Designed by: Martin Nedergaard Andersen
In Bandido, the players work together in catch the escaped bandit!
The starting Bandit tile is placed centrally in the play area – ideally either a large table or a clean floor, as he does (eventually) take up a lot of space. All players are dealt three tunnel cards and play commences.
On the Bandit tile are five tunnels, leading off the card. The players’ shared objective is to make sure every tunnel leads to a dead end, and on your turn you must add a card to the ever-expanding network that the seemingly-inexhaustible Bandit is digging. The problem is that most of the cards branch out rather than end (-there are a number of dead-end cards, but it feels like there are never enough!) and so the key to success is to try and link these various offshoots back together again – easier said than done.
After placing a card, you draw a new one and it’s the next player’s turn. Players can communicate to a degree – for instance, saying you have a good card for a specific location – but may not show each other their cards (- unless you want to play a kid-friendly house-rule of all cards being visible) If the cards run out, the bandit escapes, and you lose. If you manage to close off every tunnel, the players win instead.
None.
Very low - each turn involves adding a single card, and any pauses are generally down to conversation and collective planning.
Minimal - the challenge is to try and get various disparate tunnels to join up.
It's rather one-note, but fun enough - and tricky enough - to return to.
1-4
Players
6+
Years
15-30
Mins
Sam says
A neat little game in a neat little box. There's a more-ishness at first: it's not at all easy to succeed and we felt inspired to do so. But when we did succeed, we never really felt a strong desire to play it again either: it's just a little too repetitious and the balance of frustration/fun the game seeks to strike can seem to err slightly toward the former as the various tunnels proliferate their way around the table. But that aside, I think the game pretty much achieves what it set out to be and could be a hit with younger kids.