Fernando Lopez
United Kingdom
London
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Ahh Boom-O, an old favourite of mine and my groups. We've played this countless times and enjoyed every single game. The fact that it supports so many players is probably one of its best aspects as we often have 5 or more people wanting to play. Actually it is only meant for 6 players max, but since there are enough time bomb cards for 8 players you can squeeze in a few extra and we often do.
Onto the session!
We were playing with 7 players here, 6 experienced Boomers and one newbie, we gave her the helpful 'explantion cards' and we were off!. As often happens in large players games, soem peoples hand were good... others not so good. What this means is that you will see a lot of 'bomb' cards played, and usually early on in the game. This is exactly what happened here, of course in a large players game there is also a greater chance that at least one person doesn't have a 'hold' card. And indeed hold cards were in short supply, the first bomb caught three players, the seconds another three and the last one took out 4 players! Mel was unlucky in all three instances and so was the first person out of the game. Myself and another player were sitting on one time bomb, two others had two left and Enrico and the newbie-kate were sitting pretty with all thier time bombs.
Now came the double play cards. Two in a row in fact, one took Alex down to one timebomb, the other wiped me out of the game. Another early bomb narrowed the field even more leaving only 3 players in the game, Enrico and Kate on 3 time bombs each and Kirk with a paltry one. Finally we had a round without a self detonation and Kate managed to finish all of her cards with a wiley use of the trade hands card, taking out Kirk and leaving just her and Enrico.
Speed is the name of the game in the final rounds, with only 2 players the game changes significantly, much more likely to come down to a bad/good draw than anything else, finishing your hand is much more likely to happen. Kate got the best of the draws winning the battle after only losing one life to Enricos bomb., proving that this game is as easy for newbies to win as experienced players (another good selling point - at least for some gamers 
Note: We play the game slightly wrong apparantly (only discovered after reading some threads here, instead of drawing up to 7 we redeal to all remaining players. This lengthens the game considerably, but does server to give people a better chance as an initial bad deal won't ruin thier chances. The downtime for the shuffle/deal is not really very noticeable in our group as we tend to talk incessantly during the whole experience)
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