You know what? I love card games. I love that you can take a deck of cards, and use the inherent randomness of the shuffle to create a fun little strategic adventure for yourself no matter how many times that deck gets shuffled. I love that each turns is different, and each game presents a new challenge to solve by either modifying a strategy you enjoy, or being forced to come up with an entirely new one. It’s delightful.

Ah yes, everything I need. Dugouts, kiosks, and one lost-looking guy

Bombagun is a standalone version of a minigame from Atom RPG . Two players play from an identical deck of cards, gradually building resources while defending themselves from an opponent’s attacks. Players accumulate housing, food, and defenses, and use these resources plus action points to mount assaults on their opponent. Whoever runs out of health first loses.

I don’t trust that gang leader.

Bombagun is deceptively simple. While its mechanics are easy to understand, putting them together into a coherent strategy becomes more complex as the game wears on. The combination of needing to build up your own resources coupled with not letting the opponent build presents an interesting challenge in balancing that building with the need for at least some aggression.

This does seem like a harsh way to win, but these are harsh times.

While the deck is large enough that each player playing with an identical deck doesn’t necessarily lead to the same cards being out at once, the lack of customisation does give a certain degree of frustration. For example, I lost a round because I couldn’t draw anything that would actually let me protect myself. My deck was stacked with all the resource cards on top, but no defense. Being able to customise my deck would have given me the ability to decide the distribution of cards, and what strategy I wanted to play. With an unchanging deck, while there is strategy, there is also generally one “best” strategy, with the game devolving into trying to get that strategy working as quickly as possible.

Though Bombagun is fairly luck based, it is also short, with its rounds lasting three to five minutes each. When I lose because of bad luck (and only that, I swear), the sting quickly wears off as I jump into another round. There is no long investment lost because of bad luck, just a single skirmish, quickly forgotten.

Bombagun is a fun little game. It isn’t grand, but it doesn’t claim to be. All it claims to be is a game for the apocalypse. With its fun art, catchy music, and simple mechanics, it succeeds entirely at giving players a lovely strategic romp through a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Developer: Atom Team

Genre: Card Game

Year: 2022

Country: Russia, Ukraine, Latvia

Language: English

Play Time: 3-5 Minutes/Round

Youtube: https://youtu.be/F1-o6kKG4_k