I, unfortunately, don’t have much money or time to play board games (that aren’t my own). Nor do the people around me. This means that a board game purchase is a special occasion that happens maybe once per year. Sometimes, when money gets really tight and life gets really busy, even a once-per-3-years purchase.
This time I had given Bomb Busters the special honor. I had picked out the game, told everyone else about it, and had already convinced myself it was the right one. Some weeks later … I received the news that Bomb Busters had won the coveted Spiel des Jahres! Well, that sealed the deal! We bought the game and played it a lot the past few weeks.
In this review I wanted to quickly mention why I picked this game and what I think about it. I will do this from the perspective of a game designer, sharing what lessons I learned and perhaps ideas for how to improve weak spots. Hopefully this helps others make an informed purchase!
Why Bomb Busters?
Bomb Busters is a cooperative game. It means that you play together, as one team against the game. In this case, you’re trying to defuse a bomb together.
I personally don’t have a preference. I like both cooperative and competitive games for their own strengths. In fact, if I had to choose, I’d pick a really tense cut-throat competitive game over anything else ;)
But cooperative games have one major benefit: other people are more inclined to play them. Many people make statements about themselves like “oh I’m just not a competitive person” or “oh rules are so hard, can I be in a team with someone else?” Regardless of whether these statements are true—they’re usually not—these complaints melt away when playing a cooperative game. You are in a team. All of you. You’re not competing, you are working together. And if you forget the rules, don’t worry, someone else in your team knows.
For these reasons, I’ve long ago decided to only play cooperative games with my family. Playing a competitive game makes them invent too many obstacles and assumptions, perhaps out of fear or a past bad experience, which means those games barely get played. A cooperative game feels more friendly and inviting.
A second benefit is that the game supports 2 to 5 players. Most games draw the line at a player count of 4. Which is too bad, because all possible playing groups of mine usually have 5 members (at least)!
Last but not least, Bomb Busters has a very intuitive theme (“cut the right bomb wires together to defuse it”), a cute approachable visual theme, and requires no reading. All those things really only matter for a first game—for getting people to give the game a shot—because once you know the game, you’re only looking at the puzzle in front of you and nothing else.
But I’ve learned just how crucial it is to overcome that very first hurdle. Both as a game teacher (the one who reads the rules and explains them) and game designer. The biggest mistake any game can make is looking like it won’t be fun to play. Because then it doesn’t matter how amazing the game is on the inside … because nobody will ever see the inside!
Those three facts made me pick out this game.
- A cooperative game that provides a smart, solid puzzle for a group.
- A nice range of player counts supported.
- An approachable theme and look, with simple rules and mechanics that don’t require you to be an avid gamer.
I must admit I was surprised by the price tag, thinking it was far too high for the simple components and rules you get. But then I discovered there are 66 missions inside. These are little boxes of secrets and extra materials to open up as you go along. That explains the cost for me, although not entirely.
Having that “mission” structure was perhaps the fourth reason I wanted this game. Because …
What I Like About It
Missions
The game teaches itself with 8 “training missions”. Every mission explains only one more rule. You play again, with the new rule, experiencing how it works and how it changes the game. And then, once you’ve done those first 8 missions, you know the entire game and can start with the “real” campaign.
I know some people who dislike such systems with a passion. People who think this is “dumbing it down” or “wasting time”. Who will skip ahead to mission 20 for the first game … and then be surprised they fail miserably and don’t understand the game ;) There are enough comments online that give Bomb Busters a terrible review purely because of the training missions. They even make silly statements like “good gime, simple and solid, but I hate the childish training missions approach, so 1/5 stars”
I have personally grown to love this way of teaching games. I even see it as the best possible way for most games, and try to use it with my own games whenever I can. It makes such a massive difference in how easy it is to teach the game, get started, and have fun as quickly as possible.
Because what’s the consequence of this setup? The consequence is that I could …
- Teach the first mission in 2 minutes. Without any preparation myself too. I only vaguely knew the rules, so I basically read the card and taught those rules at the same time.
