Bonfire

Stefan Feld does it again with a unique themed euro. Cool puzzle mechanism tied in with several other ways to gain necessary actions to ignite the bonfires & win the game!

Good game that is easier to get into than it will appear. Many great choices on how to get your points.

Bonfire has some pretty clever mechanics I think. The gameplay is smooth and straightforward. Bot has a deck of cards, so you do feel like you're competing against something (unlike Praga), but again, cards are easy to manage and plays fast. You don't have to think for the bot at all. Bonfire seems more interesting mechanically. You have to spend action tiles AND resources (which can be hard to come by) to carry out actions. Actions can seem limited or restricted, so you have to puzzle out how to work around that. The end game trigger is pretty interesting in that players can kinda manipulate when they want the game to end, so players can either try to stretch it out to try to squeeze more actions and points in or trigger game end, in which the game has a count-down system where you have 5 rounds left to play after trigger.

If I had to compare this to another Feld game, it would be Aquasphere. But whereas Aquasphere is a tight, brutal, agonizing puzzle where you just barely get by on the margins and even the tiniest flapping of a butterfly's wings can send your whole turn crumbling to the ground, Bonfire feels a little more forgiving or at least more generous with its resources. The biggest hurdle in learning the game will be the symbology, especially with the specialist cards. I was constantly consulting the rule book when each new card came out, and I don't feel that I really got the hang of the symbology so much as I just memorized what each individual card did. It was also hard to grok all the tasks but many of those are thematically linked in terms of requirements. For example, place offering tokens on two islands of a specific resource, or have seven of a particular action token. In that respect it's a little easier to figure them out but you'll still be consulting the rulebook a lot. It might be helpful to print out a reference sheet for each player. This game also reminds me of Kanban in that there's a fairly specific order you have to do things in. With Kanban you need to get parts before you can build cars, and then you also need to get blueprints before you can buy cars. With Bonfire you need to send your boat to different islands to get tasks and guardians, but if you want to do that efficiently, you need to make sure you have action tokens and resources to scoop them up right away instead of wasting a turn. Then before you have a procession with your guardians you need to make sure you have path tiles and you want to time that correctly so you get good resources, or if you want points from that, then you need to make sure that you got the correct portal from the Great Bonfire, but to do that you might need to forego critically needed resources. Basically, what I'm trying to say is that it's a big puzzle, and you'll probably need a few plays before you can really have a holistic view of what your strategy should be. On another note, I really need to complain about the punchboards. The tasks especially were not well perforated, so I got a lot of dangly paper things on those, and ripping them off after the fact will still not be a clean cut. I imagine someone somewhere will eventually produce a deluxified version of the tasks and probably the other components--because honestly this game is beautiful and that would certainly elevate it--but a less experienced board gamer could seriously damage the task tokens when they're punching them out and for me personally that would be a major downer. This isn't the publisher's first rodeo, so I hope I just got a bad batch and all the punchboards aren't like that. Anyway, at the end of the day, this is a great design and while I might have some complaints about the components, it's still a beautiful game on the table and the theme--while perhaps a bit flimsy--is certainly exotic enough that an elevator pitch is probably going to turn a few heads. Any fan of Stefan Feld's or any fan of big euro-y tactical strategy games should definitely give this a try.

One of Feld's best, lots of options, scales well with two. Just plain fun.