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.
A copy of A Gentle Rain was provided by Incredible Dream for the review purposes
“Always changing, yet always itself” is the message from the game to the player on the front of the rule leaflet. Themed as a tranquil retreat to a quiet lake that will centre your mind, everything about A Gentle Rain is trying to be a calm, meditative experience.
The rule leaflet sets the scene. You have come to the lakeside hoping to see a rare and beautiful sight. The lilies of the lake only open their blossoms in the rain, and only rarely do all eight varieties bloom at once. The goal of the game, bloom those blossoms.
There are 6 steps to learning the game, with the first step being “get comfortable”. Make some tea, change into cozy pants. Put on some calming music and take a moment to centre yourself. A game of A Gentle Rain starts with a single tile placed onto the table, then your action is to just draw a tile, and place it adjacent to an existing one, matching flowers. These tiles have the corners taken out of them, and when you manage to get a perfect square, you place one of the eight wooden lily discs into the newly created circle at the corner of 4 tiles. If you manage to get all eight lily discs out before the stack of tiles runs out, you’ve succeeded. If not, well, that’s fine too. It’s the journey that matters, not the destination.
A Gentle Rain is a svelte package. A box no bigger than my palm, although deep. 28 luxuriously thick tiles, eight wooden discs with colourful printing, are all that this game contains. There is functionally no barrier to entry for A Gentle Rain, it’s open the box, flip over a tile and start. Literally nothing is stopping you from playing this game at nearly any opportunity.
The rule book suggests taking a moment to relax before engaging with the experience. Remove any stressors, preform a calming, centring exercise, create a peaceful environment, then begin. The randomness of the tile stack means that you can’t really strategize, not effectively anyway, and that’s part of the point of A Gentle Rain. You aren’t here to focus and fixate on winning or surmounting this challenge. This game wants you to relax. Don’t take the world so seriously. Sip your tea, listen to your body, and flip a tile. Maybe that tile will work and maybe it won’t. Be mindful, be present, and be centred.
One of the tips that I’ve used in my parenting is that when your child is having a meltdown, or a tantrum, or some other kind of emotional outburst, their brains a locked in a highly emotional state. Emotional in this case means unconscious and irrational. Something that can help pull their brains out of that state is to engage the logic processors in their mind. Something like “Can you count the stars on the wall?” “Hey, you have paint on your toes! What colour are your toes?”, prompts like that. This brings the logic side of the brain online and helps kids come back to a more centred position (For more information, check out The Whole Brained Child by Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson).
The gameplay of A Gentle Rain, while as simple as can be, the act of matching colours and looking for the perfect spot for each of your tiles is enough logic to pull your brain away from being in an emotional state. There’s just enough to look at, enough locations to consider before making your decision to engage the logic processors in your brain, which pulls your mind into a centred state, and not too much logic that you fall into a cold, calculating state. The other day, after a long day of parenting and a more difficult than usual bedtime, I felt myself fuming. I plopped myself down at my table, grabbed A Gentle Rain that was nearby, and started playing. By the time the 8th lily bloomed, my stress had seeped out, my brain felt calm, and I was ready to enjoy the rest of my evening.
I’m not saying that A Gentle Rain is a surefire stress breaker, but it is an exercise in centring yourself. I think A Gentle Rain is a catalyst; a reminder to take a moment and breathe. Rest your mind, play a little game, and face your day as a happier person. I feel like A Gentle Rain would be the perfect game to live beside your breakfast table. Playing a game in the early morning hours with a steaming coffee sounds like a lovely routine to be in, and a perfect way to start the day right.
A few games have tried to capture the feeling of a roguelike video game, and in my opinion, no game does it better than One Deck Dungeon by Chris Cieslik, published by Asmadi Games.
In One Deck Dungeon, one or two heroes take on a dungeon, guarded by numerous traps and monsters. Each challenge requires the heroes to achieve certain dice values in 3 aspects, strength, agility, and magic in order to overcome the challenge unscathed. Players take damage to their health, and/or lose time by discarding cards off the top of the deck. After each encounter, the heroes can choose to either increase their dice pool, learn a new skill, or take the experience to hopefully level up. Higher levels offer more wild dice, as well as potions, and increases the heroes skill and dice pool limits.
Once the deck is out of cards, the floor is over. The deck is reshuffled, and players continue on their dungeon delve. After the 3rd floor, the boss encounter happens, which players attack round after round until either the players take too many hits and perish, or the boss succumbs to the might of the attacking heroes.
