The first game of Two Rooms And A Boom is exciting. The second is a lot like the first one, but less exciting. The third is a lot like the first two, but not exciting at all. That’s a precipitous decline in enjoyment for any game, much less one that’s 15 minutes long. The reason? Two Rooms And A Boom, despite its orchestrated cacophony, has but a single note to sing.
Two Rooms And A Boom is a social deduction game played by separating a (hopefully large) group of players into two teams: Red and Blue. This is done by shuffling a deck of cards and dealing one secretly to each player. One member of each team will be special, as their card will inform them. The special Blue Team member is the “President.” The special Red Team member is the “Bomber.” The players are then split between two rooms using any arbitrary means, and the game begins. It is played over 5 rounds (round 1 is 5 minutes, round 2 is 4 minutes, round 3 is 3, etc.). At the beginning of the first round, one player in each room is nominated to be the room’s leader. At any point in a round the leader may abdicate to another player or be voted out and usurped. At the end of each round the current leaders both choose a player from their room to send to the other. The Red Team wants the “Bomber” and the “President” in the same room at the end of the game (I’ll leave to your imagination why), and the Blue Team wants the opposite. After the fifth round, everyone reveals their roles. If the “Bomber” and “President” are in the same room then, as the title of the game suggests: BOOM!
Unlike most social deduction games, Two Rooms And A Boom allows you to show your role card to other players. Furthermore, if you are playing with more than 10 players (all of my games have been) you can choose to show just the part of it that reveals what team you are on without disclosing whether you are the “President” or “Bomber.” These are very strange design decisions and add no value to the social deduction formula that I can see. Because of them, this is how every game of Two Rooms And A Boom seems to play out: 1) both teams color share until they know who their teammates are, then 2) they share their full identities amongst their teammates so they know who their MVP is, and finally 3) because both teams know who their MVP is but not who the opposing MVP is, they do some blind guess work when switching players between rooms until the game’s over. The only moment that even feels like it matters in Two Rooms And A Boom is the final player swap. Having the entire drama of a game’s narrative hinging on a single scripted decision point is disastrous for its longevity.
The designers of Two Rooms And A Boom know this. That’s why the game comes with roughly 5 million additional player roles besides “President” and “Bomber.” But variability is not a substitute for core design. The vanilla versions of The Resistance and Werewolf are fun on their own; the extra roles only provide ways to further modulate the experience for long-time players. In comparison, vanilla Two Rooms And A Boom is pure weak sauce. The initial enticement of that first play quickly fades into indifference. It’s too short to create meaningful tension and too rudimentary to create an interesting deductive puzzle. I feel no impetus to try out a game’s variants and additional content when the core game is poor, and Two Rooms And A Boom doesn’t get a pass just because 90% of the designers’ effort seems to have gone into dreaming up an exorbitant amount of optional roles for it. In fact, I feel quite the opposite. Game design is an art; I have no respect for just throwing a bunch of options in a box and letting your players figure out what works. If a certain combination of roles make for an exemplary game (Two Rooms And A Boom has some very passionate fans that claim some indeed do), republish that as the new core version and I’ll play and review that (maybe). The flaws in the game seem inextricable though, so I’m highly doubtful that’s the case.
I could see Two Rooms And A Boom working really well as a team-building exercise if it wasn’t for its off-putting theme. Seriously, I live in New York City. Can you imagine if I brought a game about political assassination and terrorism to an office party? Probably would not go well with HR. Might as well make it about Crips and Bloods. I don’t get it. It would be really easy to plop a more wholesome theme onto these mechanics, and for the demographic the game seems to be targeting it’s pretty astonishing that they didn’t. In a way, I think this tonal incongruity really betrays the designers’ lack of creative focus. Obviously, I don’t find the game offensive, but I found this worth mentioning as another example of Two Rooms And A Boom‘s dubious artistic sensibility.
Two Rooms And A Boom is a shallow, repetitive experience that if only played once may seem like something great. While I’ve only played the vanilla version of the game, I feel neither qualms nor FOMO for not playing with any of the additional roles. When a core game’s no good the onus to fix it ain’t on its players. I’m sure there are some groups out there that could get a lot of mileage out of the game, especially if one player becomes obsessed and meticulously curates new role decks for every play. But personally, I think Two Rooms And A Boom‘s over-reliance on the final player swap for dramatic tension and watered-down approach to social deduction make it a game not worth gathering the required number of people together to play. If an organizer other than myself hosted a game I could see myself giving it another go, but I won’t be expecting much other than an experience too similar to the ones I’ve just recounted.
Two Rooms And A Boom gets a rating of TWO out of FIVE, indicating it is NOT RECOMMENDED.