Illuminati: Bavarian Fire Drill is an expansion to Illuminati: Deluxe Edition; both are made by Steve Jackson Games. Bavarian Fire Drill has its work cut out for it trying to add new, fun rules to a game that has been in play for over twenty years and seen many expansions. But it succeeds in this goal better then any Illuminati expansion to date.

What’s it Like to Open?

Bavarian Fire Drill comes in a small tuck box. Inside are over 100 cards and a one page sheet of instruction with new rules and tweaks to old ones. The box is of rather low durability and most players will probably throw it out after opening. Luckily that is OK as the cards are meant to be shuffled into the main Illuminati cards, and there is enough room in the Illuminati Deluxe box for the new cards with room to spare even if you already have previous expansions.



What’s its Rules Like?

This expansion adds two main things to Illuminati. First more group and special cards, some of these from the Steve Jackson CCG, Illuminati: New World Order. Second a new card type, Artifacts that represent an item of importance and the people who care for/protect it. These cards use the same style of art and humor as previous Illuminati cards. They will have no trouble blending in with older cards and the humor implied thru a cards name or image is often quite funny.

The down side to this is that the cards blend it too well. There is no symbol on any of the new cards to show it comes from an expansion making removing it from the main deck quite a hassle. Steve Jackson Games website does included a list of all cards in Bavarian Fire Drill but the basic game has hundreds of cards and if your using the Illuminati: Y2K expansion finding 100 cards out of all them by name alone is going to take a while.

The new groups are fun and variety is the spice of life but for the most part none of them are that interesting. Some do throw in neat special abilities but most of those abilities are weak enough or on a small enough scale that they won’t seriously impact the game. The image below is an example of what you'll find.



The new special cards are much the same. Some are very similar to old cards and some where added so there would be special cards that affect the new Artifacts. While I can’t be sure I think most of the special cards were added to address small game imbalances and to keep the ratio of special to normal cards the same even with adding new groups.



The artifact cards are the real meat of the expansion. These are a new type of card. However for the most part these new card act like regular groups with some minor differences. Artifacts are never placed as part of your power structure; instead they are set off to the side. Artifacts do not have power or control arrows so can never attack another group. All artifacts have special ability or effects that the controller of the card has access to. There have always been groups in Illuminati that had special abilities but because of the lack of arrows and changes to card orientation, artifact cards have more room for more elaborate rules. Most of these special abilities are interesting and powerful. Some can make a player that is lagging behind become a serious threat.



The rule sheet also has two tweaks to older rules. The first helps keep uncontrolled groups on the table and is so simple I feel a little dumb I never thought of it. The second is another use of special cards that was already in the Y2K expansion. Both are show in the image below.



What’s it Like to Play?

The artifact cards behave mostly like regular groups but these minor differences give them plenty of variation and make them a great new addition to the game. The real problem is one of impact. There are less then twenty artifact cards. The basic game has hundreds of card and the Bavarian Fire drill expansion adds over ninety non artifact cards. Combined that with previous expansion and you may have quite a massive deck. With only a handful of artifacts to draw you probably won’t see one most games. If you want a visual aid to the chances of drawing an artifact card look at the image below. I enjoy the variety of all those cards, its fun to see different things every time you play but most of what make this expansion interesting is in the artifacts and the fact that they won’t impact most games is a little disappointing.



I think this is a good expansion. If you play Illuminati semi regularly this is a pretty good investment of $17. But if you play it only occasionally or if you looking for something to improve parts of the game you don’t like then this may not be worth your while.