Bomb Busters

I finally played Bomb Busters after seeing a bunch of buzz around it, and so far, it’s mostly lived up to it’s expectations (at least at the player count I am playing it at… four!). Bomb Busters won the Spiel des Jahres, which probably explains some of the way it became popular. I’ll note… I don’t always agree with award winners, but this one makes sense, I think (I honestly haven’t really analyzed the other games in the category, I should probably do that more!). Either way, Bomb Busters is clever, approachable, and easy to teach, while still giving hobby gamers plenty to think about. This is one of those cooperative games that immediately made me think of The Crew, even though the actual mechanisms are pretty different. The Crew is doing limited communication through trick-taking. Bomb Busters is doing it through hidden information, deduction, and a little bit of “please understand what I’m trying to say without me actually saying it” sort of gameplay that mostly works well (until a bomb blows up of course!)

And honestly, that works really well for me. I don’t think it beats The Crew for me overall, at least not yet, at the time of writing this I am maybe 24 missions in…. but it is very much in that same space where the table gets into a shared puzzle brain and then everyone starts laughing when the obvious thing was sitting there the whole time or one of us totally misreads a clue, etc.

What is Bomb Busters?

• Bomb Busters is a cooperative deduction game for 2 to 5 players.
• Players are trying to defuse bombs by correctly cutting matching wire tiles.
• Each player has hidden wire tiles on a stand, sorted in ascending order, so you can see your own wires but not everyone else’s.
• On your turn, you usually pick one of your own wire values, point to another player’s hidden wire, and guess that it matches.
• If you’re right, both wires get cut and revealed.
• If you’re wrong, the detonator advances and the other player marks the real value with an information token.
• If you cut a red wire, the bomb explodes and you lose.
• Some missions add yellow wires, special rules, equipment, character powers, and other twists.
• The game includes 66(?) missions, and they ramp up over time with new rules and surprises.

That is the basic idea, but the actual game is really about reading between the lines of the information you have and sometimes gambling with your instincts at what wire to attempt to cut. You know where your numbers are. You know where other people placed their starting clues. You know what has already been cut. You know what values can’t be in certain spots (sometimes you do at least). Then the game asks you to make a guess with incomplete information and hope everyone else is seeing the same board you are. There is equipment to mitigate really hard guesses… but they are limited.

What I like about Bomb Busters

It is weirdly resistant to alpha players

One of my favorite things about Bomb Busters is that it avoids the classic co-op problem where one person can just take over the whole game. There have been a lot of games that claim this is true (Spirit Island…cough… cough…) and it’s something you work around if you identify it with your group… but in Bomb Buster’s case, since everyone has hidden information, and since the communication rules are pretty strict, you can’t just sit there and quarterback every turn.

You can hint at things through your actions. You can make a cut that gives someone else useful information. You can tell others to use equipment to try and guide them if you think you know more than them. You can remind people about general tactics or how equipment works. But you can’t just say, “Hey, I have all the 7s, don’t guess 7,” because that breaks the game. That hidden information does a lot of work, and I really appreciate that. A lot of cooperative games say they solve alpha gaming, but this one actually has a pretty clean reason why it works.

It rewards playing with the same group

Bomb Busters feels like the kind of game you want to play mission after mission with the same people. You start to develop a table language. Not a spoken language, because again, rules! But a non-verbal communication style. It doesn’t break down as badly as Hanabi’s meta gaming rules (play with people who take Hanabi too seriously and you can learn how to extra all the fun from a game and toss it in a dumpster). You learn what people usually mean when they choose a certain clue, or when they spend equipment, or when they take a risk that looks weird at first, but it’s never a hard “THIS IS HOW YOU DO IT EVERY GAME FOREVER” thing (like my Hanabi example).

I like that a lot. There is maybe a small danger where a group could get too metagamey in some ways and come up with a fixed system for how to always clue or always guess. I can see that being a thing but I don’t see how it would work for all missions. Our group hasn’t really gone that far with it, though. We have tendencies, but we’re not trying to solve the game outside the game, if that makes sense. So for us, that shared language has been a positive thing.

The on-ramp is very good

The game does a really nice job easing you in. Early missions are basically teaching missions, and it adds rules one at a time before it starts combining them in nastier ways. Some of those early missions are probably a little too easy for my main game group, but I don’t really hold that against it.

If I was playing this with my son, those missions would probably be exactly what we needed. And if your group already understands deduction games, you can always move through them quickly. The nice thing is that the game doesn’t dump everything on you at once. It teaches a rule, lets that rule be the game for a bit, and then starts mixing rules together until your old strategy suddenly doesn’t work anymore. That’s a good sign.

The missions keep changing the puzzle

I’m only around mission 23 or 24 so far, out of 66, so I don’t know how wild it gets later. But even where we are, Bomb Busters has already shown that it knows how to remix itself. You might play a few games where one approach feels pretty reliable, and then the next mission changes just enough that your little comfortable strategy falls apart. It’s very hard to discuss this without SPOILERS.

