Two Rooms and a Boom Review

Two Rooms and a Boom is a deduction, party game.

Title: Two Rooms and a Boom

Year Published: 2013

Designer: Alan Gerding, Sean McCoy

Publisher: Tuesday Knight Games

Players: 6-30

Game Time: 15 Minutes

Set-up Time: ~1 Minute

Ages: 8+

Theme: Modern Day

Mechanisms: Acting, Voting, Bluffing, Deduction

How to win: At the end of the game, depending on your role, be in the correct room.

Game Description

There are two teams: the Red Team and the Blue Team. The Blue Team has a President. The Red Team has a Bomber. Players are equally distributed between two rooms. The game consists of five timed rounds. At the end of each round, some players will be swapped into opposing rooms. If the Red Team’s Bomber is in the same room as the President at the end of the game, then the Red Team wins; otherwise the Blue Team wins.

Lying encouraged.

Set Up, Game Play & Game End

Official ‘How to Play’ video from Tuesday Knight Games

Two Rooms and a Boom Round-Up

As far as party games go Two Rooms and a Boom is a really good one.

I’ve played, and had fun, with 6 and with I THINK, 21 players and while 6 is fun, the more the better. As with all party games you need people to play in the right spirit, get involved, play to the rules but also have fun.

The more is better as colour sharing, paired with the spy card and the Shy Guy make for fun games with ways for players with other roles to hide and protect themselves. This means trust is… lacking and you never feel safe or certain, and you shouldn’t.

The roles are really varied and give for a different variety in the game. You can play a standard set of cards with regular roles and have fun. Or you can go the other way and have a crazy game with role-swapping and people playing with their eyes closed.

In case you’re wondering, here is my favourite Two Rooms and a Boom setup: 🙂

• President/Bomber
• Doctor/Engineer
• Spy
• Shy Guy
• Mimes
• Angel/Demon
• Romeo/Juliet
• Wife/Mistress
• Gambler (If an odd number of players)

Rating

A very good party game

I give it 6/10

Two Rooms and a Boom Initial Review: September 2014

One partially divided room, one boom.

Lots of confused people.

I’ve played this with 7, 10, 11 and 1 5 players and like One Night Ultimate Werewolf the higher player count adds more to a good game. Other can be played with less than 7, unlike Avalon where in my opinion you need at least 7 just to get started.

Can’t win? Tips for Social Deduction Games

Like Avalon, though you are dealt a secret role card (Red or Blue for the basic game) and people are divided into two rooms (hence the first part of the name :))

The Blue team will have at least a President who is trying to survive. Trying to kill him is the Red team Bomber who will blow up in one of the rooms at the end of the game (hence the second part of the name :))

You play over 5 rounds (or 3 depending on player count) with discussion and bluffing with hostages being exchanged between rooms at the end of each round.

At the end of the game, if the Bomber is in a different room to the President, they survive and the Blue Team will win. Obviously the Red team wins if the President is blown up.

The rounds are timed 5,4,3,2 and 1 minutes which really puts the pressure on and partially explains the lack of photos 🙂

Pics stolen from BGG

So if you’re thinking Avalon has bluffing and One Night Ultimate Werewolf is timed, what makes this worth playing?

Well for me it’s the card showing. In games like Avalon, you can’t show your card but in this one, you can. You can show all of it to someone or even everyone, or you can colour share.

Colour sharing is cool too. You can agree to share the corner of your card with someone else to see what colour each of your cards are. It’s a great way to get the information… but obviously pretty dull if it’s just Red vs Blue. There are 100’s of different roles but only 2 that I think should be in EVERY game.

Shy Guy

If you’re the Shy Guy you can’t reveal your role to anyone, even to colour share. Gives people a role to hind behind and gives a reason for the President and Bomber player to keep their card hidden.

Spy

These are just normal Red and Blue cards but the Red card is on the Blue Team and the Blue card is on the Red team. This adds a bit of spice to that colour sharing element and adds doubt. No one wants 100% perfect information in a deduction game, that would be boring.

So yeah, looking forward to playing more of this and exploring the roles and making the game crazy. We’ve played a couple with set-ups that have Gray cards which are neutral and win in different ways that are usually unaffected by the bomb. Such as the ‘Sniper’ who needs to find the ‘Target’ but better not pick the ‘Decoy’…

There’s also Werewolves and stuff…

Great fun.

Jesta ThaRogue