Bandido - First play!

30th May 2023

It's a Tuesday evening again and that means it's time for some gaming goodness with the Woking Gaming Club at The Sovereigns.

Bandido is a wily one!. The sly criminal has finally been caught and sent to jail. But Bandido is never one to rest and soon has found a way to dig tunnels out of his cell.
Can the players manage to coordinate in this cooperative card-laying game to stop Bandido escaping?

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What's in a game?

• Starting tile: This thick tile is double-sided and both sides depict the titular Bandido behind bars. One side of the tile shows 5 tunnels out of Bandido's cell and the other 6 tunnels. That's one busy guy no matter which side you look at.

Here's the cheeky chappie himself.

• Cards: The game's set of cards are a curious oblong shape.
  Each card will depict tunnel, this might be a simple straight or bend or might be a more complicated junction.
  Additionally; some cards will show a hand holding a flashlight, essentially represent a discovered tunnel that has been blocked-off, in other words; dead-ends.

A sample of cards.

There's not much to say about Bandido's minimal components.
The starting tile is notably thick and chunky in contrast to the cards which feel a touch flimsy - possibly due to their unusual proportion. This is not an issue though and unless the cards are mistreated they will be fine.

Bandido's artwork is equally minimal, there's a touch of stylised art for Bandido himself and well.... that's pretty much it other than the illustration representing dead-ends and the tunnels themselves.

You could argue that the hand holding the flashlight is an icon, otherwise there's no iconography in the game. Everything is instantly understandable.

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How's it play?
Setup

• Starting tile: Put the starting tile in the central playing area, select the side with 5 exits or for a supposedly harder game select the side with 6 exits. There didn't seem a discernible difference in difficulty as far as I could tell.
• Cards: shuffle the cards into a face-down deck and deal 3 face-down to each player. Players should keep their hand secret from other players.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

​On to play
In Bandido, players are cooperatively trying to stop Bandido from escaping by playing cards to block off all tunnels.
The game uses a traditional turn order with the active player resolving their turn before play progresses to the player on their left.
A turn plays out as detailed below.

• Play card: The active player must play a card from their hand with the following criteria.
  • Orientation: When playing a card, it can be rotated to any orientation and must be adjacent to the tunnel from at least 1 other card or starting tile.
  • Honour connections: When playing a card, it must honour all connections that it is placed adjacent to, that is, it must connect to all tunnels.
    The placed card cannot cut off a tunnel. If this would occur, then that card cannot be play in that way.
  • Cannot play: If for any reason the active player does not have a card they can legally play, then they must place their entire hand at the bottom of the deck and draw new hand of 3 cards, their turn is now over.
• Draw card: After playing a card, the active player draws back up to a hand of 3 cards.
• Next player:  Play now progresses to the player on the active players left.

Endgame
Play continues until 1 of the 2 following conditions are met.

If the deck becomes depleted and none of the players have any cards left to play and there is at least 1 un-blocked off tunnel, then Bandido manages to escape! The player collectively lose.

If on the other hand, the players manage to block off all tunnels at any point during the game, then Bandido is trapped. The players immediately and collectively win!

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Overall
Bandido's theme is sort of stuck-on​ and perhaps a little offbeat (I mean stopping the titular character escaping!) but it fits the game well enough and will be understood by all players.

Whilst the game's rules light, don't be fooled by this simplicity. Bandido is quite a hard game to win. This is especially true when playing at a higher player count. In a solo game, the player will know exactly which cards are available but with 3 companions, it becomes much harder to predict.
(One criticism I have of Bandido is that as the tunnel network invariably grows, it may expand in unexpected ways - more than once we've had to shift the entire map because it was going off a table edge - which is a fairly fiddly affair.)

There is without a doubt also a degree of luck involved (As is the case with most cooperative games.) which may not appeal to all players but there's also a good chunk of having to think ahead and trying optimise how cards are played.
 
It's hard to resist the urge to play dead-end cards that close tunnels down in the early game but it can be vital that you don't always do this.
Management of 'moving' tunnels around the playing area is key to success.
E.g., directing tunnels towards each other and connecting them can create 'loops' which essentially closes both. Additionally looping 2 tunnels into 1 then closing it off is equally useful.
There are only a limited amount of dead-end cards and using them up too early means they won't be available to use in the late game.
It's something players must plan for.
Players must also make sure they don't create any situations with card positioning which will render a tunnel impossible to close.

Because Bandido is so straightforward, with a easily recognisable goal and accessibility, it's a great game for all the family, more causal players and younger players and can prove a lot of fun.
That this is a cooperative game is even better, many cooperative games have intricate systems that must be managed in order to make them work, which not the case here.
It's definitely worth trying.