LogFAQs > #932974741

84. Two Rooms and a Boom (2013)

Category: Team vs Team
Genres: Hidden roles, bluffing, voting, social deduction, party game
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1
Game length: 20 minutes
Experience: 10+ plays over 4+ sessions (2015) with 8-10 players
Previous ranks: 44/100 (2016), 53/80 (2018)

Summary - There are two equal teams: the red team (with a bomber) and a blue team (with a president). Everyone is randomly divided into two physically separate rooms. Over the course of a fixed, small number of timed rounds, the players in each room talk to one another, and elect both a leader and a hostage. Hostages are exchanged between the two rooms at the end of each round. After the final round, if the bomber is in the same room as the president, the red team wins; otherwise, the blue team wins.

Experience - Social deduction games were my jam when I started hobby gaming, and Two Rooms and a Boom was a really solid option for a large group of people. That one summer of 2015 we played it a ton, and then the person who owned it moved away, and the remaining regular gamers meet so much more infrequently and in such smaller groups that I've barely seen it since then. If I have a regret regarding it, it's not playing more different roles.

Design - Two Rooms and a Boom is really silly. It's a good case of how to do an awful theme without being stupidly edgy: suicide bombing as assassination is, you know, bad. But everything about the game, starting with the silly title, encourages us not to take it seriously or stir up controversial. Perhaps it's due to its relative lack of popularity, but I've never heard anyone complain about Two Rooms and a Boom, unlike Secret Hitler. And yes, that's because it's not stupidly exploitative with a hot-trigger issue.

Anyway, the game is fun, if you like the people. There are goofy roles in it, like the ones that prevent you from showing your card, or (especially) the clown that forces you to smile the whole time (this resulted in a bunch of people pretending to be the clown and smiling the whole time). And the suspicion that goes 'round when someone new enters is always fun.

Two things make Two Rooms particularly unique: Leveraging physical space and playing an extremely high player count. Those are probably the biggest innovation in Two Rooms, though of course they're also one of the worst parts about the game, because they so badly limit the opportunities to play it.

If I have a minor gameplay glitch (and it's been so long now that it feels pointless to nitpick), it's that with even numbers of players in each room, it's possible for one team to control both rooms if the first randomly selected leader is the same color both times. That can result in a stale game, as no one needs to decide whether it's better to remain in control or to try to gain information by sending an agent from the in-power team across the aisle. As a result, eight-player games fell very flat in my group, while ten-player games were considerably better.

Future - I was legitimately prepared to write that sadly, I may never play Two Rooms and a Boom ever again. But then I clicked a link to Amazon, and according to a review, a six-player game of Two Rooms can be good. I feel like a group of three in each room is rough, but that does spark my interest again.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness