Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Bombastic is the second release in Bitewing’s series of travel games, after the charming Trailblazers and before the upcoming Gazebo. I must confess to being enamored of the cases for these games. Those rounded corners, the pleasant plumpness, the choice of a bright and contrasting color for the fabric around the zipper; it’s all good. You look at Bombastic on the table, or clipped to someone’s backpack, and you can’t help but want to look inside.
The contents are equally as appealing, those chunky bright orange tiles. They sound so good when you shake the container, or dump them on the table. They also immediately give the game away, so to speak. If you didn’t know what type of game you were getting into before opening up a copy of Bombastic, you’ll figure it out pretty quick. It’s hard to gaze upon nine tiles with X’s and O’s and not put two and two together. You can feel, even before you know, that this is a variation on Tic Tac Toe.
In many gaming circles, putting Tic Tac Toe on the table would be considered something akin to an insult, a threat. Bombastic attempts to update and chaosify the ol’ workhorse, to take the most famous solved game in the world and render it enjoyable, dramatic, and unknowable. It mostly works!
The tiles are placed facedown on the table, shuffled up, and placed in a 3×3 grid. A deck of action cards are shuffled, and two are revealed. On your turn, you have two choices. You can use an action card, which allows you to peak, shuffle, or otherwise modify the tiles on the table, or you can reveal three tiles in a straight line. If you do that and manage to reveal three of your own symbols, you win!
Be careful, though. There’s a bomb out there somewhere, and if you reveal that, they’ll be packing up pieces of you into that little carrying case. This, really, is Bombastic’s only major tweak to the formula. It’s part memory game, part push your luck, and all quick little filler. I like it best when both I and my opponent are being reckless, when we’re pushing the boundaries of reasonable behavior. I’d rather have four games of Bombastic begin and end immediately with a bomb reveal than play one 5-minute-long tête-à-tête.
Whether or not that’s how designer Robert Hovakimyan wants me to feel, I can’t tell you. All I know is that I enjoy playing Bombastic best when I’m playing the Looney Tunes version. My gut tells me that he’d rather I didn’t. Every time I open the game by revealing three tiles, it feels transgressive, almost like I’m making fun of the game and its lack of stakes from the inside. Still, for something that’s meant to play in less than five minutes and often does, you could do a lot worse.
