How to Play Bombanana: Your First Bomb, Step by Step

What you are signing up for

BOMBANANA! is a three-player co-op game. Not two, not four: the store page says “exactly three monkeys required”, and the developer confirmed on the Steam forum that every player needs a copy of the game. Each of you is missing a sense:

Blind Monkey cannot see colours or screens but is the only one allowed to touch the bomb.
Deaf Monkey cannot hear the others but sees the bomb in full colour.
Mute Monkey cannot speak but is the only one who can open the manual.

Two roles need a microphone; the Mute Monkey does not. Details on the roles page.

Step 1: the lobby

Host a lobby or join one from the server browser (launch feature: you can join people without being Steam friends, or share a room code). Pick a role, or press Random Role — the game hands out an achievement for rolling three times. Everyone readies up; the timer starts when the level loads.

Step 2: name the module before anything else

The bomb has one or more modules, each a small panel. Level 1 in both the demo and the full game is a single Cable Module: a few coloured wires and one lit LED. The Deaf Monkey’s first sentence should always be the same shape:

“Cable module, top left. Four cables. Light is red. Colours left to right: blue, yellow, red, green.”

That sentence is everything the Mute Monkey needs to find the row in the manual. Skipping the position or the count is how trios lose thirty seconds arguing about which panel is meant.

Step 3: the manual answers, silently

The manual page for Cable — the only page Lefto has shown in an official screenshot — reads: “Cut the correct cable based on the number of cables connected to the module, and the color of the active light.” The Mute Monkey opens that page, finds the row for the count and colour, and signals the answer with the emote wheel, by pointing, or with a head nod when the Deaf Monkey guesses out loud. See how the manual works.

Step 4: repeat, then act

The Deaf Monkey says the answer to the Blind Monkey (“cut the third cable, the red one”). The Blind Monkey repeats it back. Only after that repeat does the Blind Monkey cut. The 10-tips guide calls this the safety net: “if an error occurs, stop completely” and rebuild the chain from the module name.

Step 5: after the first bomb

Level 2 adds a second module. The four demo modules — Cable, Direction, Calculation and Switch — carry you through the first campaign levels; the full game then adds colour sliders, a symbol wheel, a piano, sound buttons and CHAOS modules that must be managed rather than solved. The modules page lists them all with what each role sees.

Three mistakes every new trio makes

Using Discord instead of game voice. It lets the Deaf Monkey hear, which breaks the puzzle and usually makes the trio worse, not better, because nobody learns the gesture vocabulary.
Reading the manual from page one. The Mute Monkey should jump to the module the Deaf Monkey named, not browse.
Cutting on the first instruction. Repeat it. Bombs explode on misheard colours, not on hard puzzles.