Burgle Bros - First Play!

28th August 2022

It's a Sunday evening and we're logged into Board Game Arena for some gaming goodness.

Burgle Bros is a cooperative tile based bank heist/caper game: Can you sneak through the building, dodge the guards, disarm the alarms, find and crack the safes.
Time to find out in... Burgle Bros.

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Caveat: We have only played this digitally.

What's in a game?

• Room tiles: These represent rooms/encounters players will have, there is a wide variety and some will prove useful while many will create obstacles for players. Each one features a black and white line art illustration representing its room. Tiles also have a splash of colour to indicate what kind of encounter they will be. e.g., red means a trap or alarm.
  Numbers: Finally, all room tiles except safe tiles are numbered 1-6, these are used to create the safe combination which must be cracked when trying to open a safe.
• Cards: Burgle Bros uses several different decks of cards.
  • Character cards: There are numerous different burglar characters in the game and each one has a unique ability. Additionally, burglar cards are double sided with a basic and advanced version of each character.
  • Event cards: Certain actions (Or lack of to be precise.) can cause a event card to be drawn and resolved. Event cards can be beneficial or detrimental.
  • Loot cards: This is what the game is all about - getting loot. However, carrying loot always causes a problem of some sort kind!
  • Patrol cards: Pesky security guards patrol the building you're robbing. Patrol cards display a red space on a 4x4 grid which is used determine where guards wander to! The standard game is played of 3 floors and each floor has its own individual patrol deck.
  • Tool cards: When picked up by players, tools can be very helpful to players.
• Tokens: Burgle Bros also makes use of several types of token to represent various situations such as alarms being triggered, door becoming unlocked. etc.
  3 types of token are a little different.
  • Alarm Tokens: There are various types of alarm and each type has their own tokens that get placed on the playing area when the respective alarm is triggered.
  • Stair tokens: These are used to indicate whether stairs go up, down or both - depending on what floor the tokens are on.
  • Stealth tokens: These are vital for players, if a player loses all of them... it's bad news.
  • Wall tokens: These long straight tokens are used to as the name suggests, represent walls on each floor, they determine how players and guards move and may also block line of sight.
• Meeples: It wouldn't be much of a heist game without burglars and of course, guards. The physical game comes with a meeple for each burglar character and 3 guard meeples - one for each of the 3 floors.
• Dice: Burgle Bros uses normal six-siders, which come in 2 colours and each has a different use.
  Red dice: These are used to track both guard patrol routine and the speed they move at.
  Green dice: Players will frequently be called upon to make dice rolls, especially to open safes.

The art direction for Burgle Bros has some unusual choices.
Room tiles have detailed, realistic looking line art illustrations while on the  other hand, characters are depicted with highly stylised and exaggerated cartoony art that looks like it's out of the opening titles of a sixties crime caper movie - which is appropriate.
It's a weird clash of styles but in this instance it actually works quite well.

There are a few icons that are used throughout Burgle Bros but they're all fairly easy to learn, a lot of the game's information is conveyed via text.

