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Cut the wires together to defuse the bomb. One wrong snip and it's all over.

Cut the Wire is a cooperative deduction game where you and your team are bomb disposal experts racing to cut every wire before the detonator runs out. If you love the cooperative bomb-defusal game Bomb Busters, you'll feel right at home.

Each player holds a stand of numbered wires, sorted but hidden from everyone else. On your turn you point at a teammate's wire and call its value, hoping to cut a matching pair. Guess right and the wires are snipped. Guess wrong and the detonator ticks closer to zero, or worse: hit a red wire and the bomb goes off.

Talking about your own wires is forbidden, so every cut is a careful read of what's already on the table. Work through the training missions one by one, learning a new twist each time, until your team can defuse anything.

How to play

Cut the Wire is a cooperative deduction game. You are a team of bomb disposal experts and you win or lose together. Each of you holds a stand of numbered wires, sorted lowest to highest and hidden from everyone else. Cut every blue and yellow wire before the detonator runs out, and never cut a red one.

Goal

You win the moment every stand is empty: all blue and yellow wires cut, and any red wires safely revealed.
You lose at once if anyone cuts a red wire, or if the detonator fills up to the skull.

Your stand

Your wires sit in a row, sorted from lowest to highest, with their values hidden from everyone else. They never change places. A wire that is cut or revealed stays where it is, now showing its value, so its position keeps informing the team. Reading those positions, and the sorted order, is how you work out what is still hidden.

Wire colours

Blue wires each show a value from 1 to 12 (four copies of each). Yellow wires all count as one shared value, 'yellow': you cut one by calling 'yellow', and its printed number only fixes where it sits in the stand. Red wires are deadly and are never cut; their number too is only there to place them in the row.

Blue: a value from 1 to 12.
Yellow: all share one value, 'yellow'.
Red: deadly, never cut it.

No table talk

You may never talk about the wires in your own hand, suggest their values, recall earlier hints, or say your guesses out loud. Everything you act on must come from what is already revealed on the table and the sorted order of each stand. This silence is the heart of the game.

On your turn

Play passes clockwise from the Captain. On your turn you take exactly one of these three actions:

Dual Cut

Choose a value you hold yourself, point at a single wire in a teammate's stand, and declare it, for example "This is a 9."

Correct: the wire is that value. It is cut where it sits, and one of your own matching wires is cut too, both kept in place.
Wrong, and the wire is blue or yellow: the detonator fills another circle and your teammate's wire is revealed, showing its true value. You never show where in your own hand your intended wire was.
Wrong, and the wire is red: the bomb explodes and the mission fails. Only point at a wire when you are confident it is not red.

Solo Cut

When the last uncut copies of a value are all in your own hand, you may cut them yourself, with no teammate, two or all four at once. A yellow Solo Cut is allowed only if you hold every remaining yellow wire.

Reveal Your Red Wires

When every wire left in your hand is red, reveal them all at once. They are now safe and your stand is empty.

The detonator

The detonator is a row of circles, one for each player, the last marked with a skull. Every failed Dual Cut fills the next circle, and filling the skull ends the game, so a larger team starts with more circles and can afford more mistakes. Cutting a red wire ends the game at once, however many circles are still empty.

Double Detector

Once per game, during your Dual Cut, you may point at two wires on one teammate's stand instead of one and name a single value. If either wire is that value the cut succeeds, and if both are, your teammate chooses which to cut. If neither is, the detonator fills another circle and your teammate reveals one of the two wires of their choice. If exactly one of the two is red, the bomb does not explode; only the wire that is not red is revealed.

Equipment

From mission 3 on, each game deals a few shared equipment cards. A card unlocks once two wires of the number printed in its corner have been cut, and each can be used only once. Tap a card to read exactly what it does and when it may be used.

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