Designing Tic! Tic! Boomb!!! Before I Had the Whole Picture

I don’t normally start designing before I can see the whole game working. Tic! Tic! Boomb!!! was exactly that exception.

One morning at breakfast, my daughter told me she’d been testing ChatGPT for game ideas and had a list to share. One title caught my attention: a cut-the-bomb-fuse game. The idea stuck with me for a while — I doodled, tried to work out how the mechanics should even function.

A month passed, and I still didn’t have anything solid. So I just opened the graphic software and started designing a simple bomb card, then the tic card. Once there was something to look at, ideas started flowing in. Seventy-something cards later, we had a game.

To be entirely honest, this is the game we were least confident about going in — the gameplay is original enough that it needs a longer explanation than our other games. The first few test sessions, maybe with the wrong age group, got a cold reception.

But teens and young adults love it. It’s the one card gamers gravitate to. At family gatherings, it’s consistently the game generating the most trash talk. And it’s also the one game where, honestly, there isn’t much left to enhance further.

Ready to cut the fuse yourself? Check out Tic! Tic! Boomb!!!.