One Deck Dungeon includes 5 characters, all with different starting dice pools and abilities, and 5 bosses, each with a different modifier that needs to be dealt with on each of the 3 floors of the dungeon. Multiple expansions exist for One Deck Dungeon, but I’m only going to focus on the base game here.
As you might expect from a roguelike dice chucker, there’s a lot of luck in One Deck Dungeon. From the values you roll, to the order the encounters come out in, there are a lot of aspects outside your control that can make or break your run, but that’s part of the fun in Roguelikes, right? One Deck Dungeon does give players tools to manipulate their fate, such as trading in a blue 4 to get a yellow and red 4 in return, plus a single +1 modifier that can be used on any dice, or that players can always trade in any two dice to get a single wild dice of the lower value.
One Deck Dungeon absorbs me in its dice manipulation puzzle. I love the moment of rolling 8 or 9 dice, letting them settle, then slowly massaging the numbers to overcome the challenge. It can be really annoying if you modify 4 or 5 dice, then realize you made a critical blunder and need to roll back your changes. But that’s more a comment on my own lack of mental power and making changes before really assessing my tableau than a nitpick about the game.
I’ve had at least half a dozen runs that have just been utter failures. From getting to the boss, only to get utterly pantsed, to falling flat and rolling a staggering number of 1’s against a monster and being forced to take 7 damage in a single encounter. While these moments feel unlucky, I don’t think that One Deck Dungeon suffers from being ‘too lucky’. A big part of the game is knowing when to take a hit, and when to take a challenge reward as experience vs the skill vs the dice.
Even with just the base game, One Deck Dungeon feels like it has a great amount of replayability. Each run through a floor, a player will only see 8 – 10 encounters, and each encounter has their own quirks. Add that to the uniqueness of the characters and the bosses, you can play a lot of One Deck Dungeon before you exhaust its variety.
The campaign mode has a variety of difficulties too, with the goal of the campaign to take a single character and best all the bosses in as few plays as possible. The more dungeons you run through, the more skills and benefits you unlock, making your character a veritable powerhouse by the end of the campaign with all kinds of benefits that can be difficult to remember to use. This does mean that the first few games of a campaign will be the most difficult, which is unsatisfying, but once you’re over the hump, it ends up being a pretty fun challenge.
What I really appreciate about One Deck Dungeon is the small footprint. It’s a tiny box dungeon crawl that feels as satisfying as most of the other dice chucking dungeon crawl games that take up way more space. I also very much appreciate that all the characters are female, which is very non-typical for this genre.
One Deck Dungeon has 2 expansions released, with a 3rd one in crowdfunding at the time of this writing. Each expansion is stand-alone, meaning you can play it as its own little thing, or create a hybrid deck by mixing in the original. More variety is only a good thing when it comes to One Deck Dungeon.
If you’re looking for a roguelike board game, One Deck Dungeon can’t be beat. If a fast and compact dice manipulation adventure that is quite challenging to overcome sounds like your cup of tea, I highly suggest you check out One Deck Dungeon. The experience is mildly addicting, especially after you manage to overcome your first boss, then swapping characters will keep you busy for hours on end!
Apparently I have a love hate relationship with dexterity games. It’s a love, because I adore games like Crokinole and Tokyo Highway. Flicking and building rickety structures makes me giddy and excited. But then I also harbour this utter hatred for Jenga. You’d think I’d enjoy that one too, as it’s kind of the quintessential stacking game. I don’t really know what it is, but I don’t like playing Jenga.
Tinderblox, by Rob Sparks is a dexterity game in a small package. Literally, a mint tin holds the entire contents of this game, Which is just some red and yellow cubes, brown sticks, a small deck of cards, and a pair of painfully ineffectual tweezers.
A game of Tinderblox begins with a single campfire card, and 3 brown sticks. Then, on your turn, you draw a card that tells you what you need to add to the fire. You take the tweezers, pluck the pieces out of the tin, arrange them, then place them onto the campfire. If you knock things down, you lose! Sometimes the cards will tell you to use your non-dominant hand, but that’s the extent of the craziness.
Tinderblox is kind of refreshing as a dexterity game. Its miniscule size means you won’t have a deafening crash when something goes wrong, unlike Jenga. It’s easy to transport and play anywhere, unlike Tokyo Highway or Crokinole. In fact, it’s so easy to play anywhere, that I plopped it on the counter while making Christmas dinner at my in-law’s place, and my sister-in-law and I just took our turns in between our chopping and cooking.
The variety in Tinderblox doesn’t come from the game necessarily, but from your fellow players. If you happen to play with someone who takes risks and places their pieces in precarious locations, that game will feel a lot more tense than if your opponent is super conservative and always takes the safe pick.
