Bandido is a lot of fun in a tiny little box. With only 69 cards in the set and a straight-forward rule set, this is a quick one to get to the table. Perfect for kicking off a game night or waiting for your friends to meet you at the restaurant.
The premise (which I admit, is a little problematic but we can go into that later) is that a prisoner has escaped through the tunnels and you are the guards trying to outsmart them. Each card you play adds a new tunnel to the underground maze. Your goal is to create a dead end with a flashlight card or loop the tunnels around, eliminating all exit points. If you can do this before the 69 cards run out, you win! If not, the bandido escapes.
I’ve played several games at the table and on Board Game Arena. It is a good cooperative game that encourages planning and discussion at the table, but since each player has their own cards they keep to themselves, it doesn’t suffer from “quarterbacking”.
The rules say you can’t straight up show your cards to people, but it is easy to say “I can finish that tunnel if you don’t touch it” - but then if you can play a card, you have to play it so sometimes another player could have ended the game but there were too many turns between them and the path has expanded.
Sometimes luck is on your side and your team is dealt the exact right set of cards to end the game in a couple rounds…and other times, you’re counting the cards on the table to see if the one card you need is still somewhere in the deck.
So, yeah, the premise of the game… it bothered me the more I thought about it, I think particularly the “Bandido” aspect - making it Spanish, which carried some extra baggage that this simple card game did not need. And after seeing the PnP deck that a user on BoardGameGeek made that re-themed the game with COVID-19 and stopping the spread, it was clear how easy it would be to just reskin this game to be less cliche. Heck, it could have been rabbits stealing carrots and your the farmer trying to stop them! Mole Men attacking from the center of the Earth and you’re defending it! I’m sure there is even a way to reskin and make it Marvel/Star Wars because that is what we do with all games now.
The game came out in 2016 so perhaps we weren’t having these more meaningful discussions about diversity and inclusion in the hobby at that time, but my 2023 brain cringes a little at the stereotype that is baked into that one word and distracts from an otherwise great little co-op game.
Eh I'm not a fan of this one. It seems like you win in 5 minutes, or you lose in 25 minutes. I don't think I've played a game where 15 minutes in you are like "OH YES I DREW THE EXACT RIGHT CARD TO CONNECT THESE AWFUL TUNNELS BACK TO EACH OTHER SOMEHOW" it's usually "I had to play a tunnel where I didn't want now we need the perfect S shape going in the appropriate direction to even have a chance"