Fired Up

Bonfire is the newest board game from renowned designer Stefan Feld, and it's exactly what one should expect from a Stefan Feld game. It's likely to please his existing fans and not win over many new ones.

Nominally, Bonfire is about tribes of gnomes heading into abandoned cities to relight dormant bonfires that will please the mystic guardians of the area. In practice, the game is light on story but fat with mechanics. There's a lot to manage as you play, in a way that very loosely reminded me of the collage of systems in Feld's popular game Trajan.

Stefan Feld is known for action-taking games with clever new ways of constraining your choices. He has another new system here that I find both demanding and fun. Seven different actions you can take in the game are each represented on tokens, each with their own color and symbol. Each player has a series of tiles that show different configurations of three of these actions, arrayed in a straight line. You begin the game with one of those tiles placed on your board, and the three action tokens it shows given to you. When you deplete your action tokens, you take a turn off to place a new tile on your personal board -- giving you not only the three tokens for the symbols on the new tile, but additional tokens if you line up matching symbols in rows or columns on your board. Build a long chain, and you might get two or three or even more tokens for the same action... which is useful, since you can take more powerful versions of actions by spending multiple tokens on your turn.

Each of the actions puts you in a different head space, with its own strategic considerations. There's one kind of token that moves a counter around a wheel, collecting you different resources (and forcing your opponents to re-plan when what's available changes). Other kinds of tokens play a role in a loose form of area control: you move a ship around the board, scooping up "quest"-like tokens from different islands you land on. Competition for good tokens can be fierce. Gathering what you need to fulfill those quests poses yet another challenge. There are even character cards you can acquire (with yet another action type), which provide endgame points and ways of cheating the rules.

There's a lot going on here, though in a few plays, I've felt that it all integrates together fairly well in a satisfying way. This isn't one of those games where you can pick just one thing and lean into it as your path to victory; I'm not convinced at this point that you can afford to completely ignore any of the game's action avenues. But what you can do is focus on one type of action more than the others, and which one you do will probably be determined by what symbols you're able to line up most on your personal game board. This is not a game where you can develop a "winning strategy" and then re-run that each time you play; you have to make the most of the opportunities you're given.

There's an interesting ebb and flow to the action. You're required to spend all but one of your action tokens before you can "restock" yourself with new ones, so the range of things you can do grows and shrinks multiple times throughout the game. Gameplay can bog down a little in the middle, but it starts fast (since you have only three tokens in the beginning) and ends fast too (as you're rushing to complete tasks you've committed to).

Until I have a chance to play Bonfire more, I'd say that it doesn't quite supplant some of my favorite Stefan Feld designs (but he has had so many good ones, spread out over more than 15 years). Still, there's a lot to unpack here, so you never know! For now, I'd give Bonfire a B+. If you're a fan of Trajan, or Merlin... or, really, any of Feld's more elaborate games, you should check it out.