This is my official first true game of 2026! It came in mid January 2026!

Burgle Bros. 3: Future Flip is a cooperative exploration/grid movement game for 1-4 players. You and your fellows are doing a heist, but it’s in the future! You have to hack the main mainframe and get out to win! This was on Kickstarter in July 2024 and promised delivery April 2025; it arrived mid January 2026, so it’s more than a few months late.

This is definitely a little outside the theme of the previous Burgle Bros games!  Burgle Bros (the original) is a small game about doing a heist! The second one, Burgle Bros 2, was a bigger game, but still a casino heist!  See our review here of that.  Although this game, Burgle Bros 3: Future Flip has the same DNA, with floors to explore and tiles to flips and enemies to evade, it does feel a little different.

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

This is an interestingly shaped box: see above for the curved corner!  The corner doesn’t seem to get in the way (I have opened and closed it multiple times and it hasn’t been a problem), so it does look cool but it doesn’t cause issues.  Also, see can of Coke for persepective.

Each player chooses one of the 10? 14? (if you got the Kickstarter, you got a few more characters) characters that comes with the game.  You’ll note that each character has a special ability, as well as number of actions (clock) and hand limit (hand).  This is a cooperative action point game; each player will get so many actions on their turn.

The wooden meeples correspond to the players.  Weirdly, they chose NOT to have the character cards be the same color as the wooden meeples?

In fact, if you aren’t careful, you may get flummoxed when you can’t find your character!  Where’s the character meeples for the two characters above???

It turns out each character has TWO sides: geared and disguised, and the meeples  ONLY correspond to the disguised side.  See above.  I am pointing this out because it might trip you up a little in your first play.   

Each character also has their own personal gear: note the little character symbol in the upper left of the gear cards.  These are special cards that are one-use abilities during the game.

There are also plenty of generic gear you can pick up after you hack a SysOp; it’s your reward for a successful hack!

The SysOps are various flavors (green, red, and OMEGA PROTOCOL): these are the baddies roaming the floors of the building trying to keep it under control.

The floors of the building are represented by neoprene mats; one for each floor!  And yes, I believe these come standard with all versions of the game!

The Patrol cards (above) control the movement of the SysOps: see above as they set the destination of the SysOp (D3 or D4).   Note that there is a different pile for each floor.

As the characters explore the floors, various tiles come out; see them above!

These are all kept in a nice bag (really, it’s nice and it fits all the tiles well).   The reason for the bag is that the tile you choose depends on either the floor you are on, whether your geared or disguised, or various other things!  This is different from other Burgle Bros games where you just put the tiles out and flip ’em when you PEEK or MOVE.  Here, in Burgle Bros 3, you have to draw a tile and flip it to the appropriate side!  And yes, that’s why it’s called Burgle Bros 3: Future Flip!

As the game unfolds, the floor unfurls and you can see where alarms, walkways, coridors, etc are.   

One of the most important things in the game is to stay out of the SysOps ways as they roam the floors!  Each player has some “cool” and some “stealth”. (eee above: the blue cube are “cool” cubes, and the masks are “stealth” tokens).  While you are cool, you are in your disguised mode but if the SysOps moves to you, you lose 1 or 2 cool cubes!  Once you “lose all your cool”, you flip to the geared side!  And now, when they move to you, you lose stealth! If you are ever reduced to zero stealth, ALL PLAYERS LOSE THE GAME!

The nice little summary cards list all the things the players can do: PEEK at a tile next to you (to avoid setting off an alarm maybe), MOVE to a tile and activate it (because you need to reveal stuff quickly), CHARM (to get some hack cards), LINK and SWAP (to share gear or hacks) or use your Tool.

What’s this CHARM thing??? That seems new???  You can CHARM the co-workers of the building (hey, most people don’t like working for evil corporations and will help you with a little coercion) to give you HACK cards.  Well, they are called PROGRAM cards, but these are the cards you use to HACK the SysOps!

To win the game, you have to HACK the final SysOp on the Mainframe space!  See two such evil baddies above!  Note how many Program cards you will need to hack the final SysOp!  (There are some other preconditions: both floors have to be in OMEGA PROTOCOL and you have to be on the Mainframe space and you have to have all the Program cards!)

Once the main SysOp has been hacked, if all players make it back to the Air Ducts (see above), we all win!  Shared victory!! If anyone loses all their stealth, we all lose!!

Really, this production is fantastic.  I feel like they fixed a few problem we had in Burgle Bros 2!  We’ll discuss that more in the What We Liked Section below.

Overall, great production.

Rulebook

This was a very good rulebook.

It gets an A on The Chair Test: the rulebook fits perfectly on the chair next to me, it stays open, and it has a big, easy-to-read font.   There are also plenty of examples and well-notated parenthetical boxes.  See above.

The Components list is what you want: pictures of all components with an annotation underneath,

The set-up is perfect; it spans two adjacent pages, so you can set-up without having to spill over into other pages!  It’s got a picture for set-up, and it’s well marked.

In general, this was a very good rulebook.