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How's it play?
Setup

• Playing area: The building is the main playing area of the game and in standard difficulty the building has 3 floors. This means setting out 3 sets of cards - 1 for each floor to create the building.
  Floors: Remove all the 'Safe' and 'Stairs' room tiles from the room tiles deck. Now shuffle the remaining cards and deal them into 3 face-down decks.
  Next add 1 safe and 1 stairs to each deck and then re-shuffle them into a deck again. Finally put out each deck into a face-down 4x4 grid. Thus, you should have 3 sets of 4x4 cards,
  Walls: Put out 8 wall tokens between cards to form walls for all floors as directed by the rules.
• Patrol decks: Sort the patrols decks by floor and shuffle them into 3 face-down decks. Some cards may have to be randomly removed according to player count.
  Dice: Place 1 red die adjacent to each patrol deck. Set the value of each die to 2-4 depending for floors 1-3 respectively. This value determines how many spaces a guard moves during their action.
• Events, tools & loot cards: Sort these into their respective types and then shuffle each into a face-down deck
• Players: Each should randomly draw a character card and decide whether to use the standard or advanced side. give each player the corresponding meeple for that character.
  Stealth tokens: give 3 stealth tokens to each player.
• Guard: Flip over the top card of the patrol deck for floor 1, place the guard meeple for that floor on that tile - do not reveal the tile.
• Burglars: Flip over any 1 room tile on floor 1. This is the entry point for the burglars, a 'goes downstairs' stair token should be placed on that tile. All players should also place their meeple on the entry space.
• Destination: Flip over a 2nd patrol cards for floor 1. It will indicate the room tile that the guard is heading for.
  Red die: Place the red dice (Showing a 2 for floor 1.) on the destination tile. This indicates the speed at which the guard moves.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
​The objective in Burgle Bros is to find and crack all 3 safes, gain 3 loot cards, then escape to the roof, all without being caught by the security guards.
This is done by the use of action points (APs).

In Burgle Bros, the active player spends their APs to perform certain actions.
Then the security guard on their floor moves along their patrol route.
Then play progresses to the player to the left of the active player.
A turn is broadly speaking, broken down into 3 phases.

• Player action: The active player has 4 APs they can use to perform the following actions.
  • Peek: The active player may spend 1 AP to flip a orthogonally adjacent face-down tile face-up, revealing what it is. This may seem like a waste of an AP but blundering into unknown rooms is a high risk proposition.
  • Move: An AP can be spent to move the active player's meeple to a orthogonally adjacent tile, regardless of whether it is face-down or face-up, a face-down tile is immediately flipped face-up.
    Once a meeple has entered a new tile, its action must be resolved. There are a variety of effects that can occur. Sometimes nothing will occur, or an alarm may be triggered, a meeple might be forced to stop or make a roll to enter the tile and so on.
    Alarm: This isn't a player action per se but whenever an alarm is triggered, 2 events occur.
    Firstly, the red dice is moved to the tile which triggered an alarm, secondly a alarm token is also added to that tile.
    Note: A meeple obviously may not move through a wall token.
    Going to a new floor: If the active player's meeple moves to a new floor. Flip a patrol card from that floor to reveal the starting position of that floor's security guard, then flip a 2nd patrol card to provide him a patrol route.
  • Hack: Some room tiles contain computers a which can be hacked to remove alarm tokens (More on alarm tokens below.). If the active player is in a computer room, they may spend an AP to add 1 hack token to that room. There are different hack tokens that correspond to the different alarm types.
    Later, when an alarm is triggered, a hack token can be removed to remove a matching alarm token.
  • Add dice to safe tile: If a safe tile has been revealed and the active player is standing on it, they may spend 2AP to place a die on the safe tile. A safe tile may hold up to 6 dice.
    These will be used to crack the safe - which is explained below.
  • Crack safe: If the active player is on a safe tile, they may attempt to open (Or work towards opening.) the safe. The following occurs
    Discover combination: Each safe has a 6 digit combination. Look at the 3 cards in the same row and the 3 cards in the same column to get the numbers for this combination. This may include doubles.
    Roll dice: For the cost of 1AP, the active player now rolls all the dice that have been placed on the safe tile.
    For each result on the dice that matches a number in the combination, that number is 'covered'. A single die result that matches multiple numbers in the combination, covers all of them.
    When all 6 numbers in the combination have been covered, the safe has been opened!
    Note: A safe does not need to be opened in a single roll and the assigned dice can be re-rolled at the cost of another AP.
    The following occur after a safe has been opened
    Tool: When the active player opens a safe, they draw a tool card from it's deck. Tools provide some benefit to the player that holds it.
    Loot: The active player also draws a loot card. Generally, loot cards are a hinderance to the players but are also vital to victory.
    ​Guard: Finally, increase the value on the red guard die for that floor. Thus; if the safe on floor 1 is opened, the red die goes up from 2 to 3. It also means that the guard on floor 3 will have a basic speed of 5 after that floor's safe has been opened!
• Check for events: If the active player has only used 1 or 2 APs during their turn, then they must draw a card from the event deck and resolve it.
  Event cards may prove beneficial to players... or may prove detrimental.
• Move guard: Once the active player has finished their actions and possibly resolved and event card, play moves over to the security guard. There are a number of factors to remember when moving the guard.
  1 guard only: Only 1 guard moves, which will be the guard on the same floor where the active player ended their turn. All other guard do not move.
  Speed: The security guard will move at least a number of spaces equal to the value for the red die for the floor.
  Alarms: Alarm tokens increase the speed of a guard, the more tokens, the more movement they have!
  Destination:​ The guard always takes the shortest route towards the red die.
  If the guard reaches their destination, they will deactivate any alarm tokens there.
  If they still have movement left after reaching their destination, flip a new patrol card, move the red die to the new location and begin moving the guard towards it.
  Catching players: If a guard moves on to the same tile as a player's meeple, that player's burglar has been spotted. The player must discard a stealth token. A player must also discard a stealth token, if they move their meeple on to a space with a guard for any reason. Essentially, this allows the burglar to somehow avoid the guard.
  What happens if a player cannot discard a stealth token? Let's just say it's bad news for that burglar!
• Next player: Once the guard has acted, play progresses to the player on the left of the active player.