- We finished that first game in 5 minutes and could continue to Mission 2.
- After beating Mission 2, people were excited for what Mission 3 would bring. At this point, we’d been playing for ~20 minutes, and only not-playing (e.g. explaining, grabbing material, etc) for ~5 minutes.
- It was so easy to play “one more game”, and players were so excited, that we did all the training missions that same evening. And then played Mission 9—or first “real mission”, we joked—to end it on a high note.
Bomb Busters is a simple game, but like most board games it has a bunch of rules you simply must know for it to work. If I were to teach all those rules at once, before playing, people would be both bored and overwhelmed.
Instead, by the end of mission 8, you know all these rules. Even better, you’ve used them already, seen them in practice, won games by realizing how to use them better. You have learned a game that would have looked too intimidating otherwise, and you didn’t even know you were learning.
I would always recommend designing a game such that it can be taught one bite-sized step at a time. Training missions for a bomb squad even make thematic sense too, and it worked great.
It surprises me that so few games utilize this. Because it’s common knowledge in the world of video games. They always have levels, difficulty settings, a “campaign mode” or “tutorial mode” to learn the game as you go.
Even designing a video game follows this process. It’s recommended to write your code in such a way that you can always leave out any system and it still works. This leads to clean code, simpler gameplay, and a less daunting to-do list for you. A game that only works when all systems/rules are fully active and understood and used … is not a good game in my view, and certainly not an easy game that’s simple to teach.
Thus, this game’s mission structure works great and is a big advantage.
I don’t want to spoil any of the later missions. But let’s just say that (almost) all of them brought something new, and exciting, and interesting that made us eager to try the next mission. There’s just so much you can do with the potent core of this game, and the designers seem to have brainstormed about all of it.
Solid Puzzle With No Leader
The biggest issue in cooperative games is the leader problem. It’s when someone is taking all the control, doing other player’s turns, trying to do everything on their own. It might manifest as literally moving other player’s pawns or deciding what they should do. More often, it manifests as someone simply being more powerful (because of random cards dealt, or a role card, or a dice throw, or whatever), which means the logical move is just to … stop cooperating and let them do things for a while.
This game does not have that issue. Everyone has an equal amount of random wires. Yes, there is a “Leader”, but they’re just the start player and used as a reference point in some missions. (For example, one “round” is done when it’s the leader’s turn again.) It’s very rare that they get special powers or roles.
Everyone has to take their own turn. Nobody can take it for them, because only you can see your wires and perform an action.
Everyone is equally important. If even one player fails to be smart about hints or deductions, the whole web of logic falls apart and you lose.
Which also means it solves the second biggest issue with cooperative games: they’re hard superficially, not hard in a deep satisfying way.
There are many cooperative video games, for example, that throw random obstacles at you and cause chaos. Yes, this is a “challenge”. It’s very hard to cooperate when the camera shows the screen in a weird way, and your character is stuck somewhere behind a rock, and there are ghosts flying around, and whatnot.
But these are superficial challenges. Those games have always failed for me (and those with whom I played) because there is no satisfying challenge. It’s just chaos. It’s just random obstacles, because without that, the game would be too easy. Without those superficial obstacles, if players cooperated somewhat capably, they’d easily win every time.
This game doesn’t have that, although it’s dangerously close to sliding into the trap anyway.
The puzzle here is a very satisfying one. Because it’s based on logic. On clever thinking and smart strategies to how you reveal hints and cut wires on your own and as a group. If you lose, you lose because you didn’t play well enough. If you win, you won because you played well.
Think of it this way. A “superficial challenge” would be if the game had a mission like “one of the players has to sit in a completely different room and shout their turns”. Yes, this would be a “challenge”. Pretty hard to win the game like that! But is it a fun challenge? Is it a deep and rewarding experience? No! If unable to see someone else’s wires, you simply can’t deduce anything. It’s hard for silly reasons and just impossible to win without guessing.
