FUSE Review – Sisyphus with a Ten-Minute Sand Timer

FUSE prepares you to take on Keanu Reeves’ role in Speed 3, which is exactly like Speed 2 only in SPAAAAAAAACE. It’s you vs the terrorists, and they’ve riddled your spaceship with bombs and put 10 minutes on the timer. Can you disarm them all?

Each player starts with two bombs. This is a position no one wants to find themselves in, but thankfully these bombs come with instructions to defuse them. It’s a simple matter of placing dice on the bomb card so it matches the defusal pattern. For example, one bomb might require you to put three dice of the same value on it.

Once defused, you discard the bomb and draw a new one from the bomb deck. Although be careful, as instead of a bomb you could draw a fuse card. This can either show a coloured or numbered die, and you must remove a die of this type from your bombs.

With 10 minutes ticking down, these fuse cards can set you behind.

Despite being a real-time game, you still take turns. Only like a cat at the greyhound track, when it’s your turn, you’re frantically trying to move as you can.

First, you draw and roll dice from the bag. These dice must be split among the team, as they put them on the bomb cards. Any dice not taken are re-rolled and act like a fuse card. Whereby everyone must either remove a die matching the colour or value from their bombs.

Then you hand the bag of dice to the next player. Continues until all of the bombs are disarmed, or the time runs out and well… you die a horrible firey death.

Speed and tradeoffs

Being a real-time game, FUSE keeps its rules light and simple. Match the pattern on the bomb cards with the dice drawn. However, simple doesn’t mean easy. Especially under the pressure of a ticking clock.

With sweaty shaking hands, you’re bound to mess up even the simplest of tasks, and when you do you’re punished for it. While this punishment isn’t gargling orange juice after brushing your teeth, it is enough to put you on edge. Putting you in the middle of wanting to do the task fast, and to do the task without issue.

It highlights the wonderful dexterity element of FUSE. Even though it’s about making thoughtful choices quickly. This playfulness comes from having to create pyramids or figure out the fastest way to pass a bag of dice.

That’s the sweet appetizer before the main course, which of course is the rolling and dividing of dice. Again this is a rather simple decision to make, but it calls for everyone to be alert and communicate effectively. There can’t be any bosses or leaders in your team, as all need to provide information and wants for the group to decide.

This kind of cooperation is engaging and wonderful. Even when there’s conflict over who takes what dice, it gets resolved quickly.

It’s this moment of coming together and solving the crisis that elevates FUSE over other real-time games like Escape: The Curse of the Temple, and 5-Minute Dungeon. These games want you to move off of instinct alone. Whereas FUSE offers you a trade-off – take your time and make the right decision, or make the wrong choice but have time to fix it later.

Sisyphus the board game

FUSE is a difficult game to beat, requiring multiple plays and learned behaviour. As such, you can see your team get better on repeated plays and discussion afterwards. You dissect the game you just played, suggest improvements, and then try again. See if your improvements worked or not.

That’s what this game relies on though, your desire to improve. After the initial excitement of learning and playing your first game. There aren’t any big changes from one game to the next. As a result, your improvement becomes the only compelling reason to keep playing.

The previous rush of excitement and creativity found in the initial plays quickly dissipates. Leaving you with what can feel like a grind.

This lack of variety and spontaneity is the only thing stopping FUSE from being an easy recommendation. Because the first couple of times you play the game is fantastic. But it takes a sharp drop the moment you realise, there’s not much difference between one game and the next.

Even still, it’s got me excited about Kane Klenko as a designer, and I’ll be looking forward to trying out the rest of his designs.