A Review of Everything Too Many Bones

this video is sponsored by skillshare hello bone fans today we will be reviewing a board game called too many bones and we will be reviewing everything that's been published for it so far and those of you familiar with the game might be saying wow that's that's a lot and you would be right this is the longest video review that we have done in terms of length uh the word count is about the same word count as my bachelor's degrees thesis and this is the hardest project i've ever worked on i wanted to let you know why i'm doing this and that's because i am enamored with too many bones but also because i think there's so much of it out there that it can feel a little bit murky in terms of what's what what's good what's necessary what's not so i wanted to make a video that's not just a comprehensive critique but at the same time a comprehensive bias guide uh and this might be folly but you know you're about to watch this folly so there you go i i do want to plug patreon and i'll sponsor skillshare uh right now because this is a long video i'm not sure you're gonna last all the way through it uh so without patreon and skillshare uh videos like that would just not be possible if you've enjoyed this if you found value in this uh please back us on patreon please visit skillshare there's a link in the description uh finally i did segment this video into chapters if you don't want to watch the whole thing in one go that's totally cool that's why the chapter headings are there uh if you want the essential parts that would be the cultural context the tnb core tnb undertow and the trophy chest and conclusion but if you want a bias guide you will need to watch the entire thing so there you go enjoy in an interview with streamlinedgaming.com churn earn own the ceo of simon said that his proudest achievement is introducing the hundred dollar board game well i can't take that away from him but i think he's burying the lead the thing that absolutely everyone will remember simon for is not the hundred dollar board game but how they warped a scene known for crowdfunding indie darlings into a big boy pre-order marketing extravaganza some of you will be familiar with zombicide simon's breakout head but i bet a lot of you won't remember how their kickstarter campaign went for zombie site to succeed it needed to accrue twenty thousand dollars which might seem modest right now but back in 2012 only one or two board games went above two hundred thousand dollars in their campaign totals zombie solid was one of those games success it's easy to see from here how zombie side shape kickstarted going forward i can't say for certain that it was the first bloated crowdfunding campaign filled to the brim with expansion stretch goals and exclusive content that fuels the second-hand scalper market that artificially increases the game's value but it was the one that succeeded and other board game publishers wanted some of that zombicide money too except that's not what happened simon did not raise two hundred thousand dollars with their fun house ride through zombie tropes they raised two hundred thousand dollars in the first three quarters of the campaign and turns out someone at penny arcade mentioned zombicide in a forum somewhere and believe it or not in 2012 people cared about penny arcade so things started blowing up like 400k blowing up by the end of the campaign there was an exclusive penny arcade character available as a stretch goal and after that got introduced simon doubled their money and ended just shy of a cool 800k success breeds success it's a phrase you'll often hear in bad self-help books but it is absolutely that kind of mentality that drives people to emulate prosperous business models if i do everything exactly as the person with a lot of money then i'm bound to end up at least with half as much money right and it doesn't even matter that it wasn't the surface level stuff but an obscure detail that's not really replicable that led to the actual success people just want more of the same thing and board game publishers were ready to deliver [Music] it is only through that prison that we can view chip theory games and their very own breakout hit too many bones this comparison might not seem kind mostly because it isn't exactly accurate chip theory games isn't seem on rather a company that emerged in the culture engendered by simon what if this business model but for entirely different audience i don't think i'll accrue many enemies if i call zombicide shallow in terms of gameplay shiny plastic figurines attached to a thin veneer of rules like a skyscraper made out of toilet paper tubes and duct tape too many bones also has shiny plastic literally shiny if you catch the glint of light bouncing off the glossy polka chips add to that neoprene playmats pvc cards pvc rules sheets chunky plastic trays boxes made out of sturdier stuff than some of the shoes i've owned and most importantly hundreds of colorful dice i won't go on about how voluptuous too many bones is because it's a bit like saying look at this elephant isn't it huge it's even got other smaller elephants following along amazing but when chip theory sent me every box they made for this game i think i had a minor panic how do i review all of this this isn't just stuff it's stuff that comes with a deaf of rules you need an industrial tractor to excavate conceptually too many bones answers the question that's been on all of our minds what if gremlins went onto a dnd adventure the characters in the game are called gremlins the gear locks waves like miscreants weighing over the heads setting off on the quest to defeat one of the game's seven tyrants but they are kremlin-like in appearance and mischief whilst we're on the subject of deceptive appearance i won't fault anyone for mistaking too many bonds for a dungeon crawler heck i've made that mistake myself but it isn't it certainly wears the dungeon crawler uniform the four characters in the main box easily fall into the archetypes of tank healer melee damage dealer and ranged damage dealer you fight monsters level up get new abilities it's all there but i think tmb leans into a yet undefined genre that might have an equivalent in video games but is more the realm of board games alone when i think of dungeon callers i think of fantasy tropes setting off on a type of adventure where each play session is an encapsulated episode of