Detonate
- Board's Eye View
- 19 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Designed by K C Schrimpl, Corey Schrimpl and Cameron Ring, and published by Lost Boy Entertainment, Detonate is a surprisingly tense push-your-luck dice game for 4-12 players.
The explosive theme adds to the game's tension but Detonate is essentially a dice and gambling game where you face a simple binary choice: you can either take the lowest value tile on the table or you roll the chunky 10-sided die. Take the tile and you're out of the round; the tile value will be your score for the round.
If you roll the die, the number you roll has to be higher than the 'explosion number'. That's just 1 on your first roll but it increases each time in the round that you roll the die: 1 and 2 for your second roll, 1, 2 and 3 for your third roll, etc. 'Explode' and you're out of the round and with a score of zero for the round. You flip the lowest-value tile to its +1 side, where it adds to the scoring value of the highest-value number... Players continue, taking turns, until there's just one player left after all the others have either taken a tile or exploded. The last player in the round gets to take the highest value tile plus all the +1 tiles turned over.
You start a new round and carry on afresh with all the players back in and with the initial explosion number reset to 1. The winner of the game is the first to hit the target number of points. It's here that we took issue with the rules because they start the end-game target as 20 points for four player but rising by 5 points for every additional player. That takes to 60 the points total for a 12-player game, which seemed excessive to members of the Board's Eye View review team. Detonate shines as a filler-length 20-minute game so it's preferable to play with an end-game target that doesn't risk it exceeding its welcome. In our plays at Board's Eye View we settled on an individual target score of 30 regardless of the number of players, and that worked well for us.
Detonate is intuitively easy to play; it requires almost no 'teach' so you'll be playing it right out of the box. It's the sort of game you can play as a social activity without demanding excessive focus or concentration from the players - so a small-box game that you can slip into your pocket and take down the pub. It's playable as a light family game or you can quite literally up the stakes and play it as a gambling game; the rules suggest the option of playing with dollar bills - so with Detonate you'll literally be getting bangs for your buck! However you play, Detonate makes for an exciting push-your-luck party game.