The tweezers that come in the game are awful, but I postulate that their ineffectuall-ness is really part of the game. Also, the cubes are wider than the logs, which means you can’t just pinch a stack from above. A fair amount of the challenge in Tinderblox is struggling against the physical limitations of those damn tweezers. I know some people have house-ruled that tweezers are optional, or have replaced them with a more functional set, but I’m of the mind that they’re supposed to be bad. Tinderblox is pushing you to fail. That said, you can become skilled at Tinderblox, as my wife has. She and my sister-in-law managed to run the deck out between the two of them, resulting in a grotesque spire of logs and cubes that was an awe to behold.
Tinderblox doesn’t push the envelope on what a dexterity game can do. It’s not a huge physical gimmick that you need to ensure your table is level for. It’s a fun little game to plop on the table during any social event. I recently brought it on vacation with me, and it’s been a hit everywhere I pulled it out. On a friends’ coffee table after dinner, on the pub table, surrounded by drinks, and even as the cap of a longer game night.
Remember that time, when I was talking about the games I’ve played the most, but don’t own, and said that Magic Maze just wasn’t a game that I felt compelled to own, despite having played it nearly 3 dozen times? Well, Math Trades are wonderful things, and I’m now the proud owner of Magic Maze, so I’m ready to give it a proper review!
Magic Maze is a real time cooperative game for 1 to 8 players. The goal of Magic Maze is to guide the four characters, a dwarf, mage, ranger, and warrior, all represented by brightly coloured pawns, though a convoluted mall so they can steal an item and be prepared for their next adventure, then escape the mall, all before the time runs out.
What’s special about Magic Maze is that players don’t embody any one of those characters. Instead, each player’s role in this puzzle is moving any character in a specific direction, and/or activate a specific aspect of the mall. Like, one player can move anyone to the north, while another player can activate the escalators and move characters east, and another player is responsible for adding new tiles to the board when someone reaches the edge of the map. Players need to cooperatively use the direction they’re allowed to move the characters to navigate the narrow hallways to find the loot.
The rulebook for Magic Maze includes 17 scenarios that scaffold players into the full game. The first run includes only 9 of the 24 tiles, and teaches players the very basics of the game, which is just getting each character to their loot space. Every subsequent scenario adds a rule or a twist to make the experience harder and more complex, such as adding the exits, then special abilities for each character, and so on, until players need to navigate a mall that’s 20 tiles large.
There are two main hurdles to overcome. The first is that the game runs on a 2-and-a-half minute timer. There are ways to flip that timer, but those opportunities are limited. The second barrier to victory is that all communication is limited. So limited, as in, once the game starts, no one can talk at all. Don’t worry too much about that, as there is one reprieve. The “DO SOMETHING” pawn. An obnoxious red pawn that anyone at anytime can pick up and slam down in front of someone else, telling them that they should be doing something at that moment.
The sound of this big red pawn tapping the table has been burned into my psyche
If players are able to grab their loot and get out of the maze before the sand runs out, they win! If not, they bicker about who screwed up the heist while setting up for another run.
Listen, it’s no secret that I love real time games, and will hoist them upon anyone who doesn’t say no. I love the tension that having a tangible loss condition constantly ticking away, and the game mechanics trying desperately to pull your attention away from those timers so you forget about them and lose. I understand that not everyone shares my love of timers, but don’t listen to them. They’re wrong.
Magic Maze is quite simple to play, as you generally only have one or two things that you can do at all, depending on your player count. It’s not hard to remember that you can only move left. What’s more difficult is having people remember that they can’t fix their mistakes if they go a square too far, or locking down their communication to the level the game wants them to.
The first scenarios in the rule book are perfect for teaching new players the barest version of the game, and the scenario structure makes the game incredibly modular, so you can cater to various difficulty levels by adding and removing complexity as required. If you want things easier, the elf’s intercom module lets players talk whenever the elf is standing on an intercom space. If you want things harder, there are plenty of fun tricks for you to discover.
The reason Magic Maze made it into my “games I’ve played the most but don’t own” post was mostly due to the fact that a game can end after just 2.5 minutes. And, at maximum, take 15 minutes, if players are dilly-dallying and hitting all the timer flip stations. The second reason was because I played it with a couple different groups in quick succession at our local board game café, I always felt like I could just play it there and didn’t need to invest in my own copy.
