There’s a problem with most hidden movement games, and I say that as the mechanism’s greatest devotee. Namely, they’re slow. So slow. Maybe it would be kinder to call them “deliberate,” but even that doesn’t quite transform the ding into a compliment. Stealth, in theory, can be deliberate. Stick insects are deliberate. But it can also be harried, adrenal, instinctual. Like a panther. Like an owl. Like me ducking out of a Super Bowl party before the uncles start complaining about the halftime show.

Burned occupies the untapped middle ground between those two poles. Designed by Jon Moffat, who gave us last year’s top game about poop carts, Burned is neither Mind MGMT nor Captain Sonar. Instead, it’s the closest a board game has ever gotten to making me feel like a highly-trained secret agent picking off mooks in broad daylight. Usually right before they tackle me to the ground and stomp me to death.

“You have thirty seconds before they’re on top of you…”

Picture with me, if you will, the moment in any spy thriller when the baddies are stomping up the stairs. Go ahead, close your eyes and picture it. Close them. Now open them. This ain’t no radio drama. You, the secret agent, can hear them coming. They’ll be on you in seconds. Not minutes. Certainly not hours. Seconds. They’re at the door. The wood is splintering. They sweep into the room, and you’re

gone.

Burned is about those split seconds. A session takes ten minutes, maybe fifteen at most, and comes across as no longer then five.

Which makes it all the more impressive that it isn’t real-time. Nothing explicitly hurries you along. The Burned Asset takes his turn. Then the Agency pursues him. Back and forth it goes, back and forth, until one side or the other has been planted.

Along the way, Moffat deploys considerable tricks to sell the illusion that the entire encounter is measured in heartbeats. For example, there’s the map. Unlike many other hidden movement games, which deploy geography in the most literal sense, the space in Burned is more impressionistic. Depending on the layout, the entire area might be confined to the square footage of a hotel. And not an especially large hotel. One card will be a courtyard; another, a terrace. One space is just “steps.” Another is a fountain. Stealth, then, is a matter of ducking out of sight, not putting miles between pursued and pursuer.

This sensation of proximity extends well beyond card titles. Both sides move the same way, either walking or running from one card to another. Walking means moving to a card that matches the color of the one you’re standing on; running means moving anywhere — literally anywhere at all — but incurring a penalty, whether announcing the color of the destination if you’re the Burned Asset, or putting your mooks at risk if you’re the Agency. Meanwhile, some cards show multiple colors. These are crossroads, spots one might pass between colors without having to tip their hand.

That is one cool pup.

The effect is thrilling. Because every spot on the map is within reach of every other spot, there’s no such thing as outrunning your opponent. You can buy time, sure. You can duck away from a fight that’s getting too hot. But Burned is a chase scene in a confined space, not an entire cat-and-mouse flick. It’s like that moment in A History of Violence where one character outfoxes another by shutting a door in their face, or the single-take fight scene from Atomic Blonde that rolls through a single apartment block, or every other scene in a Bourne movie.

Of course, this wouldn’t work without Burned’s unusually high body count. Most hidden movement games offer a certain asymmetry of vulnerability, where the one being pursued is in danger of losing their life while the greatest risk to the pursuer is the loss of some time. I’m thinking of the Hunters from Specter Ops, who can be stunned but never put down for good, or even the shark from Kelp, for whom failure means missing out on dinner.

Here, nothing could be further from the truth. The Burned Asset is uniquely vulnerable because he’s alone. But the Agency, despite being the better-staffed half of this equation, is almost assured to suffer the greater casualties. When the scene opens, they have seven agents. Most of these will probably be run-of-the-mill operatives. Mooks, in other words, there to chase the Burned Asset and, in all likelihood, give their lives in the attempt. One or two might be spotters, relatively peaceful mooks who are better avoided than assaulted directly, or even canine units that are experts at sniffing out traps.

