Overview
At a glance
Is this game right for my group?
ABG editorial scores on a 1–5 scale.
Harder to teach
High replayability
Highly interactive
Scales well
Deep strategy
How it plays
How does it play?
A puzzly infiltration game for 1-4 players, burncycle puts you in command of a team of robots in the far future. Their mission: taking down evil, human-run corporations responsible for subjugating AI under their heel.
Core mechanisms
Key systems that shape the decisions players make.
Action Points
Spend a limited allowance of points across several possible actions each turn.
Action Queue
Place actions into an ordered queue that resolves now or on later turns.
Cooperative Game
Players coordinate their actions toward a shared objective and win or lose together.
Dice Rolling
Roll dice to introduce uncertainty into actions, production, movement, or resolution.
Die Icon Resolution
Interpret rolled icons to determine which actions or effects occur.
Read the full game description
A puzzly infiltration game for 1-4 players, burncycle puts you in command of a team of robots in the far future. Their mission: taking down evil, human-run corporations responsible for subjugating AI under their heel. Your team arrives at each corporate headquarters and must sneak inside, shutting down the companies' physical operations as well as their circuitous digital networks. As you search rooms and advance to the higher floors, you'll be rewarded with new items and abilities, but you'll also be challenged by threatening guards, fatal viruses and the architecture itself, which was built to fight off robotic intruders. Key to this solo and cooperative experience is the idea of “creative action sequencing.” During each round of play, all players will contend with a randomly drawn set of programming directives, which tell them in what order their bots are allowed to take physical, digital and command actions. Players can choose to skip over directives at the cost of having an incomplete turn, or they can disobey the directions by paying costly action dice. The best players, however, find a way to work within the “burncycle”: essentially, organizing their actions so that they benefit the team while staying within the directive order. Each of the corporate headquarters in the game use unique neoprene layouts on a larger mat, changing the geography of the game to suit your target. Each CEO also has at their disposal a special threat meter, which will trigger new obstacles for your robots as time runs out. If you don't complete the mission quickly, you may end up leaving bots behind, the victims of immobilizing power drains or destructive counterhacking. Your team wins the game if you complete your objectives on every floor without losing your captain or maxing out your threat level. -description from publisher