Signal Fires

Every group has one. The person who, in a cooperative game, quietly slides everyone else’s cards towards themselves and starts saying “okay, so what you want to do is…”. In our group it is Jonas, and he will tell you so himself. Co-ops have been a bit of a sore spot on Thursdays for exactly that reason, which is why Signal Fires landing on our table this spring felt like a small miracle.

The premise is lovely and simple. A chain of beacons runs along a mountain ridge, from a village in the valley to a fortress at the pass. It is the longest night of the year, the wind is getting worse, and if any stretch of the chain goes dark for too long, the message does not get through. You and up to three friends are the keepers. Fourteen plays later, we are still not bored of it.

Setting it up

Setup takes about five minutes once you have done it twice. The board is a long, narrow strip that unfolds into a ridge of nine beacon towers, each with a little cardboard brazier that holds wooden flame cubes. You place three cubes on each tower, shuffle the Weather deck and the Night deck, and deal every keeper a hand of five Supply cards.

Here is the trick: you hold your hand facing outwards, like in some party games, so everyone else can see your cards except you. You also get a small stand-up screen with a “keeper’s journal” on it, which lists what each card type does. That is it. There are no secret objectives, no traitor, no hidden role. The whole design hangs on one inversion: you can see what your friends can do, but not what you can do.

The components are good without being fussy. The flame cubes are a warm, translucent orange that looks fantastic when the room lights are low, and the tower braziers are sturdy enough to survive a cat walking across the table. (We have tested this. Her name is Würfel and she has no respect for cooperative play.)

How it plays

On your turn you play one card from your hand without looking at it first, or you give another keeper a hint. Hints are the heart of the game: you can tell a friend either the colour of some of their cards (wood, oil, flint, or cloth) or the number of cards of one type, and nothing else. No “play your second card”, no pointing, no meaningful eyebrow work. The rulebook is charmingly firm about the eyebrows.

Played cards go to towers. A wood card adds a cube, an oil card adds two but only to a tower that is already burning, flint relights a dead tower, and cloth protects a tower from the next weather event. After every round, a Weather card flips and the wind strips cubes from a stretch of the ridge. Every third round, a Night card adds a twist: a supply mule is late, a storm closes off a tower, or the fortress sends back a message you have to relay in the opposite direction.

What makes it sing is the tension between hinting and acting. Hints are limited by a shared stack of lantern tokens, and you only earn tokens back by successfully protecting a tower with cloth. So every hint is a small investment: is it worth spending a lantern to tell Malte he is holding two oil cards, or do you just hope he plays the right thing? Usually you hope. Usually he does not.

A full game runs nine to eleven rounds and lasts about fifty minutes. You win if the chain is still unbroken when the Dawn card comes out of the Night deck; you lose the moment any three adjacent towers are dark at once.

What we loved

The best moment we have had with it was a three-player game in March. Two towers were dark, the third was on one cube, and Kofi spent our last lantern to tell Yasmin she held “one flint”. She looked at the ridge, looked at us, played her leftmost card, and it was the flint. Nobody spoke for a second, and then the whole table yelled loud enough that the neighbours knocked. That is what this game produces: small, shared, completely earned moments.

What didn’t land

None of these broke the game for us, but the colour issue matters. One of our regular guests is red-green colour blind, and we ended up drawing a fat marker symbol on the corner of every oil card. It took ten minutes and fixed it completely, but a publisher in 2022 should really not need us to do that.

Who it’s for

The verdict

Signal Fires is the co-op we did not know we needed. It takes a familiar idea, the limited-information hint game, and wraps it in a theme that genuinely makes sense: of course you cannot see your own supplies, it is dark and you are holding a torch. Every rule supports the feeling of a cold, frightened team trying to keep one message alive. It is short enough to play twice, deep enough to keep surprising us, and it fixed a problem our group has had since 2018. Game of the week, and very likely game of the year.

Score breakdown

Theme & art

9

Rules clarity

7

Meaningful decisions

9

Replay value

9

Table talk

10

Components

8

9.0/10

Overall: 9.0 out of 10. The overall score is not an average; it is how keen we are to get it back on the table next Thursday.