Instead, the game offers challenges in smart ways. Ways that allow you to still make deductions, and guess right, and do smart turns. They just put a logical twist on it.
Every game we’ve played has been a good and interesting puzzle. Usually one that revealed at least one new situation that can occur, and a smart way to deal with it (without blowing up, of course).
Setup & Play Duration
The setup of a new game is nice and short.
- You reset your lives back to maximum.
- You shuffle and draw a few random gadget cards.
- You shuffle the wires needed, everyone draws an equal amount, and everyone gives a single hint about their secret wires.
- You can start.
Similarly, games don’t take too long either. Of course, this depends on your players and the puzzle in front of you. We’ve had games when we were “lucky” with how certain things played out, which allowed us to breeze through the final half of deductions in no time. We’ve also had games with no information and everything going wrong, so everyone becomes more cautious and starts thinking for way longer.
There are several missions with a timer. I think it’s fine to spoil the first one (as it’s a very very early mission), which is nothing but a timer for 15 minutes. Well … when we played that mission, we realized how much more quickly the game could be played ;) Our 5-player games usually lasted double that (25–30 minutes) because we regularly had someone go into the think tank on their turn.
But the timer mission revealed that you can absolutely play a game in 15 minutes (and win!). I might even advise adding that timer at all times if your group tends to overthink and be especially slow. Most of the time, your brain is subconsciously right, you just need to be confident about it!
This is an anecdote with LIGHT SPOILERS! BE WARNED! One of the missions has a timer … that changes halfway through. Not only were we suddenly required to take turns much faster, halfway through we suddenly lost 5 more minutes.
We were panicked. We were in a rush. But we were making good decisions.
I can’t even remember what we did. But we took turns in 3 seconds, guessed the right numbers, revealed the right things, and with 10 seconds left we beat it. The pure adrenaline from that, the sigh of relief around the table, the pride at accomplishing such a major feat … can’t say any other board game delivered that.
Also, we play our games a bit faster since that mission ;) We also blew up a few more times after that, but that’s a fine trade-off.
What I Don’t Like About It
Flimsy Material
The wires are pretty small. Easy to flip over accidentally, either revealing what it is, or forcing you to awkwardly try to sort it out without showing anyone anything.
It also doesn’t help that the wires are held by small, flimsy plastic holders. (Containers? Racks? Wire Banks? What’s the English word here?)
With such a price tag, I would’ve liked to see bigger chunkier wires, and solid wooden pieces to hold them. It would improve the quality of play immensely and basically make it impossible to ruin a game halfway through.
Similarly, there’s a nice board to place components that allows tracking known information. This is really nice in a deduction game. You’re not testing memory anymore, you’re testing pure deduction and logic/puzzling. Almost everything that’s revealed in this game is marked on that main board.
But … it’s still a small bit of cardboard with holes to place wooden pieces. It’s not very solid or stable. It’s easy to accidentally make something fall over and it just … feels disappointing? The game is so good, why does the material feel like the smallest and cheapest things they had? Would it really cost that much to make the wooden components bigger? The main board deeper so it keeps things in place better?
I must, again, say that your experience may vary. As far as I can tell, all the editions (around the world) have the exact same material, so that’s not going to be different. But I’ve heard no complaints about the material from those with small hands and those of the female persuasion ;) Perhaps this is just a problem for men with big hands and less graceful fingers.
Mission Difficulty
There are 66 missions in total. We haven’t played them all yet, but we’ve played a good chunk.
And the difficulty … confuses is.
Most of the early missions were far too easy for us. Then there were some missions that felt downright impossible. And then the next mission would feel “obvious” again.
After thinking about it for a bit, I concluded it’s not really the fault of the missions. They’re sorted in a pretty logical way and I mostly agree with their choices here.