But the Agency isn’t untouchable. Their principal aim is to kill the Burned Asset, but they’re playing a double game. This entire shebang began as an ambush. So the big guy is here, the Director of the whole rotten apple pie, along with his body double. If the Burned Asset takes down the Director — and possibly the body double as well, depending on the order things shake out — then it’s curtains for the Agency.

The result is a chase in both directions. A highly lopsided chase, to be sure. A chase where one side is doing the bulk of the chasing and the other is usually the chasee. But it’s also a chase where the hunted can very rapidly turn the tables and become the hunter. With the application of a few bullets, a grenade, maybe a bear trap, anything is possible.

Blammo.

I suppose it bears mentioning that the Burned Asset is the harder role to play. Manpower counts for a lot, and seven to one makes for formidable odds.

In a game this kinetic, this cinematic, and this brief, however, it’s hard to consider that a shortcoming. I have complicated thoughts about balance in the first place — foremost that it’s overrated — and it strikes me as fitting that a contest between one man, no matter how well trained and outfitted, against seven other killers, should be a little tipsy on the scales.

More than that, though, many of my favorite moments in Burned were those that saw me failing to accomplish my objective. One instance in particular stands out. After setting up the map, I positioned myself at an intersection, an obvious hiding place with ready access to two major areas. Right away, the Agency zeroed in on my position. Within a single action, I had been injured. We’re talking twenty seconds into the game here.

But I had planned for this. All according to plan. I popped some tear gas, a single-use tool that stunned every agent at locations of my color. This just so happened to be every single agent in the game. And while two agents had fanned out to secure the area, the rest were clustered atop a single mezzanine.

That gave me a free move, completely unharassed, to do whatever I wanted. That’s an eternity in Burned. So I chose my next move carefully. I took careful aim at the mezzanine. Five agents in my crosshairs. And then I sprayed lead.

Hits in Burned resolve according to a simple deck draw. One by one, we went through the agents. The first one, an operative: DEAD. The next, the body double: DEAD. Third, another operative: MISSED. Who cares, my target is the big bastard. And there he was. The Director. It was entirely plausible that I might win the match within one minute of completing setup. We flipped the next card, and

MISSED.

Dammit. The other agent got away, too. I’ll type it out for consistency’s sake: MISSED. But, hey, that was fine. With so much of its manpower already bleeding out, the Agency was in a bind. I ran. Hid. Tried to regroup.

It didn’t pan out. A little while later, another agent found me and inflicted my second wound. I killed him back, but the exchange left me on death’s door. On the next turn, I shot the wrong guy. He turned out to be a spotter. Which meant whatever sniper was covering his location popped me next. Blammo. Lights out for the Burned Asset.

But the takeaway from this anecdote isn’t that I failed. It’s that Burned produces moments of effortless kino. Every duel feels close. Every shot, every flipped card, every knife duel, every booby trap, every reveal. Sure, the outcome was more The American than John Wick. Sometimes, that’s how the cookie crumbles. When I missed the Director after shooting his body double, I shouted. Yelped, more like. Woke up my friend’s dog. That’s how invested we were in that moment.

Injuries and overwatch both restrict the Burned Asset’s movements.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been excited about a tiny stealth game. I’m thinking about Fugitive, another box that can squeeze into your average jeans pocket. (Or slip comfortably into a cargo pocket, if you happen to be a person of high fashion and leisure.)

But what makes Burned remarkable is not only its size, not only its duration. It’s the way the game conveys cinematic action rather than deductive logic. This is one of those rare hidden movement games that’s about motion instead of movement ranges. At no point does anyone count spaces. There’s no fretting over doubling-back rules. In place of the mechanism’s usual trappings, one finds pure animation, pure punch, pure heft. Which is to say, it evokes feeling more than analysis, a rare strength in such an analytical medium.

In more straightforward terms, it handles like a weapon. It feels heavy and dangerous in my hand. It incites to deeds of make-believe violence. I missed my shot at the Director this time. Next time, and the next, and the time after that, the bastard is going all the way down.

A complimentary copy of Burned was provided by the designer.

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