Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
How about that theme, huh? Bomb Busters is a cooperative deduction game in which you work as a bomb squad, sweatily cutting wires until the bomb is defused. Cooperative games have been around for quite some time now. How has this not happened before? Has it happened before? I don’t know. I’m not a historian, and I’m not googling it lest the balloon of my thesis be deflated by the cold, sharp needle of truth.
In this box, you will find 66 scenarios, a preposterous amount of content for a mass market family game. I don’t know if designer Hisashi Hayashi came to Pegasus Spiele with those scenarios worked out, but I like to imagine not. I prefer to believe in a world where he showed up with Mission 8, the first mission with the full rule set, and the developers at Pegasus Spiele proceeded to lose. their. minds.
The fundamental rules are slim. Players mix up 48 wires, four each in values from 1-12. Players attempt to cut all the wires by looking for pairs. If I have a 5, and I think you have a 5, I point to whichever wire I think is a 5 on your stand, and say, “Is that a 5?” If you say yes, we each reveal our tiles. If you say no, the bomb moves one step closer to saving us all a ton of money on moisturizer.
Mixed in with the number tiles are two yellow wires and a red wire, there to throw us off. While the regular wires are numbered from 1-12, the yellows and reds bring decimals into the mix. Your teammates may have their wires arranged in ascending order, but can you be certain that the tile Bryan has left between the revealed 5 and 6 on his stand isn’t a 5.1? Let me tell you, you can’t.
If you’re unsure, you can implement any one of the game’s numerous tools, doled out randomly at the start of the mission and unlocked as more wires are cut. These allow players to make modified or hedged guesses, temporarily freeze the bomb, or a number of other possibilities. Cut all the wires before you run out of wrong guesses and you win.
Even with only the base rules in place, Bomb Busters is a lot of fun. There’s trepid-, hesit-, and exhilar-ation to be found across each 15-20 minute session. You giggle as your teammates waffle, cheer when a clutch set of wires gets removed from consideration, and gaze solemnly into the middle distance when someone makes a potentially fatal error. I enjoy deduction games, but I often find them to be a bit dry. Not so here.
The missions introduce all variety of shenanigans. Certain numbered wires have to be cut before other certain numbered wires. More reds are added. Random reorganization of the wires on your board at the start of the round. Time limits. There’s a lot more, but I’ll leave those to you to discover. The “Developers lost their minds” theory is so attractive to me because Bomb Busters is such an obvious playground for modules. I’m sure there will be more.
Missions move at a good pace so long as your group is okay with taking a big swing every now and then. If anyone needs to know they’re right, it could take a while. That is what will either make or break your experience of Bomb Busters: it is a deduction game where you occasionally have to make something situated uneasily between a wild and an educated guess. This game, at times, exists in the space between mathematical and social deduction. I once called a late-game wire correctly because I noticed that one person was speaking less than the other three, which suggested to me that he knew the answer to what the others were debating.
A moment to cover some practicalities: while Bomb Busters does just fine with three players, I cannot recommend it at two, and I don’t think it really shines with fewer than four players. This is not a game for a small group. Broadly speaking, those who are seeking a demanding deduction puzzle, for the thrill that comes from completing a particularly difficult thermo-sudoku, Bomb Busters may prove too fast and loose with its logic. They may be better served by something like Hooky, the only sub-60 minute game to ever leave me with a headache. Those who want a fun, rollicking time free of math—I do not count myself amongst your number, but I see you and I hear you—may find it slightly too staid. For everyone else, though, Bomb Busters is a blast.
Bomb Busters details
- Designer: Hisashi Hayashi
- Artists: Dominique Ferland
- Publishers: Broadway Toys LTD, Cocktail Games, GaGa Games, Pegasus Spiele
- Release Date: 2024
- Player count : 2 - 5
- Age range : 10+
- Time range : 30 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Communication Limits, Cooperative Game, Deduction, Memory, Once-Per-Game Abilities, Real-Time, Scenario / Mission / Campaign Game, Sudden Death Ending
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.92798 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 4.0.
- More articles about Bomb Busters.
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