Well, nowadays, I only visit the café twice a year. This is a by-product of moving much further away, and the fact that I now have my own substantial collection of games, not to mention that my buddies all have their own collection of games begging to be played, left a small gap in my heart. I’m not going to make the trip to the café to play Magic Maze anymore, but it’s still a really fun game that I’d love to break out now and then.
Because Magic Maze is so accessible, it’s real easy to suggest it with any group. This is a boon, but it can also make it really easy to over-play this game. After introducing it to 4 different groups within a couple of weeks, playing the first 6 scenarios over and over, it’s easy to get a bit burnt out on the system. And the scenario approach to learning the game is pretty important, as it introduces the most important concepts first, then adds the spice in later chapters. If you threw someone into the deep end, their head would spin in a flurry of iconography and the furious tapping of the ‘Do Something’ pawn.
Speaking of that obnoxious relic, I both love and hate the ‘Do Something’ pawn. On one hand, it’s loud and grating, having it tapped sharply every time someone picks it up and places it in front of someone else. On the other hand, the tension when both you’re the own trying to get someone to move a character, and when that pawn is placed in front of you, is simultaneously dreadful and delicious. What path you want to take is obvious to you, but is utterly hidden for someone else. When the pawn lands in front of you, and you’re frantically searching for anything you can or should be doing, all while the precious seconds are ticking away, goodness I live for this sort of fun.
My feelings are best summed up thusly. I recently went to a friend’s house to play Revive, a heavier economic action efficiency game. I brought along Magic Maze “just in case you actually wanted to have fun tonight.” and we did end up playing it at the end of the night, and all three grown adults playing the game collapsed into a fit of giggles as we failed the first mission 3 times in a row. Magic Maze is a fun game, one that puts a smile on your face, while also offering a challenge to overcome. It’s not the same kind of sophisticated fun that a game like Brass: Birmingham offers, but more of a slapstick juvenile type of fun that leaves you grinning from ear to ear, if not wholly satisfied. I don’t want my game night to consist only of Magic Maze, but I’m sure glad when it makes an appearance.
Considering how often I profess that I love dexterity games, I’ve never really liked Jenga. Even that’s an understatement. Jenga stresses me out and makes me want to leave a room. So imagine my surprise when I found Jenga Maker on clearance after Christmas at my local Canadian Tire. Perhaps it was the brightly coloured pieces that drew me in, but at rock bottom prices, I figured worst case, it’ll be a toy for my toddler to play with.
You’re supposed to play Jenga Maker with 4 or more players, split into two teams. One player on each team is the director, while the others are the builders. Each director draws a card, then dictates to their team how to build their structure. The first team to do so, snatches the crown piece, places it on top, then once the other team checks for accuracy, claims a point. The first team to 3 points wins.
It’s a treadmill
Oh. That’s how I knew I’d like Jenga Maker. Real time and dexterity. Love both of those mechanisms right from the start. The Jenga Maker box is thin and doesn’t waste much space. The pieces fit snugly within, but not too snugly that it becomes a challenge to put away at the end of the day. Each of the pieces are hefty and chunky wooden shapes, brightly coloured and really, a joy to handle. There are some interesting shapes beyond the normal tetromino shapes I come to expect.
I don’t recommend playing Jenga Maker with more than 4. Having extra people on each team doesn’t really add to the experience, as you’re still only building one structure per team. The dictator will tell you how to manipulate the yellow piece, one player will grab the yellow piece and start putting it in its place, and the other player(s) just watch the game unfold. Perhaps with lots of practise, directors could give directions to two players at once, but doing so isn’t going to add to the game experience.
A Canoe and a Sword
So, my fallback plan of “being a toy for my toddler” worked tremendously. Lately, she’s taken an interest to my board games, and will often say “I want to play a game”. Having a game like Jenga Maker is the perfect solution. Sometimes she loves drawing a card and just following the recipe, creating whatever is depicted. And sometimes she’ll just want to stack all the pieces together to create a boat or a castle. Either way, the wooden pieces are fun to manipulate, are weighted and balance well, and when she joyfully collapses whatever has been built up, there’s no harm to any of the pieces.
I can’t recommend Jenga Maker for much. I paid ~$10 for it, and it was a worthy investment for me. That said, I recently saw it again at a different store for $25, which is a bit more than I’d be willing to pay for it if I were looking for a gift. Jenga Maker does make a great gift for any child who likes stacking blocks, as they’re fun shapes to play with, and come with decks of ideas for what to build, if you can find one at the right price. I do love playing this with my toddler, and she loves it too. It’s kinetic, colourful, and nearly indestructible. But as a frowny face ‘serious’ board game, it’s a fine activity.
