Blaze Busters

A peaceful rural area surrounded by snow-capped mountain peaks has suffered from a terribly dry summer that has left its scattered villages highly vulnerable to rapidly extending wilfires.

You and your firefighting colleagues have just been called for a critical mission to contain several fire outbreaks that threaten to spread rapidly if uncontained.

The team is small, resources scarce and the temperature and wind strength are expected to keep increasing, creating very challenging conditions where strategy, teamwork and resource management will be the key to success.

Will your team be able extinguish all the fires before they reach any of the villages or extend up to a point where it is no longer possible to keep them under control?

How to Play?

The game allows you to control one of the firefighters in the team in a simulation-like experience where each turn you have 3 actions to choose from:

• Drive with your firetruck,
• Move on foot across the forests
• Prepare a firebreak
• Extinguish an adjacent fire
• Prepare a base camp to improve operations

After all players have, as a team, agreed and performed their actions, it's the turn of Nature, which can bring:

• Wind direction change
• Wind strength increase
• Temperature increase
• Some very welcome local rain
• A new Fire in the board

Fires spread each turn according to weather conditions and you are then entitled to pick a certain amount of Resource Cards that, in specific combinations, will allow you at some point to call a helicopter, use a bulldozer, evacuate a village or have some weather forecast to plan accordingly.

Strategy at the core

During the game you will need to cooperate with each other combining different tactics - placing firebreaks in critical places, extinguishing from the flanks and rear, and trying your best to surround and contain the fire, which will allow you to save time and resources to spend with other outbreaks.

Building base camps is an investment but will help you get more actions per turn and help with faster transport around the board. You might also want to cede one of your actions to another player when this gives the team a tactical advantage.

Whenever you are able to contain/extinguish all fires, your team wins the game. If flames expand too much, reach a village or burn too many tiles of forest, your team has lost.

Are you up for the challenge?