The issue is that the game has such a simple core setup and ruleset that it allows a bit too much randomness. You literally draw completely random wires at the start, for example. And then, perhaps, a mission asks you to draw one other thing completely randomly.
This means … that you can get very lucky. You might happen to have all 4 wires for two numbers right from the start, which means you can basically play two easy rounds and be done with the game. The “twist” of a mission might mean absolutely nothing just because numbers happened to be distributed in a specific way that makes it obvious.
When lucky like this, missions can become so “obvious” that it feels a bit boring and useless to keep playing.
In our view, the missions could’ve been more difficult in general, but the game could’ve also used one or two changes to constrain that randomness a bit. Nothing too major. Certainly nothing complicated to set up or work out. Just clever ways to make sure nobody ever gets too lucky or unlucky.
But this is just the opinion of one playing group. A group that contains people experienced with board games, who enjoy deduction, and including one Engineer of Mathematics (aka me). I’ve read reviews by others saying they’ve even failed the training missions several times. Your mileage may vary.
What changes would fix this? I’ve been thinking about this for a while. It’s why I delayed writing this article for a week. And … I can’t give a simple answer. It depends on the missions! It would require a specific rule for that mission that would counteract randomness that made it too easy (or too hard).
For example, there’s a mission where you draw a random number and have to cut all 4 wires of that number at once. (Can’t cut them any other way. If you make any mistake here, you die immediately.) That’s a big challenge … unless someone happens to have 3 of that number and happens to have hinted them at the start. Then it’s not even an obstacle, and the mission feels boring and too easy.
To counteract that, you’d say something like “can’t hint that number”. Or every player gets their own number they must cut all at once. Even if you’d get lucky once (for one number) … you probably won’t get lucky 4 times.
But for the entire game? A rule that would reduce getting lucky (when you don’t want to)? The best I can come up with is some separate system that punishes you for winning too easily or too early.
- For example, a fourth kind of wire. If that’s the only kind of wire you have left, and no other player is done yet, you lose. (That is, your other wires were guessed too quickly, so now you’re out first … but with the “cursed wire”!)
- Or a system where you only get a new gadget when losing a life. As such, if things are too easy and you’re not losing lives … then you’re also not getting gadgets/help, which means the game will not go into a spiral of getting easier and easier.
That would, however, be an entire extra set of rules, which would ruin the simplicity of the game!
Anyway, food for thought.
Conclusion
We like the game. It’s been very simple to teach (multiple times, to multiple different people/groups, in fact). It’s quick to grab, set up, and play a game or two.
The rules are simple in general. But the mission structure makes it even simpler to get started and teach rules one small bite at a time.
Every mission provides a new and fun twist on the same formula. It’s always a solid logical puzzle, with no “leader problem” or “superficial challenges”. This also means you can actually get better and better over time. We never explode the same way twice ;) It’s very satisfying to discover more and more tricks and tactics, allowing you to make very complex deductions and “magically” get something right.
The visuals are nice and approachable. The theme of bomb defusal, however lightly it is wrapped around the game, is very intuitive and helps explain the game and have the rules make sense.
You only need to understand numbers from 1 to 12 to play. (Only numbers 1–6 for the first training mission!) This makes it even suitable for younger players, although the heavy deduction and reasoning aspect might be a bigger problem here.
And if you find a mission you really like? Well, you can just … keep playing that one. You don’t have to progress. There have been a few missions that I found far more interesting than others, and I would be fine just playing that version of the game over and over.
The only downsides are somewhat flimsy material, and early missions being far too easy—or at least very inconsistent in difficulty. This partially depends on your specific playing group, and is partially a byproduct of allowing a massive amount of randomness (and thus luck) in the game. (A side-effect of the small material, though, is that the game requires very little space, even on later missions and with 5 players.)
I would even advise that if you get lucky, and you get bored because the game is obvious to win now, that you just … start a new game. No use continuing to the end when you just happen to stumble into the solution early and get bored.
Those were my thoughts on Bomb Busters,
Tiamo