That is the kind of escalation I like in a campaign-style puzzle game. It doesn’t feel like it is just making numbers bigger (although I like that too in other games). It feels like it is asking you to rethink the same core puzzle from a slightly different angle. Some missions are definitely harder than others, and a few have gotten us really stuck (you can see my play log progression below), but then we’ll get the right layout of wires and suddenly win almost instantly. I don’t know if that is a flaw or just the nature of this kind of deduction game… probably a little of both, but it has made for a lot of funny moments.

The game creates good table moments

There have been a lot of funny mistakes in our games of Bomb Busters. Sometimes someone misunderstands a rule. Sometimes someone misses something obvious. Sometimes I’m sitting there waiting for someone to guess a number that has already been completely removed from the board, and then I realize I should have known that because I have all the wires or because they were already cut. There is a concept of self-cutting when you have all of the same number (or all that are left, usually 2 or 4) and multiple times I’ve been lost not realizing I could self cut what I had and that would open up the whole puzzle to others. Oops!

That stuff is fun. It gives the game personality even though the actual theme is pretty light. The game is a number logic puzzle, but the tension of shared lives, wrong guesses, red wires, and limited communication gives it just enough pressure to make those little mistakes memorable.

What I don’t like about Bomb Busters

Setup is a little fiddly

The biggest small negative for me is the physical setup. I’ve played Bomb Busters in person a few times, but I’ve mostly played it online because I don’t own a copy yet. In person, there is some fiddliness to it and the set up eats up a bit of time unless everyone is on top of helping.

You have to shuffle and sort the wire tiles, keep everything hidden, deal them into stands, and make sure nobody accidentally flips something over. If someone sees a wire they shouldn’t see, then you either reshuffle or everyone pretends they didn’t see it, which is always a little awkward. And if you lose on an early turn, you have to reset the whole thing. It’s not a huge issue, but it’s definitely there. This is probably the one area where the Crew edges this out where in The Crew you just shuffle a deck, deal out the scenario tiles and you start.

The theme is cute, but light

Bomb Busters has a fun little bomb-defusal theme with cute rabbit characters (and maybe cats, we weren’t sure!) and wires and exploding if you mess up too badly, but the actual gameplay is pretty abstract. You’re mostly solving a number puzzle.

That’s fine. I like number puzzles. But if someone is expecting the theme to feel more… bomb difussing-like? Something like Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, then this is not really that. Keep Talking feels more directly like a frantic bomb-defusal experience, especially with the communication, real time aspect, and to a certain point… the VR stuff. Bomb Busters is much more of a calm, clever logic puzzle with a bomb skin on top. Again, not a bad thing, but I wouldn’t sell it as a super thematic game.

It can probably be frustrating with the wrong group (I assume)

I can imagine Bomb Busters being rough with someone who doesn’t really get the logic puzzle or isn’t paying attention. Your mistakes are shared. If one person keeps missing what is happening, or keeps making guesses without really following the information, the whole group feels it.

That might be especially true with younger kids or with people who don’t enjoy deduction. This isn’t a co-op game where one person can kind of float along while everyone else carries the experience. Everyone has to be involved, and everyone has to at least try to read the board. That’s not really a flaw for the right group, but it does make the group fit matter.

Final Thoughts about Bomb Busters

So far, I really like Bomb Busters. I don’t think it beats The Crew for me, but it is close enough that I think anyone who likes The Crew should at least try a demo of it if they can find one. They are clearly not the same game, but they scratch a similar itch: limited communication, shared deduction, short missions, and a cooperative progression system that can be played in short spurts over and over. It’s very repeatable without exhausting itself.

The core loop of deducing numbers, making guesses, pushing your luck, and using equipment at the right moment is just a neat little system. The game keeps finding ways to morph that system without losing what made it work in the first place. I still have a lot of missions left, so my opinion could move in either direction a bit…. but right now this is an easy recommendation for the right group.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Bomb Busters replayable?

Yes, it absolutely is. Some of the scenarios might be too easy for an experienced group but you can jump around scenerios or skip if you need to do that, although, later scenarios, the difficulty doesn’t feel linear. If you look at my groups play stats, you’ll see some scenarios were more difficult than others.

Is Bomb Busters good at 2 players?

I personally haven’t played it, but I’ve read and also heard (on the On Board Games Podcast) that it’s really good at 2 players but not quite the same exact game or logic puzzle. That said, if we want to listen to the general public, it’s actually listed at a pretty even split of “Recommended” and “Not Recommended” on the boardgamegeek player count poll. So take take my opinion with a grain of salt here.

Is Bomb Busters a legacy game?

It is not a Legacy Game. It can be replayed in any order at any time. Despite things exploding, you never actually explode any components.

Is Bomb Busters a co-op?

Yes, it is a cooperative game.

Where can I find the Bomb Busters Rulebook?

You can find it directly on boardgamegeek as well as various other publisher websites

Does Bomb Busters have a Solo Mode?

At the time of this writing, I haven’t seen any fan-made or official solo mode. However, people are always creating them so if you happen to find one, let me know here and I can either try it or at least link it.