BOMB5

In Bomb5 you are trying to be the first player to place five of your trophies face up onto the table. To set the game up, each player takes their set of trophies and starts with a hand of three numbered tiles. These numbered tiles range from 1 to 4. During the game you will also come across bomb tiles which can completely change what is happening on the table.

On your turn you simply place one tile from your hand onto the table. Every new tile has to be placed orthogonally adjacent to another tile already in play, so you are always building out from the existing layout, careful to those of you playing on tiny tables. The key thing you are looking for is combinations of connected numbered tiles that add up to 5.

Whenever a line of connected tiles totals 5, and you cannot go over, a chain reaction is triggered. You then place one of your cup tiles onto one end of that completed line and flip over the tile at the opposite end. Sometimes this will reveal another cup, helping you get closer to victory, but other times it could reveal a bomb and trigger additional effects that shake up the game.

Bomb tiles are what keep the game unpredictable. Different bombs have different effects, with the way they work reminding me a lot of the Bomberman video game series that I played a tonne of when I was a kid, mental note to dig that out to play with the boys. Some bombs let you flip specific tiles while others can affect entire rows or columns at once. Because of this, the board can change very quickly and plans can suddenly fall apart or work out far better than expected.

The game continues with players placing tiles, creating totals of 5 and triggering chain reactions until one player successfully places their fifth face-up cup and wins the game.

It’s quite engaging and it’s quick, which might surprise you to hear, and to be honest this is rare, but I can’t quite put my finger on why I didn’t massively enjoy this. I’m not saying it’s a terrible game, not at all, and I think it’s going to have many fans, but I felt that I was always quite restricted in the choices I could make. Weirdly, only going up to five gives you quite a strong restriction on the different number combinations you can use and I couldn’t help but feel that if this was Bomb7 or Bomb9 I might have enjoyed it more.

I think this is definitely a play-before-you-buy type of game because you are going to get a pretty good idea whether repeated plays are for you within one or two games. This is definitely the sort of thing that at the UK Games Expo you could give a go, see how you feel and decide whether you want to grab a copy, but for us I wasn’t really rushing back to it after the first couple of playthroughs.