The Breach

About the game

What is The Breach?

Planet Earth, the end of the 21st century: the Achab Corporation influences and dominates the globe using outstanding technologies, obtained via access to Gene.sys, a secret database of unknown origin which has turned out to be a mine of information and knowledge. However, the Corporation is not the only entity that wants to obtain these secrets: the Breachers are expert hackers, capable of connecting to Gene.sys in order to steal information and increase the power and prestige of their faction. A.R.M. (the Achab Remote Mind) security system, a sophisticated artificial intelligence developed by Achab engineers, proactively detects and fights against each intrusion attempt to Gene.sys, but it seems that something is going wrong with it… The Breach is a competitive Net Crawler game where players attempt to breach the Gene.sys database to steal secret information. Each player is a Breacher, a digital rebel, guided by their ideals or by their Faction interests. The Breach has a distinctive resource management system, set collection mechanics and variable powers. Your objective is to spread your viruses inside the database, while gathering as much information as possible. The game map is Gene.sys, a virtual universe of mysterious origin, currently controlled by the Achab Corporation. After hacking into the database, the Breacher Avatars will need to face several dangers: not just other Breachers, but also I.C.E. controlled by the A.R.M. (the Achab Remote Mind), who will try to stop the incursions. In case of need, A.R.M. will also use powerful Guardians to try to put an end to intrusion attempts. Each game of The Breach will be different from the previous one. The choice among Avatar, Breacher, and Database structure offers a different challenge each time, and players have to be clever to identify the best strategy for optimizing the available resources. —description from the publisher

How it plays

Mechanics

On the shelf

Categories

Questions players ask

Questions to bring to BoardGameBrain

• How do setup and the first turn work in The Breach?
• When does scoring happen and what ends the game?
• How should the table resolve an unusual timing or rules interaction?