the overall game you might kill some monsters find some loot or the monsters might kill you here the entire campaign is at the tip of your fingers in one play session but it's less of an adventure and more of a gauntlet to train your characters to be competent enough to defeat whichever boss you've chosen to face at the end from zero to hero in one sitting it might seem a pedantic difference but experientially it sets a very different tone it's not a boss battler either because you'll spend the majority of your game time tackling encounters that lead up to the boss fight you might not even make it to the boss fight falling short before the ultimate crescendo especially if you play at one of the game's harder difficulties in video game terms the closest experience to this genre would be rogue lights a genre of games where trying and dying is part and parcel but even then the comparison falls flat because in rogue lights once you die you start the whole thing over again whilst carrying over some permanent skills in too many bones your choice of tyrant will determine how many days you have to complete the game days meaning encounters not each encounter will result in a fight you'll draw an encounter card and it will give you two options some cards don't have a fight option some do some won't let you do anything else but fight and your choice only determines the special rules superimposed onto the battle if successful you'll get rewards chief amongst them progress points collect enough progress points for a given tyrant and instead of having a regular encounter you can attempt to take them on if you lose even in a tyrant battle it's not game over you won't get any of the rewards but you won't lose either you can even repeat the boss fight your only penalty is time the days move on and once you run out of those that's when you kick the proverbial bucket the battles themselves are more abstract than what you're used to in dungeon crawlers there's no pre-built map with a carefully selected array of monsters there's just a battle mat with 16 spaces eight for your gear locks to start on and 8 for the monsters as a baseline encounters use what is called a bq a formula to determine how many monsters you'll fight and how strong they will be difficulty wise there are three types of monsters or as the game calls them baddies there are one point baddies the baddie babies five point baddies the baddie baddies and twenty point ones the baddie daddies to calculate your bq you will multiply the number of gear locks you are playing with with the day that you are on so in a two player game on day four you would face one five point baddie and three one point ones but aside from the tyrant determining the initial pool of the archetypes of baddies you'll be facing and some rules modifying the battle and the bq by the encounter card the array of monsters is totally random which i think is this game's greatest strength monsters by themselves are simply brutal some combinations outright lethal so each time you head into battle you don't know what to expect if you told me before i played this game that i get excited about tactical skirmish encounters designed by a tabletop algorithm i would have presumed that you've been sent by youtube to spy on me yet here i am loving every moment of it gearlocks start with roughly the same amount of health as the baddies neither they nor you can attack for a lot but there's more of them than there is of you and each time they hit you they could just wipe you out anytime anyone attacks the royal attack dice equal to their attack stat each attack die has a chance to miss attack for one damage and there's a one in six chance for dealing two damage if a baddie hits picket the game's tank who starts with five health with two attack dice it is entirely possible that four fifths of picket are no longer there and as all gearlocks he's not exactly known for his size to begin with but that is nothing compared to what you'll actually be facing an early combo of monster abilities i've come to know and love is hardy and compound hardy means that no matter how hard you stump a monster no matter how many sources of damage you unleash in a single turn at most it can take only one damage whereas compound means that the body itself will be attacking with as many attack dice as the round you are on meaning you want to take it out early yet its other ability is preventing you from doing exactly that or how about a baddie that has both dive and flight flight means that after it attacks every other round it becomes untargetable which most of your abilities can't bypass dive means that as soon as it stops being untargetable it will swoop down towards your most vulnerable character and unleash pandemonium your best chance is to take it out in a single attack yet precisely the sort of character that is capable of doing that is probably already dead it's not unlikely that you'll face both of these monsters together with a few others thrown in for good measure i suppose the best way to ensure that an algorithm composed challenge is actually challenging is to make every component as deadly and unfair as possible too many bones reliably instills dread with every battery reveal you flip a chip and you go oh no not now not this thing and then you flip another one and another one and somehow it's even worse than you could have ever imagined it's moments like that that i live for in games but only because we're given the tools we need to surmount them just like the baddies are bat poop broken so too are your gear locks with a skill set so over the top that they couldn't fit them onto a single a4 page they have to use both sides not only does each gear lock have an innate ability that they can later upgrade but multiple talent paths that can be combined in any way you see fit various special rules unique to them and also a laundry list of abilities that can be activated by spending the misses you've accrued over your many many attempts at rolling dice the game's eponymous bones if i have to single out one thing that defines tmb it wouldn't be the neoprene mods or the poker chips it wouldn't be the humongous excessive at all it's that your abilities most of them i use them and lose them i mean not permanently you get them back after each fight but during a fight you get one use and that's it imagine yourself surrounded down to your last chips but somewhere slotted in your mat