Bomber Robot app icon — a little robot beside a lit bomb

Bomber Robot Classic Arena Battles

Old-school bomb battles, new game.

Coming soon toGoogle Play Coming soon to theApp Store

A grid, a wall of bricks and a three-second fuse. You dig your way out of your own corner, pick up whatever the bricks were hiding, and go looking for the other lot — who are doing exactly the same thing from theirs. Blow them all up and the arena is yours. Walk into a blast, including one of your own, and it isn't.

Two ways to play

The same game either way — the only difference is who is driving the other robots.

  • ▲ One player, offline — one robot is yours and the rest are machine-driven, split into two sides of one to five. Needs no connection at all.
  • ▲ Multiplayer, online — up to four people share one arena on two sides, with no machines on the board at all.
A medium arena seen fully zoomed out, robots of both colours scattered across it and bombs counting down

Outwit the machines

A rival thinks once per cell, and in a fixed order: stay alive, then kill the other lot, then get stronger. It keeps a map of everywhere that is about to be on fire, refuses to lay a bomb it cannot walk out of, and will corner you against a wall if you let it. Set both sides from one to five robots and pick a colour each — five on the small board is a knife fight, five on the large one is a manhunt.

Play online with friends

Open a room and read out its four-character code. A public room shows up on the join list for anybody who opens the tab, one tap to get in; a private one appears on no list and needs a password you set. The host picks the board, deals the sides and starts the match. Everybody is drawn a name like misty-otter or lunar-gecko — there is no keyboard anywhere in this game.

The multiplayer lobby showing a public room code, the two team columns, board size, pattern and style pickers
An arena mid-match with a bomb blast, gifts lying on the floor and the bomb, remote and bat buttons stacked in the corner

Seven things under the bricks

About a fifth of the bricks are hiding something. Five of them change a number and leave it changed — an extra bomb on the stack, a wider blast, more speed, a remote bomb in the pocket, a swing of the baseball bat. Two run on a clock instead: a shield that eats one blast, and a snail that leaves you at a quarter speed for ten seconds. A gift lying uncovered burns like a brick, so dig towards what you want rather than through it.

Arenas up to 35 × 35

Three sizes — 11×11, 21×21 and 35×35 — and four hand-drawn patterns. Classic is the pillar lattice and nothing else. Open takes the pillars away entirely. Split runs a wall straight down the middle with two doorways in it, and Diagonal cuts the same thing corner to corner. The pattern decides what is in the way and where the two sides come onto the board, so where the fight starts changes with it.

The full 35 by 35 arena zoomed out to fit the screen, dense with bricks and pillars

Tap where you want to go

No direction pad and no swipe. Tap a cell and the robot walks the shortest way there, taking the corners for you; tap it again and it stops on the spot. Tap somewhere it cannot reach and it goes as near as the walls allow. One finger drags the map, two pan and pinch-zoom it, and the bomb button never moves from the bottom-left corner — the remote, the BLAST switch and the bat stack upwards above it as the field hands them to you.

See it in action

Dig, corner, detonate — and get off the cell before the fuse does.

A bomb going off mid-arena with gifts scattered on the floor
An online match with two players' names drawn in gold and teal over their robots
A single-player field with seven machine-driven robots spread across two sides
A rival robot closing in down an open corridor
The largest arena, 35 by 35 cells, fitted onto one screen
The room lobby with its code, roster, board size, pattern and style

Also in the box

  • ▲ Two skins — Neon, teal panels set into dark gutters, and the original painted Classic look of grass, stone and clay.
  • ▲ Friendly fire — nothing checks sides before killing. Your bomb takes your own team-mates exactly as readily as a rival.
  • ▲ Remote bombs and a baseball bat — lay a fence of remotes and set them all off at once, or knock a live bomb down the row into somebody's face.
  • ▲ A room scoreboard — a gold cup and a count over the head of anybody whose side has won a field that evening.
  • ▲ Put your phone down mid-match — you keep your seat, your side and the room; a moon appears over your robot so nobody mistakes you for an ambush.
  • ▲ Every arena drawn from a seed — one number and two names are the whole of a 35×35 board, which is how four phones build the same field without sending it to each other.

What it doesn't do

  • ▲ No ads — there is no advertising anywhere in the game.
  • ▲ No in-app purchases — nothing is for sale and there is no currency you can buy.
  • ▲ No accounts and no sign-in — multiplayer names are drawn for you, not registered.
  • ▲ No permissions — the app asks for nothing: no contacts, photos, files, microphone, camera or location.
  • ▲ No text you can type — there is no chat, no profile and no name box, so there is nothing to moderate.
  • ▲ Single player works fully offline — a connection is only ever needed to sit in a room with other people.

Private by design

Bomber Robot collects no personal data, because there is no way to give it any. There are no accounts, no profiles and no input fields — your multiplayer name is two words drawn at random on your own device. Rooms are anonymous and temporary: the last person out takes the room with them. The only network traffic in the whole app is the Firebase Realtime Database that carries your taps to the other three phones, and minimal anonymous Firebase Analytics. Your settings and preferences never leave your device.

Made for

Anyone who grew up on the original and wants it back on a phone without a storefront bolted to the side of it — and anyone with three friends in the same room and four minutes to settle something.

Get in touch

Questions, feedback, or ideas? We'd love to hear from you.