BOMBANANA! Module Guide: Wires, D-Pad, Numpad, Switches

Defusing the bomb is the easy part of BOMBANANA! — talking about it is what blows you up. Our trio cleared the first half of the campaign on puzzle skill alone, then hit a wall where every death was a garbled callout, not a wrong answer. So we did what any reasonable team does: wrote a fixed callout package for every module type, drilled it in Custom mode for an evening, and stopped dying to communication entirely.

This guide is that package. It covers all four module families — wires, the D-pad, numpad math and switch panels — with the exact callout order we use, the manual-reading notes for the Mute Monkey, and the relay etiquette that keeps the Deaf Monkey sane. Nothing here is a universal answer key; the manual’s rules are what they are. What this gives you is a format that gets complete information to the manual the first time.

Table of Contents

1. The Relay Chain, In One Paragraph
2. Wire and Cable Modules
3. D-Pad Direction Modules
4. Numpad and Math Modules
5. Switch Panels
6. When Modules Fight Back: Hazards and Changing States

The Relay Chain, In One Paragraph

Every solve in BOMBANANA! moves through the same chain: the Blind Monkey feels the bomb and reports what’s there; the Deaf Monkey (who sees the bomb and speaks but hears nothing) voices that report and carries it to the Mute Monkey (who reads the manual but can’t talk); the Mute Monkey gestures the rule back; the Deaf Monkey translates it into words; the Blind Monkey executes. Two relays, every fact, every time. The callout packages below are designed so each hop transmits a complete, ordered packet — because the single biggest source of detonations we recorded was a fact that arrived at the manual missing its position or its state.

Wire and Cable Modules

Wires are the first module every trio meets and the one that punishes sloppy order the most.

The callout package, in our fixed order:

1. Count first. “Wires module, four cables.” The manual’s rules almost always branch on quantity, so the count goes before any colors.
2. Colors with positions, left to right. “One red, two yellow, three red, four blue.” Positions and colors travel together — never a bare color list, never “the red one is third.”
3. Indicator state. “LED off” or “LED green, lit.” If the module has a light, its state is part of the packet; several manual branches only fire for lit indicators, and we’ve watched a trio burn 40 seconds re-describing a module because the LED state arrived last instead of first.
4. Rule back as a position. The Mute Monkey’s gesture should resolve to a position, and the Deaf Monkey voices it as a position: “cut the second wire.” “Cut the yellow one” is banned on our team — with three red wires across two modules we’ve seen it go badly.

Blind Monkey technique: drag a finger along each cable to its anchor before calling it — on later bombs the panel is angled and it’s surprisingly easy to skip a cable by feel. Confirm the cut target by hovering before committing, and get an explicit “confirmed” from the relay before cutting.

D-Pad Direction Modules

The D-pad module asks for a directional input, and it has two traps: perspective and the tactile layout.

The callout package:

1. LED or indicator state first. Like wires, the direction rules branch on what’s lit. “Pad module, LED blue.”
2. The center reference. Describe the number or symbol at the pad’s center exactly as it appears. This is the value the manual’s rule keys off, and it’s also the piece the Blind Monkey can verify by touch.
3. Direction in clock terms, not up-down terms. “Point to four o’clock” survives perspective flips better than “down and a bit right.” The bomb panel is rarely viewed from the same angle by the seeing players and the touching player, so anchor everything to the pad itself, not the room.
4. Confirm by hovering. The Blind Monkey places a thumb above the target direction and says which one it is; the Deaf Monkey confirms against what they see; only then does the press happen.

Why the perspective trap works: the Deaf Monkey sees the pad from the front; the Blind Monkey feels it from whatever angle they’ve grabbed it. If your directions are relative to the room, one of you is always wrong. We lost three bombs to this before switching to clock positions relative to the pad’s center label.

Numpad and Math Modules

The math module is where one misheard digit costs more than any other mistake in the game — a wrong entry means re-reading an angled keypad by touch.

The callout package:

1. Read the expression digit by digit. “Expression: seven, plus, three, times, two.” Not “seven plus three times two” said fast — relayed arithmetic is a telephone game, and we treat every operator as its own word.
2. The Blind Monkey confirms what they feel. They read the keypad buttons by touch and echo the expression back; the Deaf Monkey checks the echo against what they see. A wrong operator caught here costs five seconds; caught after entry, it costs a re-read and usually a panicky timer check.
3. The Mute Monkey’s rule is about the result’s properties. Depending on the manual page, the answer may need to be entered as-is, or adjusted — odd/even, greater-than/less-than comparisons and the LED state all come up. The Deaf Monkey voices the rule as a transformation: “enter the result as-is” or “round down first.”
4. Repeat the final result before typing. “Entering one four.” A two-second repeat has saved us from at least a dozen transposed digits.

Mute Monkey note: for the arithmetic branches, the most reliable gesture we found is holding up fingers for digits and using a flat palm-chop for “times” versus a horizontal slide for “plus.” Invent your own — but invent it in the lobby, not mid-bomb.

Switch Panels

Switch panels look trivial and cause the most “how did we fail that” deaths in our log, because a switch’s up/down state is genuinely hard to verify by touch under time pressure.

The callout package:

1. The top light order. Several switch rules key off the color sequence of the lights above the panel: “lights, left to right: green, red, green.”
2. The digit string. If the panel shows digits, read them as a string, not a number: “one, zero, one, one” — “ten eleven” has caused exactly the disaster you’re imagining.
3. Current switch states, numbered. “Switch one down, two up, three down, four down.” The Blind Monkey traces each switch to its anchor and reports state by position.
4. The target state as a string. The Mute Monkey gestures the target configuration; the Deaf Monkey voices it position by position; the Blind Monkey sets one switch at a time and re-reads the whole panel after setting, because a half-flipped switch feels identical to a flipped one.
5. ENTER is an action, not an afterthought. Someone says “pressing enter” and gets a confirmation before it happens. We once solved a panel perfectly and detonated because two people thought the other had hit enter — and then a neighbor switch got brushed in the confusion.

When Modules Fight Back: Hazards and Changing States

Past the mid-campaign, BOMBANANA! stops being a static puzzle. Module indicators change state mid-solve, and the game layers environmental hazards over the bomb: power outages that plunge the panel into darkness, obstructions that hide part of the bomb from the seeing players, and loud interruptions that are pure chaos for a team whose relay is a speaking player.

Three adjustments carry us through:

• Re-verify before every commit. If a hazard just fired, assume the module state changed. The two seconds of re-checking are cheaper than a solved module that quietly un-solved itself.
• On power outages, the Blind Monkey becomes the eyes. They’re used to working by touch — while the seeing players are blinded, keep relaying from touch and wait the darkness out rather than rushing input.
• Solved-module roll call. On multi-module bombs we call out “wires done, pad done, panel in progress” after each solve. When something changes state later, you know which module to suspect.

The full flow — inventory, one voice per module, collect then solve, confirm, roll call — is the same one from the beginner’s guide, just running against nastier modules. If your deaths are role-specific rather than module-specific, the role playbooks break down what each monkey should personally be practicing. And when the handcrafted levels are behind you, the Endless survival guide covers how these modules scale in the wave mode.