is the answer maybe tantrum has been upticking his rage counter and if he gets hit for the exact right number of damage he'll be able to pick up that untargetable bird and fling him off the board maybe patches can roll and i'm not kidding a posse zap result and then bring boomer back from the dead for another round of her grenades maybe but then you have to lose the answer that saved half the fight and find another answer in a desperately dwindling array of options this tension of succeeding in battles persists through the adventure each day the fights grow harder tougher meaner but if your party gets wiped that means missing out on all of the rewards that's not just the progress points that eventually let you challenge the tyrant but also loot and most importantly training points this is perhaps the real playground of too many bones i hesitate to use the kid in a candy store analogy not only because it's tried but also because systems like that have been tailor-crafted to compel people with adhd like myself but look at this i mean just look [Music] i bet you're having precisely one of two reactions to this ability sheet you either want to run for the hills in which case you can safely write this game off as not for you or you're going i can see myself spending hours upon hours just floating in it i wasn't kidding about adhd i sincerely think this game was designed to compel to people like me but it doesn't mean that it accommodates me well this sheet is a mess there's information everywhere i mean everywhere and none of it is ever structured in a way that makes sense or is intuitive to learn the rule book isn't great either but at least when i read it i felt like it made sense it was only until i picked up one of these that i realized how much information in the rulebook is missing because i couldn't understand how the mechanisms presented here interacted with the game here even when you grok it this still the problem that the wording is far too concise yes you heard me right i wish there was more text every one of these characters deserves not a sheet but a comprehensive booklet on the right you have all the possible die faces on the left you have all the possible results that's useful when you want to look things up but very hard or sometimes even impossible to learn from if it wasn't for youtube tutorials mbg rule spreads i would have no idea how to play tantrum in a way that even remotely resembles correct but dangled at the bottom of this iceberg is a promise of infinite depth you just have to break through first plunging yourself into freezing temperatures even someone like patches arguably the simplest character has enough diverging paths and combinations to spend days on a carpet just sitting there having fun untangling a snarl you could follow the straightforward and sensible combat medic path first you get a heel die then you get a die that doubles whatever your heel die rolls then you can go for some extra damage or even a second heel die that could also be doubled or why not both and finally you can even revive people who wouldn't want that someone who'd rather go stim stacker instead trading in sure-fire average effectiveness for a cavalcade of buffs that turn you all the other gear locks into gear lock hulks with potentially disastrous results but you don't have to follow one path you can mix and match you can splice in some hot spots forested dice you can build your character however you like sometimes rendering them ineffective but the experimentation that's part of the appeal i'll share a little secret with you too many bones only feels difficult and insurmountable once you understand your characters and what the game wants out of you on easier difficulties it's breezy so then the fun of it isn't to be good it's learning to be good i genuinely feel sorry for anyone who started this game off reading strategy guides because what's left after that isn't anywhere near as exciting as the promise of discovery all of that makes training points the main currency of the game not only because they're the predominant barrier to victory but also because that's how the game trades you fun a training point is like an admit one ticket to your favorite ride the more you collect the more times you can go but you can't just fritter them away either for every training point spent on exciting abilities you also have to spend them on getting more health chips or attack dice or dexterity or defense every single one of these is crucial and managing how many you get of each is as murky as your character sheet attack is simple for each attack you have that's how many attack dice you get to roll so that's important so is health because five health might seem like a decent amount but actually a stronger body could wipe you out in a single turn so you want to get more defense is also important because for each defense die you roll that's potentially one or two damage prevented but also it's a good source of bone results to activate your ancillary abilities and the dexterity is important because dexterity not only lets you move on the battlefield but it's also the total number of dice you get to roll each turn you could have an attack of six it won't do a single thing if you only have three dexterity and are limited to a total of three dice because you lose those precious skills as soon as you use them your stats will be your bread and butter upgrading your character is a tight rope management game lean too far to one side and you're off which sounds fragile and frankly it is too many bones as a design is a bit like a stained glass window beautiful complex and all it needs to break is a naughty kid who's a bit bored and has easy access to pebbles if this box was the only way to play too many bones i'd end this video on a cautious recommendation get into this if it sounds like precisely the sort of thing you don't mind sinking a lot of time money and brain cells into but it's not the only way to play and that gives me the perfect excuse to be a bit more critical and when i say critical i mean that i wouldn't recommend this version specifically you do get four characters in the box but three of them are not very interesting i want to like boomer the grenade lobbing range damage dealer because she sounds exactly like the sort of character i would enjoy her grenades are a bit like batman's utility belt filled with exploding knick-knacks which i guess is just batman's