Get in, get out, and don't get caught!
Burgle Bros. is a cooperative Stealth-Based Game where the players are members of an elite crew trying to pull off a heist without getting caught. Together, they must explore the building (represented by a grid of initially face-down tiles for each floor), avoid the alarms, sneak past the guards, find and crack all the safes, and get to the roof to escape.
A sequel transports the players into a casino heist setting.
Tropes found in the game include:
- Abandoned Pet in a Box: Why would The Chihuahua or The Persian Cat (two Loot cards) be kept in a safe?
- Air-Vent Passageway: The two Service Duct tiles are considered adjacent to each other, no matter where on the map they are.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience:
- Different types of rooms are color coded:
- Pink: Camera (Alarm)
- Red: Fingerprint, Detector, Laser, Motion, Thermo (Alarms)
- Beige: Deadbolt, Keypad
- Yellow: Atrium, Foyer
- Olive: Secret Door, Service Duct
- Green: Safe
- Blue: Laboratory, Lavatory, Walkway
- Purple: Computer Room (Fingerprint, Laser, Motion)
- Gray: Stairs
- Character tokens are color coded:
- Red: The Acrobat
- Orange: The Rigger
- Yellow: The Juicer
- Light Green: The Spotter
- Dark Green: The Hacker
- Light Blue: The Rook
- Dark Blue: The Peterman
- Purple: The Raven
- Black: The Hawk
- Different types of rooms are color coded:
- Co-Op Multiplayer: You lose pretty fast if you don't coordinate your actions with others.
- Critical Encumbrance Failure: The negative effects of some of the loot cards, like the Gold Bars (each character can carry only 1 of them), the Mirror (actions per turn reduced by 1), and the Painting (cannot use Secret Doors or Service Ducts).
- Cursed Item: The Loot cards all have some sort of negative effect, such as the Cursed Goblet (lose 1 Stealth token), the Chihuahua (1 in 6 chance of barking, triggering an alarm on your starting tile), or the Keycard (only the holder can roll to crack safes).
- Dark Is Evil: The tokens for the guards are black. The tokens for the characters are brighter colors (except for The Hawk's token, which is also black).
- Delicious Distraction: The Donut tool serves this role. After you play it on a guard, that guard will not move the next time he is supposed to move.
- Difficulty Levels:
- The Office Job (Beginner's Game): 2 floors, each a 4-by-4 grid of tiles
- The Bank Job (Standard Game): 3 floors, each a 4-by-4 grid of tiles
- The Fort Knox Job (Expert Game): 2 floors, each a 5-by-5 grid of tiles
- Everyone Has a Special Move: The 9 characters come with different abilities. Furthermore, each character has both a basic ability and an advanced ability (recommended only for experienced players).
- Extra Turn:
- There are Event and Tool cards that grant characters extra actions. Inverted by a Loot card that reduces the holder's number of actions by one.
- There is an Event card that causes the next player to lose a turn. In two-player games, this effectively gives the current player two turns in a row.
- The Guards Must Be Crazy: Each time a safe is cracked, the guards on that floor (and below) speed up. But they don't respond to the safe location; they keep walking their regular rounds, only faster. (Admittedly, if they did respond to the safe location, the game would be a lot harder.)
- Heist Team: The characters form one.
- Hit Points: The Stealth tokens effectively act as this. Each encounter with a guard costs you a Stealth token. If you encounter a guard but have no Stealth tokens, then you are caught and your team loses the game.
- Hollywood Hacking: Any character in a computer room can hack the corresponding type of alarm (Fingerprint, Laser, or Motion), which allows anyone to discard a hack token rather than triggering the alarm when entering a corresponding alarm tile.
- The Immune: The Hacker's Jammer ability renders him immune to Fingerprint, Laser, or Motion alarms.
- Insecurity Camera: The Camera tiles raise an alarm only when a guard happens to pass through some other Camera tile. Clearly, paying someone to watch the Cameras full-time is too expensive.
- Let's Split Up, Gang!: A common strategy is to move each character to a different floor as soon as possible, since a guard moves once for each character on that guard's floor.
- Luck-Based Mission: The layout of the tiles is random, and can greatly affect the difficulty of the mission. For example, the Service Duct and Secret Door tiles can create a useful connections, or they can be in spaces that were already adjacent. As another example, the stairs to the roof can be easy to reach, or they can be in a distant corner of the top floor.
- Mister Muffykins: One Loot card (The Chihuahua) randomly barks and attracts the guard's attention (setting an alarm).
- No Item Use for You: The Bust loot card prevents the holder from using any tool cards.
- Patchwork Map: The tiles for each floor of the building are arranged randomly, often resulting in floor plans that don't make much sense architecturally.
- Race Against the Clock: At the beginning of the game, the guards move a certain number of spaces per turn. As the game goes on, various things cause the guards to move faster, making the game more and more difficult.
- Random Events Plot: The cards of the Event Deck trigger various effects, which can be positive or negative.
- Randomly Generated Levels: The tiles for each level are distributed randomly. It is also possible to play with randomly distributed walls, in addition to randomly distributed tiles.
- Randomly Generated Loot: The Loot cards (and the Tool cards) are random, drawn from a shuffled deck as needed.
- Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies: One Loot card (The Cursed Goblet) causes the character who first obtains it to lose a Stealth token. If that character doesn't have any Stealth tokens left, then you lose the game.
- Safecracking: This is The Peterman's specialty, but all the other characters can do it too. And all the safes must be cracked before the players can escape.
- The Scrounger: The Rigger serves this role, starting the game with the Dynamite, and allowing everyone to choose the best of two Tool cards whenever they receive a Tool card.
- Searching the Stalls: The Lavatory tile starts with 3 Stealth tokens. When a character is in the Lavatory when a guard enters (or vice versa), a Stealth token from the Lavatory tile is lost in lieu of the character losing a Stealth token. This represents the character hiding in one of the stalls of the Lavatory.
- Seers: This is The Spotter's ability, to look at the top Patrol card (basic) or the top Event card (advanced) and either leave the card on the top, or move it to the bottom of the deck.
- Sliding Scale of Cooperation vs. Competition: The game is an example of "Enforced Cooperation", as there are no competitive elements and the players are required to coordinate their moves closely, especially on higher difficulties.
- The Sneaky Gal: The Hawk serves this role, being able to peek through a wall at one unrevealed tile each turn as a free action.
- Starts Stealthily, Ends Loudly: This results when the characters acquire Tool cards like the Dynamite, the Thermal Bomb, and the Smoke Bomb, and then use them during their escape.
- Stealth Expert: The basic ability of The Acrobat is this, allowing him to move onto the same tile as the guard as a free action, without losing a Stealth token as long as he leaves that tile before the end of his turn.
- Through the Ceiling, Stealthily: This can be the result if you reveal a Walkway tile by moving into it: your token moves to the tile directly below the Walkway tile, but it doesn't count as "entering" that tile. For example, if there is a guard in the tile, you do not lose a Stealth token when you fall into it.
- Turn-Based Combat: Players takes turns spending their action points.
- Wall Crawl: The advanced ability of The Acrobat is this, allowing him to move up or down between floors whenever he is next to an exterior wall.
- We Need a Distraction:
- The Juicer can trigger an alarm in an adjacent tile as a free action, which is useful to redirect a guard from his current patrol route.
- The Raven can place a crow token on a nearby tile. Guards moving into that tile use an extra movement point.
- In general, characters may find it useful to deliberately trigger alarms to redirect a guard from his current patrol route.
