BOMBANANA! guide: which way the information travels, the vocabulary to agree on first, and the mistakes that blow you up

Teams that fail at BOMBANANA! are not short of logic. They are short of protocol.

The game imposes no method of communication on you, and that is where it is won: the teams that succeed decided before the first bomb who speaks to whom, in which words, and in what order. Here is how to build that protocol.

Who can do what, exactly

First, stop thinking in terms of handicaps and start thinking in terms of remaining abilities.

The blind monkey cannot see the bomb but can touch it. This is the only one who acts on it physically. They cannot tell colours apart and cannot read anything on a screen. They speak and they hear.

The mute monkey is the only one who can read the defusal manual. They see and hear everything. They cannot speak.

The deaf monkey sees the bomb and sees teammates gesturing. They speak. They hear nothing.

Let us restate what that implies, because everything else rests on it: the procedure sits with somebody who cannot say it, the hands belong to somebody who cannot see, and the only complete visual witness hears no questions.

Which way the information travels

There is exactly one complete path, and you should not leave it.

The mute reads the manual. They pass it to the deaf in gestures. The deaf translates out loud. The blind executes.

Learn that route and enforce it, because half of all explosions come from people short-circuiting the chain. A blind monkey asking the mute a direct question will never get an audible answer. A deaf monkey shouting at the mute is wasting breath: the mute can hear, but can only reply in gestures, so speak to them calmly instead.

There is one useful piece of feedback, and only one: the blind monkey describes out loud what they are touching. The mute hears it, checks the manual, and corrects through the deaf if it is wrong. That is your safety net, use it.

The vocabulary to agree on before the first round

Spend five minutes on this and you will get it back tenfold.

Name positions, never colours. The blind monkey cannot see colours, so "the red wire" means nothing to them. Number things: first module top left, second, third, and keep that numbering all evening.

Agree on an origin point. Count left to right or top to bottom, it does not matter, but everyone must count the same way. A team counting in opposite directions cuts the wrong thing every time.

Fix three emergency signals in the emote wheel or in gestures: stop, start again, understood. Those are the only three things you need to transmit instantly.

Use the slap as a physical stop. It is in the game, it is immediate, and it crosses every handicap. It is the one message that depends on no sense at all.

And require confirmation before anything irreversible. The blind monkey announces what they are about to do, waits for the green light, then does it. A failed bomb in this game almost always comes from an action started one second too early.

Where to start

Campaign first. Its thirty handcrafted levels introduce module types one at a time, with difficulty that climbs cleanly. This is your school. Do not skip it to chase the chaos straight away, you would not have the vocabulary.

Custom mode next, and not only to hurt yourselves. You set bomb difficulty, timer length, which module types appear, environmental hazards and how many mistakes are forgiven. It is a training tool: isolate a module type your team keeps failing, lengthen the timer, switch off the hazards, and repeat it until the communication becomes automatic.

Endless last. The generated waves harden until they finish you, which is only interesting once the protocol is drilled. It is a discipline test, not a place to learn.

Rotate the roles

This is the advice teams follow least and that improves them most.

Each role teaches a different skill. The mute learns to be clear without words, the deaf learns to translate fast without adding interpretation, the blind learns to obey precisely and to describe what they feel.

A team in which everyone has held all three seats communicates enormously better, because each player knows what the others are not receiving. As long as your mute is always the same person, you have two players with no idea how hard it is to push an instruction through in gestures.

Environmental hazards

They appear as you progress and they are designed to break your chain specifically: power cuts, obstructions, loud interruptions.

The answer is always the same: stop. A power cut robs the deaf monkey of what they see, a loud interruption robs the blind monkey of what they hear, and in both cases the chain has a dead link. Carrying on at that moment means acting on expired information.

Get into the habit of pausing the second a hazard triggers, restarting the description from the last confirmed point, and only then moving again. You will lose three seconds. You will gain thirty.

Note too that the settings change. The minivan is no longer the only place you defuse, a plane is another. The layout changes, your numbering has to follow, and that is the moment to restate it out loud.

The four recurring mistakes

Talking to somebody who cannot hear you. It looks obvious written down here. In a round, everybody does it, constantly.

Describing things to the blind monkey by colour. Same remark. It is the most stubborn reflex in the game.

Trying to handle everything at once. One module at a time, finished and confirmed, before moving to the next. Teams that open three worksites in parallel lose track of what has been done.

Speeding up as the timer drops. That is the moment when haste costs the most, and it is exactly the moment everybody speeds up. Collective composure is the real skill this game asks for.

If you are hosting a beginner

Put them on deaf. It is the most readable role: they see the bomb, they see the gestures, they speak, and they have nothing to memorise. They learn the structure of a bomb by looking at it.

Mute is the most demanding seat, because you have to read, understand and transmit without a word, watched by two people who are waiting. Do not inflict it on anyone on their first evening.

Set custom mode to a generous timer and no hazards for the first rounds too. The game stays funny without pressure, and a team that has grasped its protocol can then crank everything up at once.

Found a better gesture code? Come and describe it on the InsertCoins Discord, the homemade protocols are the most interesting thing this game produces.