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EVERGREEN
Tick Tack Bumm aka Pass the Bomb
More in Britain Than in the U.S.
If the internet had been widely available 25 years ago, this game may have caused a veritable shitstorm. But in 1992 there were no social media to be outraged. And that may partly be why Piatnik was able to publish its bomb game so successfully: Tick Tack Bumm has sold 6 million copies over time.
Mag. Dieter Strehl, manag- ing director for Piatnik since 1995, remembers: “Back then,
Michael Lalet from Weekend Games presented the game to me.” The author of Abalone had the game of “Los Rodri- guez” under his wings. Behind the Span- ish sounding pseudo name is the French couple Sylvie Barc and Juan Rodriguez (author of The Grizzled). Lalet was look- ing for a publisher for their prototype with a Mexican bomb. “Several others did not want the game, but I had the courage to take it on,” Strehl states.
He thinks it is not the gadget that made Tick Tack Bumm. “The thrill is in the acoustic stimulant, that nerve-rack- ing ticking sound,” he says. He declined to go for one of the egg timers so popu- lar at the time. “We wanted intervals of varying length in the game. So, we had a model made from injection molding and electronics, which we then commis- sioned with some concern.” Manufactur- ing the ticking plastic bomb made sense only in larger quantities, which is why Piatnik started with an edition five times the usual size.
And the risk paid off. The game with the miniature bomb, which sometimes ticks 10, sometimes 60 seconds before it goes off, immedi- ately became quite the party sen- sation. Savvy players dutifully start rolling the die, and then cards show them which letters are required where
in the words they need to create. The bomb can only be handed over if a word is spelled correctly. However, every- body wants to pass on the hot potato as quickly as possible, to prevent it from going off in their own hands. Soon the gadget is tossed around, and the game becomes a noisy affair. So noisy in fact that the ticking and sometimes even the bang can no longer be heard. For a later edition Piatnik decided to rig the bomb with a better loudspeaker.
The game seemed to meet the taste of British people in particular. Michael Gibson came up with the name Pass the Bomb, and a million copies were sold on the island alone. But it was played all over Europe: game of the year in Denmark; also in the Netherlands for distribution partner Jumbo; in France it fetched the As
Head of Piatnik for almost 25 years: Magister Dieter Strehl
d’Or for Ravensburger. Nowhere did play- ers show any fear of contact with a bomb. And Dieter Strehl still reacts accord- ingly to any questions about the subject today, “We as board game publishers are expected to always be politically correct,” he says. “Even more than the customer demands.”
The game’s success could neither be stopped by a mail bomb attempt on the mayor of Vienna in 1993 nor by 9/11. “Humans are perfectly able to distin- guish game from reality,” Dieter Strehl believes. “Much more serious stuff is going on in electronic games. There is shooting in motion pictures – does anyone leave the theater? Or protest when Macbeth commits his evil crimes?” Fact is that Tick Tack Bumm has become an evergreen almost everywhere, all over Europe, in Turkey, Israel and China people are playing it.
There is only one country Strehl has not managed to crack over the last 25 years. In the weapon-infested USA, of all places, nobody dares to publish a game with a ticking toy bomb. “None of the purchas- ing agents ever wanted to risk it, there was too much of a hurdle,” says the Piat- nik boss, who considers them hypocrites. But there is still the local market. And for the 25th anniversary, the publishers are planning a big blast here, because next to a party, a junior and a travel edition there is now also a jubilee version full of activity elements. Stefan Ducksch/cs
Creates a fear of detonation in the family: TICK TACK BUMM FAMILY
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