I am on the fence on wether this should have had an Index; this is a pretty straight-forward game, so I am not sure it needed one.  But it would have nice to have an Index to differentiate things like MOVE vs ENTER and a few other concepts.  The rules are all there, not always quite where I expected them, but they didn’t take too much time to find.

This was a good rulebook.

 

Solo Play

Interestingly, Burgle Bros 3 lists solo play as a Variant (see above)  But I loved this!  They specified the  solo mode perfectly.  This is how I want to play solo modes!  Two-handed solo!  Thank you !

See above as I am set-up for a solo (two-handed, playing two characters)!

Your characters start on the Air Duct space, getting ready to explore!

I have to admit, I didn’t enjoy my solo game.  Many, many times, I got stuck.  It’s clear you don’t want to go near the SysOps, because you lose cool/stealth.  Sometimes, you just get stuck in a corner; you could move over the SysOps, but then you lose your precious cool.   The overall theme for this game is patience.  Sometimes, your turn is almost nothing.  It’s unfortunate, if you don’t move on your turn, there’s usually very little you can do.   Sometimes you can CHARM, sometimes you can LINK/SWAP.  But many times your turn is “well, I’d better stay here or the SysOp will move over me”.

I lost my first solo game pretty badly.  I got stick in corners too frequently, and the luck of the dice and Patrol cards just went sour.

I was very frustrated.

 

Cooperative Game

The cooperative game went a little better, but not much.

The same problems that plagued the solo game plagued the cooperative game.  Sometimes, a character would just get stuck in a corner and couldn’t do anything.  They’d have maybe one viable action, but have to basically just waste their turn.  They’d get stuck because a KEYCARD space came out, or the pattern on the floor cornered a character, or the SysOps simply always was coming towards you!  It’s even harder to predict what the SysOp will do when 3 people play after you!  Will you lose your cool???

The best part of the game was the endgame.  Once all the tiles had been revealed, then we could be smart and try to figure how to get out of the building!  In the endgame, we had fun as we tried to puzzle out the best way to use the spaces on the board!!

Unfortunately, I didn’t like the process of GETTING to the endgame.   It just felt so  … reactive.  All we could do was “react” to the state of the board on our turn.  There was a little bit of strategy about where people might go, but sometimes the board layout or the SysOps pattern just stopped you from doing anything.  The game felt like … stuff was just happening to me and I could do very little about it.

I hate to say it, but the game just felt too random.

What I Liked

Rulebook: this is an amazing rulebook; it’s so well done.  The parenthetical notes were just icing on the cake!

Meeples: In Burgle Bros 2, we joked that puting the stickers on the meeples was a legacy game!  Don’t mess up the stickers!  Here, in Burgle Bros 3, they got it right: have the meeples come pre-noted.  See above.

Bag:  The bag is well-done.  It would be easy to screw up how this bag worked, but they didn’t.  it’s easy to pull tiles from it and “shuffle tiles” inside.

Neoprene Mats:   The neoprene mats work well, and they fit back in the box.  (This was another potential issue from Burgle Bros 2: the mats fit weirdly).

Two Share Actions!  I adore that there are TWO kinds of sharing actions!  If you are on the same space, you can SWAP!  If you are both far away, but on a LINK space, you can still share stuff!  Most cooperative games only have one notion of sharing, and I really really liked this!  In fact, it made the endgame so much more fun because we had multiple ways to get Program cards to people to do the final hack!  

Production: In general, the production is fantastic modulo one or two issues.

Endgame: Once all the tiles were out, you could be smart. I loved how the endgame played out.

What I Didn’t Like

Frustration.  Many times, you feel like you can’t do something on your turn.  Sure, you have to be patient, but it just felt there were too many turns where “the smart thing” to do … was to do nothing.  In fact, the frustration was so palpable in the cooperative game and I noticed us getting testy with each other.  I think this is a function of the frustration level!

Colors?  Why aren’t the character cards color-coded to match the meeples?   This seems a strange decision especially because the meeples are kind of small!  The color is the main feature you can see! Making the character cards all the same color makes it harder to distinguish who is who.

Reactions

Andrew liked this the best; he was always thinking of ways to get around stuff.  He gave this a 6 or 6.5, which is actually quite high for him.

Sara liked it okay, but she got frustrated a lot.  She gave the same rating: 6 or 6.5, maybe leaning towards a 6.

Teresa generally liked it.

Rich had to most trouble with it.  He found it too frustrating and too random.  The solo game he’d give a 5, and maybe maybe a 6 to the cooperative game.

 

Conclusion

Burgle Bros 3: Future Flip is an amazing production; the rulebook, the cards, the meeples, are all great.  In order to enjoy this game, you have to be patient.  You have to be able to suffer turns where you do nothing.  If that doesn’t sound like fun, you won’t enjoy this game.   In fact, the game can be down right frustrating when you get stuck.

The best part of the game is the endgame; if you can make it to the point where the board is unfurled, then you can be clever and win the game and get out!  Unfortunately, in order to get to that point, you have to suffer through the random flips and turns which may lead to frustration when you feel only reactive.

This game was a little divisive in my group; some people liked it, some people didn’t.  Hopefully this review will help you decide if this is for you.