Verdict
Bomb Busters is a fast-paced, easy-to-learn board game that is quite literally full of surprises. One part whimsical and one part total tension, its deceptively simple rules will capture gamers of all experience levels. The theme doesn’t always map perfectly onto the mechanics, but it’s so enjoyable that you probably won’t care.
- Simple but never boring
- Nail-bitingly tense, yet light and whimsical
- Addictive and replayable
- Full of surprises
- Doesn't fully explore its theme
Bomb Busters is the only board game I've played 15 times in a row. I set the game up, blinked, and hours had passed. No one at the table could quite believe it. And we wanted to play again.
That's the review, everybody go home!
We're still here, because of course we are. Things are never that simple. Similarly, Bomb Busters is a game of deceptive simplicity.
It's sleek, with easy-to-learn rules and cartoonish art crafted with clean, concrete lines. But beneath the shiny exterior is a mess of wires. They stretch in all directions, a map of chaos that only seems to grow longer the more you explore. But there is order here, a system to uncover.
That detective work is so compelling, that it's no wonder Bomb Busters was named the best board game of 2024.
In the coldest terms, Bomb Busters is a co-op deduction game. When my playtesters sat down for a game with me (and then stayed for 14 more), I compared it to the popular children's game, Guess Who. The axis it turns on is hidden information: everyone knows something that the other players don't. In Guess Who, it's a certain person's identity. In Bomb Busters, it's which wires are safe to cut on an explosive.
You play as an adorable bunny bomb squad, whose noble quest is to generally prevent people from blowing up. Presumably, you've been hired because you're easy to replace (you do, after all, breed like rabbits). But don't think too hard about dying; focus on defusing those bombs!
When a game begins, everyone has a collection of random wires in front of them, concealed from other players. Each wire is numbered, and it's public knowledge that there can only be four copies of any whole number. I've stressed 'whole' there, because there are a few wires that come with decimal points, fewer guarantees, and greater consequences if you handle them incorrectly. But we'll worry about those later. No need to worry; we're only defusing a bomb.
To cut a wire, you must point to another player's wire and correctly guess that it matches one of your wires. Make a mistake, and the team loses a life. Make too many mistakes, and everyone explodes into hundreds of bunny bits. Get it right, and those wires are removed from play. Rinse and repeat until every wire has been successfully cut.
In the initial training mission, that's all there is to it. Subsequent training missions throw new spanners in the works. If you cut wires of a certain number, you can unlock a special item that makes life easier. You'll be introduced to yellow wires, which can only be cut by other yellow wires.
And then there's the red wire. Cut the red wire, and everybody dies.
Bomb Buster's gameplay loop is so simple, yet it's immensely compelling. It's a game I can see board game reviewers everywhere calling Elegant with a capital E.
Players get just enough information that the puzzle feels solvable, but in such small doses that there's still room for (deadly) error. Every player must arrange their wires in numerical order, with the lowest on their left, and the highest on their right. Everyone also gets to place an information token in front of one wire, letting the rest of the team know exactly what number it is. A player also gets to place one of these if they incorrectly guess another player's wire (as, in doing so, they've revealed what number they were looking for anyway).
This alone is enough to create delicious tension. You always know roughly where a red wire could be hiding, but you can never be truly sure of its location. The unlucky sucker who ended up with it can't reveal its presence, so they must simply wait, sweating, for their friends' fingers to dance around the danger zone.
This detective work is enough to capture the attention of even the most crunch-hungry of strategy gamers. The 15 games I played were in the company of a friend who almost entirely avoids games that rely on luck, because he's more interested in hefty euros that truly tax the mind. He was just as absorbed by Bomb Busters as the party gamers at the table.
It helps that, while Bomb Busters starts simple, it doesn't stay that way. If you only played the first three missions, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Bomb Busters lacked brutality. But this is secretly a legacy board game in disguise. As you plow through the game's 66 missions, you'll prise open new mission packs, finding additional cards and rules inside.
In this way, Bomb Busters is always innovating. One mission, you'll have specific numbers you must cut before you can touch any others. Other times, a player will be the team 'rookie', meaning that they blow the whole team to hell if they make a single mistake. The number of yellow and red wires will change, and the stakes will only climb. Our team went from scoffing at the tutorial missions to wringing our hands, terrified of what a single wrong move could mean.
But don't think about exploding rabbits! Because, at its core, Bomb Busters is an extremely whimsical game. There are as many rollercoaster highs as there are moments of terror. Its snappy rules, and the way they constantly shift without ever feeling alien, make it immensely replayable.
Plus, the art is disgustingly cute. Each new mission pack features trophy stickers that celebrate your progress, as well as a handful that exist for no other reason than to decorate your copy of the game.
This whimsy delights me, but it's also my only qualm with Bomb Busters. There's something of a mismatch between theme and mechanics. It captures the hair-trigger tension (as far as my experience watching action movies tells me), but nothing about the deduction game's rules create the feeling of defusing a bomb.
For example, why does one member of the bomb squad know which wire will kill everyone, and why would they not share that information? Or, consider that thing I keep telling you not to think about: death. Who are the casualties of a bomb gone off, and what consequences are there for your team? Beyond, you know, being mashed into bunny paste.
This isn't just a problem with Bomb Busters, of course. There are numerous videogames about defusing bombs that are pitched as comedic party games rather than events of precision or, if things go wrong, horror. Looking at you, Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes.
Bomb Busters suffers from a theme that feels skin-deep - but the gameplay is so damn moreish that I simply do not care. That's coming from a writer who likes to obsess over the narrative power of board game components. But if those games are a three course dinner, then Bomb Busters is the best sandwich you've ever eaten. It has so few ingredients, but each one is fantastic.
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