characters are so much fun, like the acrobat who can move through a room with a guard without being detected. Or the rook who can move another character on his turn. Other characters have useful abilities, like the hawk who can peek through walls, but they just aren’t as exciting. The loot deck is a lot of fun, imagining yourself escaping from a bank with a yapping chihuahua setting off alarms and attracting guard’s attention is just silly and fun.

At times the game seems to just be totally against you but if you are able to survive, things eventually turn in your favor. The more players you have, the more floors you will want because it slows down guard movement, since someone on the 2nd floor doesn’t activate the guard on the 1st floor. So more floors isn’t necessarily harder. The more people you play with, the harder the game gets since the guard will move more before your next turn. 3 players is a good number, it is challenging but not too hard. I haven’t played with 4 but I imagine it gets a lot harder. I played this solo the first 2 times with 2 characters and I would suggest others do a solo game as well to get all the rules down.

The dark side of this game is that we have played this with people who hijack the game try to figure out every little thing that will happen. There are enough random elements and moving parts that it is really hard to “figure out” the game. This makes those gamers that like to “solve” the puzzle of the game go bonkers. Since each person has their own character and there are a lot of unknowns, the alpha player doesn’t necessarily boss people around. I find that the alpha player just stresses everyone else out and tend to confuse people with convoluted strategies and mess up turn order which can ruin the game. So make sure you have a token to remember turn order, and have some kind of rule about unwanted talk.

That being said for 1-3 players it is a great game, for avid, casual and family gamers, just be careful with who you invite. With some house-ruling you could probably play with 5 players. I mostly play it 2 players and it is a blast to play that way. So if you are looking for a big game in a small box, look no further!