utility belt because if you think about it it's just full of exploding knick-knacks want to deal damage in a concentrated area check want to blanket fire the entire enemy field check want to disable their abilities also check there is a grenade for every season and of course this situation of course they have the potential to hurt not just the enemies but also your friends that's what grenades are all about having fun with everyone but first you have to build your grenades and that means rolling dice every turn spending precious dexterity just to set everything up it's not that i mind unpredictability it's that i mind unpredictability that's unpredictable whether i'll even get to engage in unpredictability if i need luck just have a chance to push my luck i'm not titillated i'm just frustrated and bored patches is the complete opposite and he's also judging from the giant syringe in his hands the tnb universe's version of a patisserie chef scarcely have i found a time when him stuffing his serum wasn't somehow useful yet rarely was i excited for it i'm so bored by patches i haven't even got anything particularly exciting to say about him do you want heals he can heal do you want more damage he can make you more damagey he's reliable and predictable and that's all he ever is picket is how i realized that i just don't like playing tanks in too many bones in terms of effectiveness he's probably the most potent character out of before he starts every battle bulked up has different avenues of play and i can't count the number of times i found a perfect answer in his arsenal for what seemed an insurmountable situation but at the same time most of his abilities are static get more attack get more defense get more health you could up your stats or you could get skill dice that up your stats or you can get some other dice that might never do the thing you want them to do because you need to roll the exact right thing and there's four different possibilities on a six-sided die his skills as written such as the ones he gets from spending bones are amazing but the skill dies he can get by spending training points not so much they're just reactive and i think that's my problem too many bones isn't fun when it's reactive you want to do things you want to roll a die that will blow everyone out of the water and generate cheers and celebration around the table even if you're just playing by yourself and pickett will he delivers that but he does so passively and that's no fun which leaves us with tantrum so aptly named not only because he's very clearly an angry little boy but he's also a one-man marching band and you have to respect that tantrum deals a lot of damage up close and that's nice but he also gets rewarded for being hit each time you take damage you uptick a rage counter which can fizzle out if you go too far there's a nice management minigame but he's also very effective at mitigating his downsides like the fact that he just gets walloped a lot he also pairs well with any other core box character patches is a no-brainer keeping him alive and well pick it can get him out of dodge or more importantly swap places to get him into dodge and boomer well paired tantrum with boomer and that's a lot of damage it's brittle but once again i like being proactive he's great but a single fun character out of four is not enough for me to recommend this box especially considering that the tyrants that being the bosses you'll eventually face are all over the place in my book a board game can commit no bigger sin than end on a whimper and sometimes too many bones really leans into whimpering building up to face the tyrant can take hours with some tyrants many hours so what could be more disappointing than by the time you get there you find out that it's either a total wash or a complete cake walk you'd expect shorter games to end on easier boss battles and longer ones with harder ones after all if you're literally adding hours to your game time to bulk up more there has to be a reason for it turns out the reason is to have a mediocre time facing a poorly tuned enemy duster is a particularly disappointing damp squib the longest game time to face the easiest foe whereas the first time i encountered gendrix i couldn't believe that too many bones had that many layers of meanness occasionally tyrants shine just as much as the baddies they separate you out isolate your abilities the tyrann die you roll on each of their turns is terrifying but only and only if you picked the right difficulty with the right combination of characters to find it exactly challenging which is a lot of trial and error to arrive at a great party that is just wrapping up that is if you arrive to the party at all in a game that sells itself on an unhealthy amount of dice luck is bound to rear its ugly head luck once again i don't mind so much but what i do genuinely love is when the board game starts playing itself the very first time i attempted a tyrant encounter i rolled some dice i wasn't rolling any dice for any of the characters i was playing i was just rolling them for the baddies and then by the time it got to my characters the encounter was already over and not in a good way i mentioned that losing an encounter is not losing the game but for my money it might as well be it's not that the training points you've lost put you at a significant disadvantage you can still win the game on easier difficulties if you lose once or even twice it's not you that gets killed it's the fun that dies emotionally a loss especially a loss that occurred for pure happenstance is hard to come back from too many bones is a power fantasy the fun lies in tinkering with your stats and executing the rube goldberg machine it's great when it works it's tedious rebuilding when it doesn't don't get me wrong losing is important in games if there's no chance of a loss then the game is as tense as a runny pancake but the metal of any design is tested in how you lose and in tmb you far too frequently lose by pressing start it's not a particularly groundbreaking observation to call too many bones unwieldy the box it comes in doesn't even fit into a calyx and i feel like that alone should already tip people off about what to expect i alluded earlier that the rulebook and the learning process feels arcane at the best of times but whilst i'm taking pot shots let me like boomer with her grenades love one final criticism i'd like to touch