Bombastic

• What's Eric Playing?
A close-up of the packaging for the board game Bombastic, featuring bright colors and bold text that emphasizes it as an explosive version of tic-tac-toe. The box includes images and text indicating the number of players, approximate playtime, and game details.

Base price: $19.
2 players.
Play time: ~5 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 3 

Full disclosure: A review copy of Bombastic was provided by Bitewing Games.

I didn’t even fully start this one until midnight, which, great, thanks for that, past me. Thankfully this game’s not too complicated, though it is fun and interesting. I shouldn’t spoil the review, but I think you’ve likely come to expect exciting things from Bitewing, which is … true and fair. I still really enjoyed Spectral, though with a lot of deduction games you do need to learn the trick to them. I don’t remember the trick, so I will fully lose the next handful of those that I play. Something about diagonals? I digress.

In Bombastic, though, there’s some deduction but not much. You remember tic-tac-toe, right? Easy. Three Xs or Os in a row and you win! If I remember correctly, it’s super solved, though, so it’s pretty easy to draw at the worst. Don’t tell anyone who loses that, though; it will hurt their feelings. It’s needed a refresh, so how about adding a bomb? Too easy? How about keeping all the pieces face-down? Does that bring a bit more of the challenge you crave? Are all of these questions rhetorical? No. At least, not that last one. So get your memory in check and figure it out! Can you stop the bomb?

Contents

Setup

This one’s pretty easy to set up as well, which is nice. A pretty casual week, all things considered. Set up the tiles by shuffling them:

A 3x3 grid of game tiles featuring bombs, Xs, and circular targets on a red background.

Make a 3×3 grid face-down. Then, shuffle the Action Cards.

A collection of yellow action cards from the board game Bombastic, displaying various game instructions and effects on a black background.

Reveal two. If any have an alarm, shuffle those back in and reveal until neither Action Card does. Pick a player to go first; you can use the box bottom to keep track of who is Xs and who is Os.

A layout of red tiles arranged in a 3x3 grid alongside action cards for a board game, featuring instructions and gameplay elements.

Gameplay

A close-up view of a game setup for Bombastic, featuring a 3x3 grid of red tiles and two action cards with instructions.

Tic-tac-toe with a twist! Should be easy enough. On your turn, you can use one of the Action Cards or you can Go For It. If you use an Action Card, you follow its full effect, top to bottom, and then discard it to the bottom of the deck. If there’s a May, you can optionally use that effect, otherwise you must do everything on the card.

If you choose to Go For It, pick a three-in-a-row line (vertical, horizontal, or diagonal). Reveal all the tiles in that line. If they’re all your symbol, you win! If they’re all your opponent’s symbol, you probably lose, but that’s a Their Turn Decision. If you reveal the Bomb, you immediately lose. Otherwise, your turn ends and your opponent’s turn begins!

The game ends when someone wins or loses!

Player Count Differences

None! Two-player game.

Strategy

A layout of game components from Bombastic, including a 3x3 grid of tiles showing Xs, Os, and a bomb, along with action cards that explain gameplay mechanics.
  • Perfect information is pretty much the ultimate weapon in a game like this. If you have perfect information, you know what each of the nine tiles is and where they’re located. With that, you can pretty easily just Go For It once you’ve got pieces in place or win through other means. That’s awesome. It’s actually possible to get it pretty quickly if you find the bomb or an opponent Goes For It and fails miserably.
  • You should try to confuse your opponent as much as possible. Shuffle tiles around, offer misdirects, and honestly, straight up lie if you feel like it. Every game is social deduction if you talk too much.
  • As a result, cards that let you shuffle or swap without letting your opponent see are good priorities. In particular, you should shuffle or swap tiles that they’ve looked at to render their information useless. Even better if you can shuffle the bomb into that mix, potentially, in the hopes that it’ll blow them up.
  • If you don’t have the ability to get perfect information, at least figure out where the bomb is. That should be your primary concern; there are many cards that punish whoever reveals the bomb and if you know where it is, you can avoid it. Just make sure your opponent doesn’t figure out you’re avoiding one tile in particular.
  • Don’t lose track of things that you know, either. If you’ve bothered to learn what a tile is, hold on to that knowledge! Watch it if it’s getting publicly swapped. Keep track of all the tiles if you can.
  • Going For It isn’t a bad idea if you’re reasonably confident; just don’t reveal the bomb. As long as you don’t give away where your opponent’s missing shapes are (which, you probably will), even if you mess up it’s not the worst thing in the world. The worst thing is if you flip the bomb and immediately lose. So do what you want but keep track of the bomb. I’ll keep saying this.

