We’re always looking for ways to improve the Fantasy Box Office game rules. Looking back on 2025, we watched many studios get pulverized by a string of historic box office bombs — Tron: Ares, Snow White, and Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, to name a few. That left a lot of players more than a billion dollars in the red, with no real path to climb out.
We’ve been playing Fantasy Box Office for four years now, and patterns like this stand out over time. As we set the game up for 2026, we wanted to make the Bomb Pick less destructive without losing the tension and strategy that makes them fun. For the new year, we're giving League Commissioners a new option for how bomb damage works.
(The new options don’t affect two-player leagues at all, but they make a big difference for larger leagues.)
Why Bombs Needed a Rethink
Bomb picks have always been a tricky part of Fantasy Box Office. In the classic version of the game, a bomb gets duplicated onto every opponent’s slate — the same movie “released” by multiple studios at the same time, each absorbing the full loss.
Thematically, that breaks the game's immersion - as if multiple movie studios separately produced and released the same movie on the same day.
And in larger leagues, the mechanic is lethal. With many Bomb Picks on a studio's slate, one from each opponent, it's not unusual to end up hundreds of millions (or over a billion) dollars in the red with no realistic way out.
Of course, the game is based on rankings, not absolute profit - you can still win your league even if your studio ended at a loss, as long as your opponents lost more. But it's not fun to open your scoreboard and see so much red.
Introducing Bomb Damage Modes
Starting in 2026, League Commissioners will be able to choose between two bomb systems. It's a no-commitment choice - you set it while creating your league, but you can also change it during the year if you regret your initial decision. Anytime you flip the switch, the system re-calculates all your league’s historical scores so you can compare how both modes impact the standings.
Savage Mode (Classic)
Savage Mode is the original high-impact version of the game. When you draft a bomb, the entire movie lands on every opponent’s slate, and each opponent takes the full loss.
Some people like this because it makes the bomb pick feel closer to “shorting” in a stock-market sense: you gain the full impact of your Bomb Pick over each of your opponents, and it can create a major swing between you and the rest of the league. If your group enjoys that style of play, Savage Mode is still a great option.
All existing leagues are automatically grandfathered into Savage Mode unless they choose to switch.
Split Mode (New Default)
In Split Mode, the bomb doesn’t duplicate. Instead, the movie is divided evenly among your opponents. In a five-player league, for example, each of your four opponents would take one-fourth of the financial outcome. So if you draft a movie that loses $100m, your opponents would each lose $25m.
Thematically, this is much more tied to real-world numbers. Your opponents are co-producing the film together, which happens in real life on projects like F1: The Movie or Twisters.
It keeps the strategic value of bombs intact, but the damage lands in a way that feels more grounded and less punishing.
Split Mode is now the default for all new leagues. Existing leagues can switch over at any time.
How Bombs Feel Now
In many ways, both Bomb Damage modes are the same. It doesn't change your strategy when drafting a Bomb Pick, and in most leagues we tested, it doesn't dramatically alter the league's standings. Split Mode just helps prevent multiple bombs burying studios so deep in the negative, the game starts to feel hopeless. It gives every player a better shot at profitability.
Closing Thoughts
We’re always looking for ways to improve Fantasy Box Office and make the game more fun, more flexible, and more customizable. Split Mode is our first league rule that commissioners get to set for their own leagues, and adding more of these kinds of options is a major goal for 2026. Eventually, the League Commissioners will be able to fine-tune their own league's rules to create the exact game that they want to play.
If you have any ideas for other kinds of configurable rules, please contact us — we always want to hear from you about the kinds of features you want to use.