on how stupendously impractical this all is don't get me wrong dice are fun so are neoprene mats so is the clack clack clock of polka chips i imagine that when chip theory games landed on this idea of nearly indestructible components they did so to tap into our fear of impermanence but what if i spill my drink my game will be ruined well this one won't it'll outlive spills it'll outlive tears it'll outlive you it'll even outlive a nuclear explosion no one would be able to play because it'd be radiated but 400 years down the line too many bones will stand as a cultural artifact amongst the trash and detritus so that our descendants can say things like funny how people were obsessed with consumerism and stuff if too many bones is the only board game that informs future us of what people wanted out of games in the era of latter day capitalism what does that say about present us the cost isn't just environmental something i'll touch on more towards the very end of this video it's practicality too turns out there's only so much information you can fit onto a poker chip if seymour wanted to give us excessive miniatures then chip theory games want to give us excessive everything bits rules size scope it's all huge it's all scattered i'll never forget my first play of too many bonds i was shuffling around a table littered with neoprene mats poker chips dice free pvc rule sheets a rule book a tablet with a tutorial video and bgg forum search on my phone at the ready i had to bounce back and forth between them like an intoxicated pinball getting clobbered with rule exceptions vagaries and particularities i had an actual panic attack i'm not joking elaine had to tell me to step away from the game and calm down it's not insurmountable but i wouldn't call it pleasant either but more importantly i think it speaks to what was happening with this game in terms of the design and production process too many bones is a big box of big ideas too many to fit inside two bombastic and grandiose to control too numerous to hear i suspect that when the first kickstarter for too many bones went up the designers were just as much in the dark as to how all of this would play out as the rest of us we were given a big box of things and it was up to us not them to make sense of it too many bones undertow addresses a lot of the game's shortcomings but it wasn't a straight journey from box average to box better as in any self-respecting bloated kickstarter project first we have to have a lot of expansions and just like the core bucket of dice it's a mixed bag 40 days in day long is the sort of expansion that's nice when the core game it expands is fantastic but useless in all other cases it just adds more stuff without modifying any rules in this instance we get a smattering of more monsters and a double up on encounter cards i added mine in after i played about three or four games of too many bonds basic and i barely noticed a difference the monsters might as well have been there to begin with and the encounters didn't feel like they were any more exciting than the regular ones it's just more stuff that could have all been in the base box but if they did put that into the base box how would they sell you an expansion i imagine the variety might be appreciated by someone who plays tnb core a lot but i'm not recommending tnb core so this expansion can go straight in the bin following right behind is tink one of the first waves three extra gear locks tink is another tank and yes the alliteration is amusing but that's where my muse ends i did say i dislike playing tanks in too many bones but trust me tink is rubbish no matter your preferences his whole shtick is deploying spider bots that go around the map and kill things for you whilst you twiddle in the bottom lane with a joystick mechanically it's a mess and from an effectiveness standpoint there's not much to write about either his bots are fragile unreliable and cumbersome and when they do inevitably die you're left with a rubbish gear lock that can't do anything if tantrum was a one-man band then tink is a one-man disaster i can't say that nugget is one of the best gear locks in the game but that doesn't stop her from being a whole lot of fun to play nugget is a melee damage dealer that can sometimes dish out some herd from a distance and she's got some neat utility skills but her real strength is supplying your party with an endless amount of loot and loot that's an aspect of the game i neglected to mention but don't mistake it for my ambivalence loot is enormous amounts of fun your skills are a joy to tinker with and find cool combinations lu amplifies and elevates that joy because i can't for the life of me think of a single card that i found that wasn't somehow useful from simple stuff like healing yourself to powerful trove loot that pairs extraordinarily well with your gear lock there's something for everyone and nugget makes sure that the right people find the right something she's the matchmaker that gearlocks never knew they needed earlier i compared gearlocks to gremlins well when i was a kid gremlins was one of my favorite films and now i'm an adult and i look like a gremlin but guess what another one of my favorites was home alone and wouldn't you know it gilly isn't just a combination of the two but perhaps my favorite character in the entire game he can set traps he can summon wild animals to attack he's got useful skills and he shoots anybody on the board from range for a lot of damage this isn't a one-man band this is a one-man army heck maybe this isn't home alone maybe this is rambo first blood i mean pretty much the same film right gilly checks every box useful check powerful check pairs well with any gear lock check if you forget about tink you can't fix rubbish i think this is an essential gear lock expansion for any version of this game get gilly you won't regret it which brings us to the final expansion of the first tnb release cycle the age of tyranny and on paper it looks like it's essential i hesitate with campaign modes for any game especially one silver luxurious but frankly most people are either gonna play this game solo or with the same partner this isn't something you casually bring to game night to spring on unsuspecting friends unless you're looking for a discreet way of no longer being friends but most importantly within the rule set for the campaign structure lies something that i hoped would