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

Pros

  • Who’d’ve thought you could make tic-tac-toe interesting again? I don’t even like memory games that much and find this charming enough to allay that. When it works it works.
  • I really like the travel cases Bitewing keeps making. It was lovely for Trailblazers and it looks great here, too.
  • Yellow is a fairly uncommon color, so I’m glad they decided to go all-out. I mean, Brigette Indelicato did a bunch of the graphic design here, so obviously it’s going to be clear and look good, but I like the art direction of this game a lot. Tic-tac-toe is known for being bland and simple, so taking a strong art stance from the game itself really throws the gauntlet in a way that I appreciate.
  • The action cards are varied and fun. I think the promo cards help a lot by providing more options and adding some variety, but I like the Onitama-like vibe of taking a game you know and adding new ways to play. The actions here make it so that your options aren’t necessarily balanced or always the same, so there’s a nice luck element here. I just realized I never published my review of Onitama. Perhaps another time.
  • Plays very quickly. Five minutes per round is generous, honestly. I’ve won a game in two turns before.
  • This has the “let’s go again” vibe that I love from short two-player games. You can really just shuffle the board and the deck and go another time if you want. The perfect lunch or airplane game.
  • Getting a winning move feels great. I had perfect information one round and knew where all my pieces were; there was no way for my opponent to out-maneuver me with the cards she had and it was great. Then the game was quick enough to be over when I was in a winning position, which is also smart. To be fair, I got blown up the previous game and that was funny too.

Mehs

  • I think you’re within your rights to be annoyed if a swap ability doesn’t come up the turn before your opponent wins. Like I said, there’s some element of luck to this one. If that’s the case, your best bet is to Go For It and try to win before they do if you think they’re about to? Even if you lose, you ended the game on your terms, not theirs, and that’s a powerful move.

Cons

  • The tiles, while nice, should have been screen-printed; it’s remarkably easy to cheat otherwise by just touching the underside of the tile and noticing that the three shape options are extremely different. From all of me here at What’s Eric Playing: don’t cheat at board games. That said, it’s worth knowing how easy it is to cheat so you can avoid it. Grab the tiles from the sides, never the bottom. If you see a player touching the bottom of the tile, you’re within your rights to be suspicious. The tiles are lovely and high-quality and engraved. but X / O / Bomb are not even close to the same shape, so you can easily feel the difference. Whoops.

Overall: 8 / 10

A close-up of game components for Bombastic, featuring red game tiles, action cards with instructions, and a colorful carrying case.

Overall, I enjoyed Bombastic quite a bit! More than I expected to, to be honest, and that’s always worth mentioning. I was reading the other day about someone arguing in general that there should be two axes for consideration: what the game was aiming for and where it ended up, to reward games that deliver on their intent even if they’re not, you know, going to be your game of the year for 2025. Bombastic is not going to be my Game of the Year for 2025. That’s not a dig; there have just been other games that I’ve really enjoyed. What is my GOTY? Don’t ask me that. But I do think that Bombastic has both ambition and competence. Ambition in taking on a fairly-boring but well-treaded game (tic-tac-toe) and trying to make it interesting, and competence in delivering on a nicely-produced game with simple rules and an engaging play loop. If everyone could do that, well, there’d be a lot fewer 4 / 10 games, I’ll tell you what. But that’s worth celebrating, too. This is a great travel game that a lot of players can get into, even if they need to be wary of potential cheats. I do think that’s a decently-major issue, but I’m not into manufacturing or anything so all I can say is: sounds expensive. Beyond that, though, the game is quick and punchy, and feels like tic-tac-toe without the many, many draws and generally-boring parts. That’s a trade up in my opinion, so I’m excited about Bombastic! If you’re a fan of the classics, you like well-produced travel games, or you just want to occasionally have a game blow up in your face, you’ll probably enjoy Bombastic as well!

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