Bomb Busters Designer Explains Turning Luck Into Deduction at CEDEC 2026
Hayashi's session showed how a game built on luck can be reshaped into a deduction game, a process that led to his historic Spiel des Jahres win.
Reporting from 1 source: 4Gamer.net.
At CEDEC 2026, designer Hisashi Hayashi detailed how his cooperative board game Bomb Busters evolved from a pure-luck concept into a deduction game. Hayashi, who won the 2025 Spiel des Jahres, the first for a Japanese designer, explained the design process and the recent trend toward cooperative games among award winners.
Hisashi Hayashi, representative of the OKAZU brand, opened his CEDEC 2026 session by asking the audience to play a simple card game: each player holds a hand visible only to themselves, designates a card from another player's hand, and guesses its number. With discussion forbidden, a wrong guess costs a life. Hayashi's point was that this version is unwinnable, since success depends entirely on luck.
The session, titled "Learning How to Make Cooperative Board Games from 'Bomb Busters'," then worked through the additions that turn that luck-based setup into a game of deduction. Hayashi traced the game's origins to two inspirations: a cooperative game based on Old Maid and a deduction logic puzzle. The prototype, self-published as Bomb Squad in 2016, later became Bomb Busters through a French publisher.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.