B is for (The) Brigade

by Red Genie Games

This was the first board game we backed on Kickstarter, so we really really REALLY wanted to love it. And... we didn't. And I'm kind of sad about that. 😥 We played this once back when it arrived in 2018 and haven't touched it since. So we decided to give it a second chance. Sadly, it turns out our first impression was accurate.

Base Game / Way of the Wardens Expansion

Players: 2-4 / 1-5

Time: 20-40 minutes / 25-60 minutes

Ages: 8+ / 10+

Theme: Fire-plagued Town

Mechanics: APs, Modular Board, Area Majority, Set Collection

So the town of Tinderbox is home to Pyromancer University and somehow, a fireball storm has accumulated over the city and is raining fire down on hapless citizens. Sounds like a pretty neat concept, right? Well, it is a neat concept, but it's poorly executed... I will say, though, that we have only played this one with 2 players, so perhaps it just has balancing issues and would play better with 4. Benefit of the doubt and all that jazz.

The PvP Variant:

You are a firefighter racing against rival firehouses to protect more buildings, earn more influence, and win the title of Fire Chief. Each turn, you have a set # of action points (that can be increased through upgrades), which you use to perform various actions like moving to new locations, recruiting crew members, refilling your water buckets, extinguishing fires, moving your water wagon, etc. The coveted fire chief position is earned if you win over 5 building squares owned by the same faction, 5 squares owned by unique factions, or 3 university squares, which you do by extinguishing fires on those blocks or adjacent blocks. The catch is that each turn, you must pull an event card, which typically causes the storm to rain down more fire or sends a gust of wind blowing from one one direction of the map to another, spreading fire across the town quite quickly. When the intensity of a fire climbs too high on any specific building square, the building is destroyed and is turned over.

The Co-Op Variant:

The same as above, only you work with the other players to reach a predetermined # of action points before the turn track depletes. You can't recruit any crew members and you all must share one wagon. Lame. You do have access to equipment, which can help you gain action points or hinder you.

The expansion also introduces several other modes of play, like 4v1, solo mode, and a small 4-part campaign that can be tackled in either solo or co-op mode. Unfortunately, after a round of each above variant, we were uninterested in trying the campaign mode. Play just didn't hold our interest.

Okay, Bonnie, so why didn't you care for the game?

1. It was awkward. As I mentioned above, the ideas were good, but the execution was not.

2. Our play-through of the PvP variant lasted maybe 10 minutes. I beat the game in less than 5 turns. Which was kind of a bummer. It actually took more time to set up than to play. It was just boring.

3. The wind event is awkward and easy to screw up.

4.  The rulebooks are not great, especially the Way of the Warden's expansion rulebook. Oh, how I was tormented by that one. Poor layout. Unclear. Just not what I've come to expect from a quality game. I am a rule book hoarder-- I'm sure you know the type, but I am an excellent rule reader/memorizer/teacher. (Except for that ONE time in Gloomhaven that we don't talk about *cough*)

5. The co-op version doesn't really give you a goal to work towards. The rules just ask you to set a random number of victory points as your goal and to go for it, but it doesn't tell you what might be an average goal vs. a more lofty goal. This bothered me. So we just purposely played without a goal, made it to 42 and then decided our goal must have been 40, so look at that, we won. Woo. And, well, it was also kind of boring.

6. There was a misprint on the co-op tracking cards that caused initial confusion (factions are represented by different colors and our card has two purple tracks and no blue track). Obviously we figured it out, but it was just one more check against it.

Our rating: 3/10 - We didn't like it after 3 tries and 2 variants, so we likely won't play this one again.