Burgle Bros 3

Subtitled Future Flip, Burgle Bros 3 is the third instalment in Fowers Games' series of cooperative cinematic heist games designed by Tim Fowers and this time joined by Skye Larsen, and with the distinctive art of Ryan Goldsberry. In the first game, players were crooks trying to locate and break into a safe in an office building. The second game in the series was staged around an Oceans 11-style casino heist. This instalment tho' is set in the near future and has the players competing against AI agents in search of their kill switches. It's a standalone game and you don't need to have played either of its predecessors before playing Burgle Bros 3.

As in previous games, players are moving their meeples around a grid, exploring and revealing neighbouring rooms. They each have equipment which gives them a unique single-use ability. In this game, the characters all have a 'disguised' and a 'geared' mode. You are 'disguised' all the time that you still hold 'cool' cubes. When you lose all your 'cool' cubes you have to flip your character card to its exposed 'geared' side. When 'geared', you have a larger hand side and will benefit from stronger capabilities but you are now more vulnerable to the computer system you are hacking...

Just as the other Burgle Bros games had separate floors patrolled by guards so both of the 4 x 4 levels in Burgle Bros 3 are patrolled. This game's android 'SysOp' guards are relatively sophisticated, however, and they also have unique powers that are activated when suspicion levels are raised; for example, because alarms have been triggered.

If you've graduated through the previous iterations of Burgle Bros there's much that will seem familiar but there's enough too that's novel for the game to still feel fresh. The rules are straightforward, so you can be up and playing quite quickly, but it's a cooperative game that delivers a decent escalating challenge. Aside from the guards, there are disgruntled workers who you can charm... It's generally bad to trigger alarms and so raise the suspicion of the patrols but, during the course of the game, you'll find you have to do just that in order to create the distraction needed to avoid another player getting caught.

Stealth tokens effectively represent players' health and players collectively lose if a character exhausts all their stealth tokens; to win, you need to successfully hack the AI and all the characters have to escape with at least one stealth. The patrols ordinarily move towards a destination determined by a card and you don't know for sure where the patrol will head after that; that can mean players taking a push-your-luck decision, tho' that will be mitigated by card counters who keep track of what patrol cards have already been drawn...

Win or lose, the rising tension in Burgle Bros 3 means that players will leave the table having had a memorable experience that they'll be talking about right up till the next replay. You can't ask for more than that.

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