The rest of the experts were left paging through the dense set of rules, making us flex our brain muscles as we brought the headset-wearer to safety. Here at Polygon New York, we’re a fairly verbose and articulate bunch, but we were soon able to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to who’s most descriptive. It’s crucial that whoever has that headset on is a master of this ekphrastic process of using words to paint a picture for the blind. The defuser looks straight at a briefcase with an increasingly intricate set of bombs, describing their view to the best of their abilities. But that’s exactly what Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes requires with PlayStation VR.

It’s a bizarre experience, sitting and playing a video game without looking at a television, monitor or handheld console screen. But with the defuser’s screen contained within the privacy of the headset, the game gains even more tension than its standard reality versions. One player - the one with that gigantic, comfy headset on their face - is designated as the bomb defuser, while the rest of the team must flip through a downloadable, 23-page manual to talk them through the timed process. Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes in virtual reality plays similarly to the standard mobile and Windows PC release from last year in fact, we’ve played several iterations of it since development began in 2014. After several hours getting into the rhythm of the virtual reality version of Steel Crate Games’ Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, we’d found our new favorite party game, even if most of us had more fun without using the required $400 hardware. Funny, then, that it’s the newfangled PlayStation VR headset which helped remind us at Polygon New York of board games’ unadultered, screenless pleasures. It’s not unfair to say that, in 2016, the video game has superseded tabletop classics in popularity.

Keep calm and nobody explodes free