Bomb Busters Review – Just Please, For The Love Of God, Don’t Cut The Red Wire

Disclaimer: Bomb Busters was provided for free by VR Distribution, although the writing and opinions of this article are my own.

The closest I’ve come to disarming a bomb? Changing my baby son. Sweat dripping, hands trembling, and the ever-present danger of an unexpected explosion.

Thankfully, the new cooperative game Bomb Busters, from designer Hisashi Hayashi, lets you step into the high-stakes world of bomb defusal without risking your sanity… or your laundry.

How to play

As you play Bomb Busters, you’ll work through 66 unique scenarios that unlock as you play. Each scenario bends the core rules of the game and offers new challenges. However, one rule remains constant: Don’t cut the red wire.

These challenges all begin the same way: mix a batch of red and yellow wire tiles into the pile of blue wire tiles. Shuffle all the tiles, then deal them out equally among players – keeping them hidden as you go.

All wires are numbered from one to twelve, with yellow and red wires having decimal points. So once you have your tiles, start standing them upright on your cardholder from lowest to highest. Then, grab an information token and place it in front of one of your blue tiles. This tells your team the number of the tile it points to, giving your team a crucial hint to start the game.

Shortly after the first scenarios, you begin each game with a character card. This provides an ability for you to use when in a bind, and determines the start player as whoever drew the captain card.

Starting with them, you’ll take turns performing one of two actions: a dual cut or a solo cut.

Dual Cut

1. Pick a number from your tiles and scan the room for its match among the other players.
2. Point and guess someone’s tile. If you’re right:
   • Both players reveal their matching tiles and cut them, laying them face up on the table.
3. If you’re wrong:
   • The other player places an information marker on the tile you pointed to.
   • The Detonator Dial ticks closer to an explosive game over.
4. If you’re wrong and it was a red wire:
   • Time to pack up and go home – you just lost the game!

Solo Cut

1. If you hold all the remaining tiles of a single number:
   • Place all of the tiles face up in front of you.
   • Note on the middle board that all wires of that number have been cut.
   • Give a thumbs up and smile to all your friends.

Depending on the scenario, you might gain access to special items or powers to help you defuse the bomb. On the flip side, you might also face new obstacles that you must work around to solve your wire-cutting conundrum.

Victory is yours if your team successfully cuts all the blue and yellow wires.

Will it all end in a kaboom?

If you’ve ever played Hanabi, another cooperative game of deduction and communication, Bomb Busters feels like the inverse. Instead of cards facing outward for everyone else to see, yours face towards you. The only information you give to others is via your information token.

Your teammates take your clues and try to deduce the wires in play – a task that starts simple (when everyone has information tokens) but increases in difficulty when these tokens dry up. As they do, however, they leave clues for you to follow or deduce with. Seeing more and more tiles face up, gives you a clearer picture of what wires are available and who has them.

This is where Bomb Busters shines. It’s a game driven by constant communication, yet with minimal spoken words. Instead, the dialogue unfolds through the placement of information tokens and the uncovering of face-up wires.

For example, if someone marks a “10” wire halfway through their stack, it signals that the rest of their tiles are likely high numbers. Similarly, revealing a “2” a few tiles in suggests their earlier tiles are all low numbers – possibly all ones. Musing over, identifying, and using these signals to form deductions and getting them right will put a smile on your face and make you think you’re the Ultimate Detective/Genius.

As the game progresses and information tokens run out, these visual signals grow harder to interpret, increasing the tension. Fortunately, Bomb Busters gives players tools like item and character cards to navigate these moments. However, their limited availability adds a layer of decision-making. Use them too early, and you might regret it when the stakes are higher.

Yet even when things do go wrong, the game provides a helping hand to get you back on your feet. With each wrong guess, as long as you didn’t guess the red wire, you gain two crucial pieces of information: the correct number of the guessed tile and the knowledge that the guesser has a tile of the number they guessed.

Deduction games thrive or falter based on two things: how much information they offer and how satisfying their puzzles are to solve. Bomb Busters nails both. It walks the fine line between too much information and too little, delivering a puzzle that often comes down to a nail-biting final guess.

And that’s where the magic happens.

Bomb Busters captures the quintessential action-movie moment—the timer ticking down, the hero deciding between the yellow or green wire, unsure if they’re about to save the day or blow it all up. In this game, you feel that tension. When the information tokens and items run out and it’s time to cut a wire, it’s do-or-die. Will you succeed – or will it all end in a kaboom?

A cooperative game

For this review, I didn’t play all 66 cases – that would be a whopping 33 hours of gameplay at 30 minutes per case! Instead, I tackled 15 of them, enough to move well beyond the tutorial and dive into some tougher scenarios.

So far, I haven’t encountered a single dud.

Every case has been a solid challenge, offering fresh twists and keeping my team on edge. Since the missions are grouped in boxes of about 10-15 missions each… and I’m only halfway through the first box, I’m nowhere near seeing just how deep this bomb-defusing rabbit hole goes. But I’m eager to find out!

Over these 15 games, I played with 3, 4 and 5 player counts. The three-player games were my least favourite by far.

While the game was technically playable with 3 players, it lost some of its charm. Fewer players mean fewer items to mitigate mistakes and more work for each participant, with one person potentially juggling over 20 tiles. In our games, this led to confusion and disrupted the cooperative flow – one of the things I most enjoyed about the game.

With 4-5 players, however, the game truly hits its stride. The deduction mechanics, team dynamics, and heart-pounding tension come together seamlessly, making Bomb Busters an outstanding choice for larger groups.

This thrilling cooperative deduction game masterfully balances tension, strategy, and fun. With its clever mechanics, satisfying puzzles, and a nail-biting finale, Bomb Busters is best enjoyed with 4-5 players. While it loses some of its charm with fewer players, it remains a must-try for fans of deduction and team-based gameplay.

And remember. Whatever you do, don’t cut the red wire!