Players: 2-5
Works well with just 2: Yes!
Age: 10+
Playtime: 30 min
Complexity: 4/10
Bomb Busters requires a team of players to work together to defuse one bomb after the other (after the other). Sure, you’ve got cool gadgets to help you along the way and more than one trick up your sleeve—assuming you’ve got any arms left—but will you manage to keep your cool long enough to avoid triggering that damn thing?
The game is all about cutting (the right) wires, which are represented by narrow cardboard tiles that each show a number between 1 and 12, with four copies of every number. Each player gets a stand where those tiles—distributed at random—are stood up in ascending order, with the wire values facing the owner of the stand. So you know what your wires are, but nothing else. Using a clever system of very limited clues, you may eventually deduce some information about a few of the wires held by your teammates.
Now since wires must be cut in pairs, if you want to cut, say, your 5 wire, you must first cut a 5 wire on someone else’s stand. So when you think you’re sure (...), you point to a specific wire, say “I’m cutting this 5 wire!” with as much confidence as you can muster, and hold your breath. If you’re right, your teammate lays down that wire tile face up in front of their stand (and the position of that revealed tile in your friend’s spread hopefully feeds you with further information you can use) and you do the same with your like-numbered wire.
And if you’re wrong? Boom.
(Okay, each mission allows for a handful of mistakes before everyone gets blown to pieces. That counter goes down fast: don’t get too comfy.)
Oh you thought that was all? That’s so cute.
There are also yellow wires, each numbered as a .1; so you get a 1.1, a 2.1 and so on all the way to 12.1, with a few of them thrown into the mix before tile randomization. The trick here is that yellow wires must also be cut in pairs, meaning you must point to a tile on someone else’s stand, say “I’m cutting this yellow wire!” and hope to God you’re right, so that you can also cut a yellow wire on your own stand.
Red wires? Of course we’ve got red wires, each numbered as a .5: 1.5, 2.5, etc. Those you CANNOT cut at all. And there are no oopsies when you cut whatever circuit was keeping the bomb from embracing entropy.
Each mission consumes at most 30 minutes of your time (sometimes way less, trust me) and the box comes with a whopping 66 increasingly difficult missions for your exploding pleasure.
Plus there's a very nifty twist that makes the game work like a charm with just two players.
If this doesn’t win the Spiel des Jahres for 2025, I’ll eat my bomb suit helmet.
Most easily forgotten rule: If one player has all four copies of a numbered wire on their stand (say, all four 2s), they can do a “solo cut” and reveal them all at once. Same thing if anyone holds the two remaining wires of any one number.
Age: 10+
Playtime: 30 min
Complexity: 4/10
Bomb Busters requires a team of players to work together to defuse one bomb after the other (after the other). Sure, you’ve got cool gadgets to help you along the way and more than one trick up your sleeve—assuming you’ve got any arms left—but will you manage to keep your cool long enough to avoid triggering that damn thing?
The game is all about cutting (the right) wires, which are represented by narrow cardboard tiles that each show a number between 1 and 12, with four copies of every number. Each player gets a stand where those tiles—distributed at random—are stood up in ascending order, with the wire values facing the owner of the stand. So you know what your wires are, but nothing else. Using a clever system of very limited clues, you may eventually deduce some information about a few of the wires held by your teammates.
Now since wires must be cut in pairs, if you want to cut, say, your 5 wire, you must first cut a 5 wire on someone else’s stand. So when you think you’re sure (...), you point to a specific wire, say “I’m cutting this 5 wire!” with as much confidence as you can muster, and hold your breath. If you’re right, your teammate lays down that wire tile face up in front of their stand (and the position of that revealed tile in your friend’s spread hopefully feeds you with further information you can use) and you do the same with your like-numbered wire.
And if you’re wrong? Boom.
(Okay, each mission allows for a handful of mistakes before everyone gets blown to pieces. That counter goes down fast: don’t get too comfy.)
Oh you thought that was all? That’s so cute.
There are also yellow wires, each numbered as a .1; so you get a 1.1, a 2.1 and so on all the way to 12.1, with a few of them thrown into the mix before tile randomization. The trick here is that yellow wires must also be cut in pairs, meaning you must point to a tile on someone else’s stand, say “I’m cutting this yellow wire!” and hope to God you’re right, so that you can also cut a yellow wire on your own stand.
Red wires? Of course we’ve got red wires, each numbered as a .5: 1.5, 2.5, etc. Those you CANNOT cut at all. And there are no oopsies when you cut whatever circuit was keeping the bomb from embracing entropy.
Each mission consumes at most 30 minutes of your time (sometimes way less, trust me) and the box comes with a whopping 66 increasingly difficult missions for your exploding pleasure.
Plus there's a very nifty twist that makes the game work like a charm with just two players.
If this doesn’t win the Spiel des Jahres for 2025, I’ll eat my bomb suit helmet.
Most easily forgotten rule: If one player has all four copies of a numbered wire on their stand (say, all four 2s), they can do a “solo cut” and reveal them all at once. Same thing if anyone holds the two remaining wires of any one number.
# # #
No comments:
Post a Comment