If you are the right sort of person, Bombastic will make you happier than you have been in months. It will dig its claws in you and hold you, and even when you tear yourself away to sleep, its pictures will replay over and over on the insides of your eyelids. (You probably had a similar experience way back when you first tried Tetris.) It will love you fully and reward you deeply, and in exchange you will give it your life. If you are not the right sort of person, it will utterly and completely piss you off.

Bombastic is a puzzle game with a simple premise: You must roll dice around until they catch fire and explode. Learning how to set them alight in just the right way is the task that will keep you up at night. All the action takes place on a big grid, which is dotted with regular cubic dice. You control the hero, a sort of impy elf thing who looks for all the world like Po from the Teletubbies. His official name is "Acqui," but that is tough to pronounce, and, given the game's distinctly Japanese look and feel, inappropriately Finnish-sounding. For our purposes, "Po" will do.

So, Po. Enthusiastic and bouncy, he stands on top of one of the dice on the grid. As he walks up or down or left or right, his die rolls under him, provided there is an empty space for it. The idea is to assemble groups of dice with the same face up. Here is an example: You see a group of three dice near the top of the board. All have the four-side up. If you can roll Po's die up to touch the other three, and if you can manage it so that Po's die also has the four-side up, all four dice will catch fire and begin to glow. In a few moments, they explode and vanish from the board.

For each group you assemble, you must have at least as many dice as the number displayed on the faces of the group. In short, you need two to get a two-group going, three to light up a three-group, six for a six-group, etc. It all sounds arcane as can be, but if you saw a video clip you would understand instantly. So it is a good thing Bombastic comes with elaborate instructions, complete with many, many video examples.

As you play, rolling dice around and blowing them up, lightning strikes here and there. This causes new dice to grow, crowding your workspace and making it tougher to move around. The game ends when the grid is completely, er, gridlocked. It also ends if you should happen to be standing on a die as it blows up. That much you probably assumed anyway.

There are other, more complex rules, too. For one, the size of a given explosion depends on how big the number on top is. A six sends hot smoke and flame shooting a full six squares across the grid, setting alight anything in its path. Smaller numbers blow up with correspondingly smaller fanfare. In practice, this means that you soon learn to put Po where the blasts will cause the most damage, and it also means that you spend a lot of time rolling around on fiery dice, trying to land them just so before they go poof. So it also means, sadly, that poor little Po gets blown into the sky a lot. Japanophiles and mathdweebs will lovelovelove this. Others? Chances are good they are off playing Madden right now, so we probably don't need to worry about them.

Everything you have just read describes Bombastic's standard mode. There is also something called "Quest," which involves navigating Po through maze-like terrains pre-stocked with dice, and upon which lurk some of the best villains in video game history. One of them is described as "needy," and will chase Po down and smother him with affection if she gets the chance. The good news is that Quest also features a wise mentor in a blue cape, who teaches Po many useful tricks. His name is Mr. Macho.