Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
The most impressive thing about Burned, Jon Moffat’s two-player hidden movement game, is the economy of presentation. With around 40 cards, 20 minutes, and vanishingly few rules, Burned manages to create a fully satisfying and fully evocative hidden movement game. You really feel the paranoia and suspense of this spy duel in which a Burned Asset races to track down and assassinate The Director of The Agency before The Agency can muster its resources and assassinate him.
As the Burned Asset, you may be alone, but you have at your disposal an array of weapons and gear, chosen from a pool of options during setup. As The Agency, your primary advantage is in your numbers, as you flood the board while searching for the Burned Asset.
The gameplay is nice and simple. Every round starts with the Burned Asset equipping two pieces of equipment facedown. Then, they choose not their current location, which will have been determined the previous round, but the location they will move to at the end of this turn, by placing one of the location cards in their hand facedown on the table.
At that point, The Agency begins their turn. The agents out on the board, which start the game facedown, can either stay in their current location, setting up surveillance that makes it costly for the Burned Asset to enter that location, or they can move to a new location. Once movement is done, The Agency searches for the Burned Asset in every location in which The Agency has presence. The Burned Asset has to reveal, one at a time, all of the relevant location cards from their hand. So long as they never have to reveal the cards that are facedown, everything is fine.
If their location is revealed, the Burned Asset and the agents enter combat. The agents are flipped faceup, and one combat card is drawn for each agent present. Hits deal damage to the Burned Asset, who can take a total of four damage before the game ends.
Now, it loops back to the Burned Asset, who uses one of their two pieces of equipment. Much of the time, they’ll take out one or more nearby agents, but not always, and the specifics of how you do that change from item to item. Any agents removed in this way are revealed. If any of them are The Director, the game ends.
That’s the entire gameplay loop. Burned takes maybe 20 minutes, if that. The structure is elegant, milking tension out of every possible source. The order in which decisions are made is so smart. The Burned Asset chooses equipment and a location at the start of each round based on what they anticipate The Agency will do, but then they’re locked in. They can only watch, helplessly. Meanwhile, The Agency is trying to simultaneously further their ends and not play into the Burned Asset’s plans. If they’re patient and bide their time, they can drive him out. Play to aggressively, and you’re likely giving up the game.
For how little there is in this box, Moffat has managed to include a good deal of variety. The five pieces of equipment the Burned Asset chooses at the start of the game impact their strategic approach. The Agency has a slight surplus of agents with different effects to choose from. Within a handful of games, both players know what the other might have up their sleeve. It becomes a question of what did they choose, and how can you avoid playing into it?
A most impressive and enjoyable two-player game, Burned. It does as much with hidden movement as I think it’s possible to do with so little. This is a self-published game, sold through Gamecrafter, and I’m surprised this hasn’t been signed. Maybe Moffat hasn’t tried. I don’t know. What I do know is, Burned is a terrific design and I look forward to seeing what he comes up with in the future.