Endgame
Play continues until 1 of 2 ending conditions are met.

If a player has to discard a stealth token and they cannot because they've already used them up, then the burglar has been caught, players immediately and collectively lose the game.

If the players manage to open all 3 safes, get the loot and all of the burglars off the top of floor 3, they collectively win.

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Overall
First thing to say is that we played Burgle Bros digitally and I felt there was a bit of a disconnect with the game because of this.
In the physical copy, all 3 floors are laid out next to each other but the digital copy required visually switching between them. It means the digital copy can never feel as intuitive as the physical one.

Anyway, on to the game.
Players will need to balance the need to be cautious with the need explore and turn over tiles. Avoiding or neutralising the many alarms is good but so is reaching the objective as quickly as possible.

That's because the real challenge in Burgle Bros is managing the movement and behaviour of the guard. This requires thinking ahead and I mean really thinking ahead! There's almost a puzzle-like logic to it but there's also the potential for a lot of randomness too!
Players will need to anticipate where the guard will go (And when!) and at times try to manipulate the guard by deliberately triggering an alarm and the like.

This is compounded by the fact that the more players there are on a floor; the more a guard may move.
E.g., in a 4-player game, a player may think their meeple is 'safe' but if all players'  meeples are on the same floor (And they will be in the early game.), the security guard will move at least 8 spaces before that player gets to act again, that's enough to cross an entire floor twice! It can become very hard to predict where the guard is going whenever a new patrol tile is flipped over - which can happen often when the guard moves a lot.
I guess the solution to this is for players to get their meeples to other floors ASAP and this will slow down individual guards.

From a gameplay perspective though, this feels a little counterintuitive. It turns what is meant to be a cooperative challenge into 3 sub-games with a only tenuous cooperative link between players.
From a player perspective, it also feels somewhat counterintuitive. For players, the instinct will be to cooperate; opening a safe can be hard and adding dice to it is vital but also expensive in terms if AP. Multiple players will naturally want to quickly contribute as many dice as possible dice to a single safe to help each other open it sooner rather than later.
This is certainly how we played Burgle Bros and in retrospect, that was probably a mistake, it seemed to be that the game punished players for playing this way.

Personally I found it the intricacies of having to deal with so many alarms paired with just too unpredictable guard actions a little futile and frustrating to be enjoyable.

I suspect that Burgle Bros probably plays best at a 2-player count and could be a good couples game if puzzle type gameplay interests you.