There are some board game themes that are inherently dark and so need balancing out with a jokey presentation. Case in point, games about bombs and bomb disposal. Hisashi Hayashi's design for this game first appeared in Japan in 2020 as Bomb Squad (Okazu Brand) but in its reimplementation from Pegasus Spiele as Bomb Busters, the brighter presentation and Dom2D's cartoon animals lighten the mood and add hugely to the game's appeal.
Bomb Busters is a fully cooperative deduction game for 2-5 players where players will be tying to find the matching pair for each of their numbered blue wires to 'cut' in order to defuse a bomb. They each have their own display of numbered wire tokens in a rack so they only they can see their own numbers but players will all have organised their tiles so that they are in their racks in numerical order. There are four copies of each safe numbered wire but you want to avoid choosing a blue wire that doesn't match the number you cut. Mistakes advance the detonator counter, and the bomb explodes immediately if anyone picks a red wire to cut.
Players give each other some limited information with which they can make reasoned deductions. Other than in the initial cutdown 'training' scenarios, the blue wires are numbered 1-12 and yellow and red wires have decimal place positions within that range. That means, for example, that if I indicate to the other players that the third tile in my rack is a 1, the other players can safely reason that the first and second tiles are also numbered 1. As blue wires are eliminated (all four of a number cut), players can earn single-use equipment cards to further help them.
The net result is a simple but challenging cooperative deduction game tempered with a push-your-luck element. We've especially enjoyed the game with four or five players; less so with just two. You can expect each game to start off easy but you'll find it gets harder to avoid mistakes as you hit the mid game. You won't succeed every time but if your experience mirrors ours at Board's Eye View, this is a game that you'll want to return to and have another crack at, win or lose.
The first eight 'missions' are designed to ease players in, so that you're only playing the full game when you play the last of the training missions. At that point, you already have an eminently replayable game but there's much more in the package. The game comes with several boxes labelled as containing more missions. In fact, Bomb Busters boasts 66 missions in total! As these are all boxed up for players to discover for themselves, we've avoided giving away any spoilers either in our review or in our Board's Eye View 360.
Tho' the multitude of boxed missions gives Bomb Busters the look of a campaign or legacy game, you should instead think of all the additional boxed missions as offering a myriad of optional rule variants. Some of these may well appeal more than others, in which case you have the option of discovering for yourself the specific mix of variant rules that you and other fellow players like best and just using those when you play the game.