BENGALURU: One of my favourite things about board gaming is that moment when a game transcends the simplicity of its components or ruleset and evokes something greater; like a scene from a movie, say, but one that you and everybody else at the table both had a hand in creating and now get to play out as well. Not many games manage to pull this off, and fewer still do it with quite as much aplomb as Burgle Bros.
You and your friends have just broken into a high-security building and must work together to crack safes, dodge guards, avoid alarms and get out with the loot. Together, you’ll need to work your way across three floors (or two on the introductory difficulty setting) and make it to the roof and safety without anybody getting caught. The good news is that you are all extremely talented criminals, each with a unique special power. The bad news is that you’ve somehow neglected to do any sort of recon beforehand, and must now stumble blindly from room to room. You can peek into an adjacent room, revealing its contents and any alarms there, but doing that every time is going to slow you down. Eventually, you’ll have no choice but to run wildly into the next room and pray that you don’t set off any alarm that might cause the guard to come your way.
Each floor in a game of Burgle Bros has a patrolling security guard, and they are one of the best things about this game. In the beginning, they’re not much of a threat — you can always see which room they’ll head towards next, and they move pretty slowly. However, as the game goes on and you inevitably set off an alarm or two, matters change substantially. Every alarm that goes off increases their speed and they’ll always come to investigate that room and turn the alarm off before resuming their patrolling. The bumbling slowpokes from the early game turn into menacing greyhounds hot on your heels the longer you spend poking about.
Unfortunately, getting away isn’t particularly simple. A floor consists of a 4x4 grid room, a safe in each that you must crack and a stairway leading to the next. To crack a safe, you need to have explored all the other rooms in that row and column, which forces you to spread your focus a bit. Once you’ve done that, you can roll dice to crack the safe. Succeed, and you’re rewarded with some loot...and a silent alarm goes off, immediately making the guard on that floor more dangerous. Oh, and the loot can hinder you as well — maybe it’s a diamond tiara that makes you more visible to the guards, or maybe it’s a (presumably very valuable) Persian cat that has a distressing tendency to wander off towards the nearest alarm. Each is funnier than the last, and they all give you headaches to deal with as you try to get to the chopper on the roof and make your getaway.
If you like cooperative games, you should play this. If you like Ocean’s Eleven, you should play this. Heck, if you like good games — especially games where hilarious things happen extremely frequently — you should definitely play Burgle Bros. It’s a heist movie in board game form, and it’s one of the best cooperative games you can buy.