Image taken from https://boardgamegeek.com/image/5301335/bonfire

Designer: Stefan Feld
Publishers: Hall Games, Pegasus Spiele
Artist: Dennis Lohausen

Bonfire was our first experience with a Stefan Feld game, and I think it was a great entry point! It’s thinky, clever, and has an interesting mix of action selection and resource management, but it’s not overwhelming or overly complicated. There can be many options to choose from, and you can make some fun combos sometimes, so there are quite a few smaller rules to remember, but it’s overall pretty easy to learn and understand.

The solo game is fun, easy to facilitate, but still impacts the game enough to feel like another player for the most part. The automa player is managed by a deck of cards, and you do have to perform a few actions for them, but they’re all pretty quick and straightforward, so I don’t think it detracts from your own game too much. My one complaint with the solo game is that I wish it had more variety for replayability purposes. There is a lot of randomization in terms of set-up, so it’s not like you’ll ever have two extremely similar games, but I still felt I was doing the same thing each game just in different orders. I’d like to see some challenges, achievements, or something to encourage more exploration of the game and provide the chance to target specific strategies.

I also think Bonfire plays well at two. The turns in this game are so snappy there’s almost no downtime, and the set-up design is clever enough to adjust the game so that a play with two still causes tension between the players in terms of limited time, board spaces, etc.

Overall, the game plays pretty quickly. I got it down to around an hour solo, and it was about ninety minutes with the husband, but it was his first play through, and I can sometimes have some serious AP.

Mechanically, I really enjoy the action tiles combined with resource management and how each action requires varying numbers of tiles and resources. I also adore the spatial puzzle on the player board with the Fate Tiles and the multiplicity that occurs with adjacent matching squares. The bonuses that exist when completing a bonfire also can come in clutch and be fun to maximize. There’s just a lot of good stuff in this game without it being super heavy, long, or convoluted.

Besides the lack of overall variability, this is a really solid game. I found the bot to be a formidable opponent without being ridiculously challenging, which I appreciate. There was one game where I literally lost by one point! I haven’t played any other Feld games, so this may not be accurate, but I do feel this is a solid introduction into his game designs, and even if you don’t care about who the designer is, it’s a great game regardless.