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.
Almost to the end of the list now! These games are ones that I would play anytime, anywhere. These would always get a resounding “YES” from me, if ever asked to play
It’s one of the most satisfying dexterity games I’ve ever played. There’s a high skill ceiling, but also great potential for laugh out loud funny moments. From bouncing off two of your opponents disks to land in the centre, to fully missing the most basic of shots.
The translucent colourful dice are simply beautiful, and when beautiful components are paired with a simple yet satisfying puzzle, you get a perfect introductory game. I cannot tell you how many people I’ve convinced to start playing board games regularly when I see them doing a Sudoku, and I give them a nudge into the hobby with Sagrada.
The positive player interaction. One player builds a coal or iron mine, another player consumes it to build something else, both players benefit. That on top of some really interesting dynamics make Brass: Birmingham a top tier game.
Oh man, it’s a shorter list to say what I don’t love about Scythe. To pick one thing that really draws me into this game, I love that it’s a ‘cold-war’ game. The threat of combat is so much more present than the actual combat. I’ve had games where I was the loser of the only combat encounter of the whole game, but I ended up as the overall winner. It sounds counterintuitive, I know, but it’s endlessly satisfying.
My favourite Stefan Feld game by far. I love how simple each turn is, just use your two dice, but how efficently you use your actions determines how well you do in the game. There’s a push to fill your small provinces early to get the bonus points for doing so, but those large provinces offer huge rewards, if you can complete them. One day, I want to complete the whole board. I don’t know if it’s possible, but it’s what I want to do.
Oh gosh, Calico is a puzzle game with teeth, and I love it for it. Every hex you place feels impactful, and deciding to put a purple dots tile in one spot means you’re choosing to not pursue three other objectives with that spot. I have my head in my hands the entire time I’m playing Calico, which doesn’t sound like a good thing, but I love the burn this game gives my brain
Leaving a trail of workers behind and then doubling back to pick them up again is a genius mechanic. You want to be efficient with your actions, and spending time going back to a space you don’t need is painful, but running out of workers means you can’t do anything. I also love how fast Istanbul is to play, with most games taking around ~25 actions, you can fly through games, assuming no one is stalling at the market for too long.
The auction/bidding mechanic that makes money flow around the table, and the game constantly pouring more and more money into the economy letting the bids grow bigger and more ludicrous makes for exciting rounds. I love pricing one tile just a bit too high and watching my opponents agonize over spending that much cash on a single tile. I don’t even care if I win, I just want my friends to be uncomfortable for a bit!
Humans are bad at randomness. That’s just a fact. The most salient example I can think of is that Apple had to make their shuffle feature less random on their early generations of iPods because of complaints that the randomization of songs didn’t feel random enough. It feels ironic that in order to make the playlist ‘feel’ more random, they actually had to make it less.
To take this a step further, video game developers have been ‘fudging’ the numbers for a long time. There are often hidden values and design tricks that are utilized to make the player feel like they’re successful, or to encourage more ‘barely survived’ moments, or to make the game feel more fair. Things like, the last portion of your health is actually much more than it appears to be in the health bar, or the first or last shots will always miss you, or in Civilization there is a value that keeps track of your combat losses, and will make your odds of winning your next combat slightly higher, to prevent a constant string of losses.
All these tricks make games feel more fun. In tabletop role-playing games, some DM/GMs will opt not to keep track of enemy hit points, but to just do what feels narratively best. If a player risked it all and did something awesome and pulled off the roll, then that’s the killing blow. So much more satisfying than a rogue who scratches the dragon’s toe that just so happens to be the final point of health. If a party is beating the hell of a boss that should be much more difficult (due to narrative importance), a DM can just, extend their HP until they feel the foe has served its purpose. There’s a whole discussion to be had about tabletop role-playing games about which is more important, mechanics or narrative, but I’m not equipped to facilitate that discussion.
All of these examples are ways that designers tweak systems to make games feel epic. The stories that we remember, well after the game session has ended, the memories that bring smiles to our faces when we reflect on these experiences, and the memories that keep bringing us back to games.
It brings to mind a question then, how can you create the awesome narrative moments, squeezing out a victory when all odds were stacked against you, in a board game? The very nature of a board game demands transparency. You can’t obfuscate the stakes when the players are also responsible for maintaining the system. The most obvious example I can think of come in the form of competition between players. There have been a few moments in board games where a clutch roll of the dice is the difference between victory and defeat. “The only way you can beat me, is if you roll four 6’s on this turn.”
“Damnit!”
But what about cooperative games? I’ve been playing Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth and the balance of some of the missions feels off. One mission had flat out running through a cave, only for us to take the wrong fork at the end, and need to backtrack, but didn’t have enough time to do so. I think back to that mission and I actually can’t think of anything that we really could have done better, other than to have taken the correct fork at the end. Other missions we succeed with more than half of the remaining time. Neither of those scenarios feels good.
The best cooperative experiences are the ones that have you succeed by the skin of your teeth. I’m amazed at just how often I’ve won a game of Matt Leacock’s Pandemic on the last possible turn, or, in Tim Fower’s Burgle Bros, having a 50-50 shot of the last guard moving into my path and catching me red-handed just before I escape. Those moments are exciting, even when we lose, we loudly proclaim just how close to winning we were.
“Better luck next time, coppers!”
I know a lot of time, effort, and playtesting goes into modern board games and tweaking the balance to make it feel just right is a difficult challenge. Finding that sweet spot between a deterministic puzzle, and a random luck fest, is a feat in it’s own right. Generally a balance of randomness, and how much information a player has before they make their decisions seems to be key. In Now Boarding, players know where their passengers are spawning in from, but don’t see their destinations until the 15 second real time phase begins. You might have a perfect plan, but as soon as those cards flip up, you might just need to throw your plans to the wind. Having that imperfect information prevents players from ‘solving’ the game before the real-time phase begins. I suppse that is what seperates a game from a puzzle.
So what are the games that feel the most tense to you? What are your favourite cooperative games, and what is it about them that makes your heart sing? Let me know in the comments below!