address one of my big issues with the game the dissolution of random the board game plays itself losses age of tyranny is only compatible with the core version of too many bones putting you through successive sessions in each of which you will try and defeat one of the game's seven tyrants if you win you get to carry over some skills and you might even get the tyrant's die as loot that you can then use in the next game to offset this generosity comes scars every game after the first you'll draw scar cards slotting in scars into your character sheet permanently blocking either stats or entire skill trees sounds horrible and it is but there's one final swing of the scales of justice if you ever lose an encounter you get to draw boons some will remove scars some will give you treasure others training points or any combination of the above finally something that makes a loss smart a lot less all so i thought first of all scars were actually the only mechanism from this box that i ended up liking if my favorite skill tree got blocked or worse yet if i ended up with a character who could have a maximum of one in their attack stat with no chance of ever increasing it i had to get creative and delve into skills that i haven't explored yet but then the game let me keep skills for my gear locks in between games by ignoring previous prerequisites meaning that if in my first game of the campaign i ended up digging towards the end of the talent tree to get to the best skill i could then just keep it for all of my subsequent games ignoring all of the chaff before it does that make the game broken totally games in age of tyranny became too easy and not rewarding and if i ever got particularly unlucky with some scars guess what all i need to do is lose an encounter deliberately the boom card i draw will either remove it or give me something that's as good as winning an encounter or perhaps even better age of tyranny made me sit amongst piles of plastic for hours on end being incredibly bored and that's a real shame because there's one last thing in this box that is essential and should be in the core game full stop whilst each encounter you play in too many bones is drawn from a random pile the first three are always set there is some variability within them but that variability will last you about three games and then every time you start it's the same thing of course age of tyranny has a replacement set of 21 cards to make the first three encounters variable you don't even have to play the campaign mode to use them which makes me once again question why are they not in the core box to begin with i know that chip theory games are going to rejig the size of the core box so whilst you're at it if you're watching chip theory would you please please please include these in the main game i think a lot of people would really appreciate it and would make that version a much more reasonable recommendation talking of reasonable recommendations here comes too many bones undertone my absolute favorite way to play this game if you told me at the start of this project that i'd end up recommending the more complicated and unforgiving version of too many bones i would have told you to leave my house and take your copy of imperial struggle with you i guess the old axiom of in for a penny in for a pound applies which is ironic because one of the best things about undertow is that it's just cheaper i mean significantly cheaper on the eu store it's a difference of 40 euros it comes in a much smaller box too but you still get the same too many bones game except better and you're not going to believe me but also bigger yes there are only two gearlocks to mess around with as opposed to four and yes the returning number of baddie types is free as opposed to six but both duster and stanza are two of the coolest gear locks out there and there are two new monster types crown and max making the battles feel more varied and tactical than ever before there's something about too many bones as a whole that makes the design feel makey-uppy i mean sure any board game is made up if you think about it but when i imagine a design meeting at chip theory games i imagine two kids in the sandpit one of them goes my long-haul truck fires missiles at your helicopter and the other one goes aha but my helicopter drinks the immortal hulk serum and eats your missiles undertoad zeros into that ethos and magically somehow it doesn't make the game worse my first game of undertow came after actual dozens of games of too many bones spread out only over a couple of weeks so i felt pretty confident going in and i set the difficulty at medium that was a mistake the two new monster types have their own special rules appearing on the sides of the now extended board and threatened with extra loss conditions or just general toughness this makes positionality a lot more important actually scratch that this makes positionality important full stop because in the core game it was irrelevant until suddenly it wasn't by which point it was too late to start considering it i spent a lot more time contemplating where my gear locks stood whether they would move how the turn sequence would play out undertow felt a lot more like a puzzle where i had to move pieces in my head account for probability run simulations even existing monster types offered new keywords and new mechanisms rich with challenge and convolution in so many ways it felt like playing too many bones from the beginning again i had to re-learn how to be good at this game even the first out of the five new tyrants barnacle wasn't anything to be sniffed at the boss encounter was cool too he had tentacles grabbing the sides of the wrath distracting you from barnacle himself it felt bold new varied improved and also impossible to penetrate learning too many bones was very hard learning undertale was just about the hardest thing i ever had to do for this channel aside from actually playing dozens of games of too many bones not only does it come with a slew of extra rules but that rich design space indulges in creating exceptions every time it turns a corner you only ever need to spend about 15 minutes playing to discover some obscure rules interaction that no one's ever thought of and somewhere someone probably has an imaginary 200-page rules document that covers everything in their head but it doesn't exist in the real world so all you're left with is the hope that someone