Designed by: Tim Fowers
In Burgle Bros the players are working together to pull off an unlikely heist – cracking three safes and getting out of the building before anyone is caught!
The ‘board’ is made up of three sets of tiles (4×4) representing the rooms in three levels of the building. Each level will have a safe and a set of stairs that lead upwards. But at the start of the game you won’t know where these are, as all tiles begin face-down. Each level of the building also has a guard patrolling it – usually you know where they are going, but if you trigger alarms in any rooms, they will change direction and head straight towards you!
On your turn you have four actions you can spend in a number of ways – peeking is flipping a tile adjacent to you – but not moving into it. Moving is also an action, but if you’ve not revealed the tile first by peeking, this can be risky: setting off alarms for example. You can also hack to disable an alarm, or – most crucial of all, try to crack the safe. Once the safe on each floor is discovered it is cracked by rolling the numbers of all room tiles in the safe’s row and column – you can add a ‘cracking’ die to the safe for two actions, or roll all the dice present for one action. When a matching number is rolled, a marker is laid on the tile to show the progress made. When the safe is finally cracked, players receive both loot and a tool, and move on to the next safe… or better still, players should separate early and get themselves on the different levels of the building: because the guards move after every players’ turn, you really don’t want to all be on the same level.
The players win by cracking all three safes and getting out to the roof of the building. They lose if anyone is caught by the guards – each player can hide three times when in the same room as a guard (discarding stealth tokens as they do so) but if they are in the same room as a guard with no stealth tokens left – they are caught, and immediately give up their collaborators!
None from each other, as long as nobody starts trying to boss the other players about!
Non-existent really. When it's not your turn you're still involved: making suggestions, or at very least rooting for your fellow burglars!
Fairly low. The rules are reasonably simple, but there's a puzzle aspect to figuring out your (and your team's) best moves.
Set-up is random, players have different roles to play, there are different tools and loot coming out in each game - though the goal remains the same, there's no danger of one game uncomfortably matching another.
1-4
Players
10+
Years
60-90
Mins
Sam says
In our house we don't tend to play a lot of co-operative games: my youngest likes social deduction games and my oldest prefers thrashing me in long and involved space battles like Eclipse. Like the younger-skewed Outfoxed though, Burgle Bros has bucked that trend: because it's relatively simple on the rules, yet also tense and involving, and occasionally absurdly silly: the loot you're stealing from the safes always comes with some down-side, such as a chihuahua who might give you away to the guards, or a bust that's so heavy you can't use any tools whilst carrying it. I was a fan of this designers word game Paperback already, and this is also great - albeit much sillier!