In Burgle Bros, you and your co-conspirators are tasked with breaking into a 3-story tower, cracking the safe on each floor, and escaping out the ceiling to the conveniently placed escape helicopter with the loot that you gathered from the safes. You’ll need to work cooperatively to crawl through secret doors, evade laser, motion, and heat alarms, hack computers, dodge security guards, and decode keypads, all in an effort to escape mostly unnoticed. All players start with 3 stealth tokens, and each time the guard catches a glimpse of your hide, you’ll shed one of those tokens. If any player is caught by the guard and has no stealth tokens remaining, they’re caught, and because all your friends are spineless weasels, immediately rat out the whole gang, and everyone loses.
A game of Burgle Bros starts with 3 separate grids of tiles in a 4 x 4 grid, with wooden sticks to create walls and hallways. Each grid represents a separate floor of the building, and you’ll need to imagine that each grid is above the previous one, as there are staircases that allow you to move from floor to floor. Each player gets 4 actions per turn to peek, move, and activate tiles as they try to find the safes. At the end of each player’s turn, the guard on their floor activates, roaming the halls as they move to their destination.
A big part of Burgle Bros is working around these guards. Each guard has their own deck of destination cards that dictate where they’ll explore, and some simple rules on how they manoeuvre around to those destinations. Lots of the tiles and even some player abilities can trigger alarms, which give the guard on that floor an extra movement when they’re activated, and changes their destination to the tile that has the alarm. Generally, not ideal to have a bunch of alarms, but sometimes when you find yourself pinned at a dead-end hallway, having one of your teammates trigger an alarm on the other side of the floor is the saving grace you need.
The guards start off fairly slow, but as you crack those safes, and run the destination decks dry, their speed increases dramatically. It’s mildly terrifying when you’re taking shelter on a tile and the guard is moving 6 tiles every turn.
Each floor has a safe to crack, which requires that you reveal all the tiles on X and Y axis from the safe, then spend actions to put dice on the safe, and spend actions to roll those dice. Once cracked, you get a gear card, which are almost always good, a loot card, which often has a minor negative effect, and the guard on your floor and all floors below increase their speed by 1. The game ends when either a player gets caught, or the players collect all the loot and escape out the staircase on the third floor.
Burgle Bros. is one of my favourite games to introduce to people to cooperative games. When someone comes over to my house and asks, “So, what’s with all these board games?” Burgle Bros. is often the game hits the table. I put on the Ocean’s Eleven soundtrack, and guide them through the game. Just the theme of “We’re robbing a bank!” gets so many people excited! After all, everyone loves a good heist. The individual players each have special abilities, and I encourage each player to give their input on each other player’s turn, but am always firm in reminding people that they have the final say during each turn. Burgle Bros.
I know some people complain about quarterbacking or alpha gaming, when someone dictates what everyone else should be doing on their turn, but that’s not a phenomenon that I ever have to deal with. If quarterbacking is an issue that you need to contend with, just know, Burgle Bros. does absolutely nothing to alleviate that problem. This kind of leads into my biggest criticism of Burgle Bros, sometimes the best move for a player is to just hide on a lower floor while the other characters explore the upper floors. It sucks being the player that just runs in a circle and passes their turn, but understanding that the boring play is the smart play can help. This is also why we encourage for all players to be engaged on every other player’s turn, so that while your character is stuck in a corner, providing input to the other players still feels helpful and fun.
Speaking to the physical production, Burgle Bros. comes in a very compact box. There is absolutely no wasted space here, which I really appreciate. That said, some may construe this as a negative, as it can be difficult to put everything away without accidentally damaging the rule book. Furthermore, while compact, Burgle Bros has a very non-standard box size, meaning it won’t fit neatly between more games on cube-shaped shelves. The tiles and tokens are thick and feel like great quality, the meeples are custom shaped to the characters, and have stickers that you need to apply yourself.
I adore Burgle Bros. It’s tense, it’s exciting, and the gameplay serves an amazing emergent narrative. We’ve had uproarious moments when a player strapped on roller skates to get some extra actions, only to burn every single action on a door with a keypad. The mental picture of a burglar’s face pressed against a glass door and the iconic “squeeeeeek” as they failed to open the door is a gaming memory that I’ll never forget.
It’s this emergent narrative that really hooks players. I don’t think that Burgle Bros is particularly better or worse than most other coop games, but the gameplay and theme of robbing a bank is much more immersive than ‘saving the world from disease’. The actions make sense, the tiles and their effects make sense with regard to the theme, it all works together to create an engaging game that has been the centrepiece of several game nights. Burgle Bros. is a game that my older sister always asks for whenever I go to visit.
Burgle Bros. isn’t easy, and in fact, it’s kind of amazing how quickly a perfect heist can fall apart. I’ve had games where not a single stealth was lost until the third floor, then from just an awful turn of events, have one player get caught 4 times in quick succession and fail the game. That was a lesson on not standing on the Foyer tile that I’ll never forget. I find Burgle Bros excels in replayability, because each of the floors are randomized for every game, you don’t really know what challenges each floor is going to hold for you. Sometimes a long hallway will be your saving grace, and in other games, you’ll get blocked in a corridor with deadbolts all round you. The discovery isn’t in new/unseen content each game, it’s in which tiles come up and when.
As I said above, I adore Burgle Bros. it was one of the first games my wife and I really fell in love with together, and it remains as one of my most played games of all time (34 physical plays, numerous more on the app and a handful on BGA). It scales well from 1 to 4 players, and it’s easy to convince others to play. It’s strategic, but also has some exciting moments of luck. All the characters have different abilities, and mixing and matching them keeps the game fresh. Burgle Bros. is one my favourite games (Number 13 on my 2024 top 100 games of all time list) and one that I can’t recommend highly enough.