else had that same question and asked it on the bgg rules forum which leaves me very conflicted the core game has i can't believe i'm saying this straight forwardness relative straightforwardness that's only apparent in hindsight that undertow just does not possess but undertow is just so much fun take duster for example conceptually i'm very tickled to play a gear lock that used to be a tyrant originally mechanically she is fragile but she comes with a variety of skills that are just creative ways of murdering baddies that feel dynamic and inventive stanza on the other hand is a support character that's the total opposite of patches the other big healer gearlock in the game she can do just about everything but you'll have to finagle those situations into existence by spending multiple rounds playing songs sometimes multiple songs at once don't ask me how that works she pairs incredibly well with duster and they're both pretty great with other characters too the other hidden benefit of undertow is that you get all the best parts of age of tyranny inbaked into the box for free the starting encounters have variable options and the campaign mode is stripped down but feels a lot less wonky ditching the scars and boons nonsense but letting you keep dice from tyrants you defeated you do only have two characters but you get the interesting ones and for the price difference you can get yourself gili too too many buns is an expensive game but it doesn't have to be uber expensive if you get yourself just undertow and maybe another character or two later down the line you're doing just fine they say a joke is terrible if you have to explain it well dart has a companion called boar apostrophe d because it's a boar in a board game chip theory games made sure they'll never have to explain that joke to anyone but i can't hear any laughter it's hard to imagine a bad ranged damage dealer in too many bones mostly because even if their skills are bad the worst they can do is roll a lot of attack dice at any targetable baddie on the map so here the designers did the imagining for us dart is a ranged character and she can even attack multiple targets with the same attack but only with a single attack die for each of them and then she has to exhaust the attack die for the entire encounter she can also administer various poisons to her enemies with that attack die get it it's like a dart and they are variable and have different utility skills but they only last for a single turn unless you administer the lot onto a single target it's all so circumstantial and negligible she's all downsides and no fun she's also the most complicated gear lock aside from the lab rats maybe because she has to manage rules for her companion boar apostrophe d that works differently to dust his companion nightshade and is nowhere near as effective then there's this whole other mechanism where you have to flip her mat and completely change the rules to achieve only something that mitigates her downsides through what feels like a time-wasting ritual dart's only saving grace is that tink is no longer the worst gear lock in the game they can share that spot together gasket is the game's third tank and you know what that means i don't like him is what i would say if gasket wasn't the exception that proves the rule if pickett was passive and reactive and ting it was just tepid garbage the gasket brings a lot more positional abilities which make him particularly strong when playing undertow where that matters a lot more like tantrum before him he has a whole management minigame he's a mech and thematically a leaky one so you have to make sure that he literally doesn't run out of steam or whatever is the fluid that powers him in return you get to push things pull things grab things and do tremendous amounts of damage whilst doing so pair him with someone who can disable nasty body abilities and you've got a pretty versatile team my only warning is that gasket is particularly difficult to play well and probably that makes him not an ideal first gear lock expansion purchase experiments they can be fun but most of the time they're misshapen disasters i am of course talking about splice and dice the core pillar of the third wave of releases for too many bones i wish i didn't have to end on something so odd and clunky but here we are i think there's a person out there for whom splice and dice is a good expansion and that person is only someone who already owns everything else and played it out to death on the one hand it has extra monsters and most importantly extra crown and mech monsters making the array for undertow richer on the other hand it has two ways of building a custom tyrant for the game yet the rules force you to include monster types not available in undertow making it a bad proposition for anyone who doesn't own both stand-alone versions of too many bones and yes i did say two ways and i like one of them significantly more than the other the build a tyrant mode lets you compose a tyrant as you play the game and complete encounters and defeat baddies that you will then use to build the time for the game that you are playing now the baddies you defeat and more importantly the order in which you defeat them form the basis of the tyrant stats and abilities making already deadly encounters even trickier i appreciate what is happening here but i just i appreciate what's happening here but i just don't need it the tyrants on offer are already plentiful and i suppose if you've played everything this game has to offer to death then you do sort of need a randomizer but only in a situation where you want to play this game forever but that's all it is a randomizer one that made me appreciate original tyrant encounters even more the game is already full of random encounters it's nice to have something cohesive bizarrely that's something splice and dice also offers five more pre-baked tyrants applicable to any version of the game as wonky and bizarre as the rest of the stuff in slap and dash you want it to get weirder how about a whole new game that uses the components of too many bones but once again lets you build a randomized tyrant for the game that you will then be playing of too many barns is it any good well what do you think the lab rats carries the ethos of splice and dice into a new gear lock or is it four new gear locks that's right this expansion goes quadro hoping that multiple mediocre things will cohere into a single good thing and it does sort of the lab rats are fine i'd even call them useful i just hated playing them perhaps even more than i hated learning how to play them i mentioned before that in complexity of rules they rival dart you have to untangle a new tag team system manage four mini playmats and navigate a convoluted way of spending training points all in the name of looking after four gearlock children i think the analogy is apt here it really does feel like babysitting i once had to look after two overactive puppies simultaneously and it is a day i will never forget playing the lab rats felt much the same at times exciting draining peculiar and something i never want to repeat also this one looks a little bit like david tennant and i'm not really sure how i feel about that the only way to finish this series of reviews is to talk about the trove chest single-handedly the most ridiculous accessory made for board games unlike everything else you've seen in this video this was not sent to me by chip theory games i regret to inform you that i perhaps do lack good judgment and have bought this storage solution myself dear viewer i ask you can you blame me do you see how many boxes i have if i get rid of all of them and consolidate everything into this cube that yes fits perfectly into a calyx shelf i'll create enough free space in my house to write this off as a rent saving expense now everything lives compartmentalized with extra storage solutions inside like character and tyrant trays and i can finally dispose of these boxes for good which brings me onto a sneaky subject to cap this video off waste unmistakably the ethos behind too many bones is a game you will own for life you will collect it you'll treasure it you'll indulge it for as long as you tied to the physical realm but if you like me ended up with all these boxes that take up that much space that you then throw away only to take everything from here into here i have to ask what is the point of all of this it's not just that the boxes are too big to begin with in some cases simply filled with packaging foam and manifesting in this form only to accommodate the unbendable pvc rules glossary and the tiny set of poker chips and a pack of cards it's not just that everything is made out of mountains of plastic it's the hubris and callousness of it all here we have the grandiose vision the ultimate plan delivered to you in a mound i get it it's a marketing gimmick and the volume is the post zombie side selling point so here is my verdict i really like too many bones in terms of play but i don't like it as a product and not just because of bad rule books or inconsistent post launch youtube tutorials i wish more effort went into delivering us the game rather than delivering us impervious game coffins i like when too many bones gets ambitious one upcoming expansion for example is a pop-up book that doubles as an adventure with tucked away body chips or new loot cards emerging from fold-out envelopes that is what i want the crowdfunding campaign that is running now allegedly the final one to finish the series also looks promising with new gear logs and a whole new standalone version of too many bones putting a twist just like undertow did with lava terrain and more positional puzzles fantastic but did it really have to be another standalone game with two not enough do i really need health chips i will use attack defense and effect dice i won't use i already have a spare set that came in undertow will you really ship it in six separate boxes for fans who buy everything for them to only throw it away so they can put it in another box that was also sent to them from china to distribution centers and then from distribution centers to their homes i don't want to end on the negative because i do think that too many bones is one of the most interesting and ambitious board games out there and one thing i'd like to ask you as the audience is to definitely put pressure on your favorite publishing houses to be more environmentally conscious in terms of how they ship and package games but don't do it right now to chip theory games they're probably watching this video they know they know you know they know you care it's too late to change anything on their current campaign don't make their life difficult right now instead be conscious of your purchasing decisions you don't need everything made for this game just get undertow that's a pretty good start and probably a pretty good end or get the new standalone version from the current campaign if you feel like taking a punt but don't do this it's just wasteful this video is sponsored by skillshare the online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes skillshare has a tutorial on almost any subject imaginable from learning how to make a video to teaching yourself everything you need to know how to design a board game every time i do this sponsor spot and skillshare have been sponsoring us for a whole year now i need to find a new class to recommend and i'm never short of subjects because there are just so many cool things to learn but sometimes you have to get serious i'm not the sort of person that gets a kick out of lifestyle advice but if the trove chest proves anything is that i need to get better at managing my finances in modern money habits five steps to build the life you want by justin bridges i found actionable advice without being overbearing or threatening financial doom and gloom just useful stuff on how to manage my money better so that i can save up for the new game i want without all of the guild i also just want to take a moment to thank skillshare for staying with us for so long it's their sponsorship that lets us take a little bit more time and make projects like that possible do follow the link in the description the first 1 000 of you to click that we'll get a free one month trial of skillshare premium so you can unlock your creativity today [Music] so [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: No Pun Included

Views: 116,505

Keywords: no pun included, board game, review, npi, boardgames, boardgamegeeks, brettspiel, brettspiele, jeuxdesociete, tabletop, games, juego de mesa, gamenight, too many bones, undertow, unbreakable, gamefound, kickstarter, chip theory, tmb, plastic, dungeon crawler, big, j2s

Id: Qh3AneNEka4

Length: 59min 50sec (3590 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 27 2021