Too Many Bones (Chip Theory Games) Review by Man Vs Meeple

[Music] [Music] welcome back to man versus maple the show where we talk about all things board game related we've been asked a lot when we were going to get this review out it's four too many bones by chip theory games we did an unboxing for it about a month ago and we've gone through several revisions of the rules and we want to make sure we got the game played right right before we brought a review to you guys so here it is we played it multiple times now David we have this is a role-playing game so to speak using dice and a really unique universe on which each player is going to be taking on the role of a gear lock which are these gnome light creatures going out on single missions in order to defeat a single pirate right not really I mean you can I think you can play a campaign but there is it the game is really built so that you can play it as a one-night experience if you want to just one scenario one night a different scenario another night let's get this out of the way first these components are ridiculous in saying they really really are that I mean I don't even know where to start I mean the the player boards are not boards first of all they are basically mousepad material that are really nice die-cut for the dice and then I can't tell you how perfectly these dice fit in here it's just nice but just snug enough so that they don't really move around but not too snug Brett siscri you had the chips which represent your health and the creatures they all have this shiny I don't know if they're stickers on here but they're really super high quality they're hefty they feel like poker chips you have these dice which are very much like the Star Wars ice they're all heat plays on the printed right on there it's not thicker on these things these are really really probably the highest-quality dice you can imagine and if you can't see here there's a lot of them yeah there's a ton of guy and this isn't even all of them we have the dice out for three players so each character has their own set of dice with each die representing their own powers and specific to them so these aren't really even just repeated dice uh-huh there are so many different dice in this game it's nicely that it's nice that they have them all organized really well and numbered but we have three other four other characters we don't even have represented on the the trays the whole device you have the cards which aren't even cardboard a plastic material had this really nice texture on them that just makes them feel different than any other game out there yeah these things not only like Jeremy said are they plastic almost like oh like a wipeable placemat type of material but they're smooth on the face and they have a roughness to the back of them these things you'll never have another struggle taking the card off the top they just they really come right off the top yeah and thank God it's not just about the component because the gameplay here is really really solved as well let's talk a little bit it would be impossible for us to tee up guys how to play this game I would most closely compare it to vast not in the GUI the gameplay but any amount of investment of time that it takes to learn the game each of these characters that you play is so vastly different from one another each of the die that they use allows them to do abilities that are inherent to them and they have to know how to play the game because even the dice each of these characters will have their own set of unique facings for the dice on here right so you really have to read through this thing and understand the character in order to play it yeah this would be the kind of game that would be good first of all you have to have a fairly committed group this is not a game you're going to bring out every week for a new group yeah for sure but you're going to want to send home maybe your friends with their character yeah so that they can really study up the core mechanics of the game are so pretty simple yeah it's just we you have to learn these characters and not only you not really even learn the character so much as be able to learn how to reference this quickly yeah because if you're leveling up and you're going to try to choose a new die you can look here and get a little information about what power it might new but you really in many cases have to look at the die and investigate the faces and go okay I see what it does and some of the characters are inherently more difficult to play than others the one I've been playing the most is patches and you can see the top of these pleasure sheets which are again are a plastic really nice and material it tells you a difficulty level and how hard it is to play patches is really simple he's a visa he's a medic and he can go out there and heal people and provide people with buffs but one of the players we played with was playing with team Hank who creates these BOTS yeah basically has a bot out there as as the real damage dealer he just kind of sits back in the back and lets the bots do all the work but there's different BOTS there's different attachments from the bottom and I have to say the way these player boards work for a character can be completely different yeah like a completely different style of feel ya tink for instance has a diet it goes right here in the middle at the beginning and you actually it rotates almost like the hands of a clock that helps determine which of the ones surrounding it you can actually upgrade which is fascinating then basically all the attachments for his bot it's a it's super impressive all right let's talk about the game structure how it works so you're going to pick a tyrant that you want to defeat each of these tyrants comes with the inherent number of they're called baddies or monsters in the game that they will bring into the game the baddies are represented by chips and each of these chips are numbered 1 5 or 20 depending upon how difficult they are 20s obviously being the most difficult ones being more of the pushover a low-level mobs you're going to have a day counter in here you have to defeat the tyrant and a specific number of days and it's different for each of the 7 tyrants in the game each day is represented by an encounter and that's by a deck here that's randomly shuffled you'll start with the same three special encounters for every single boss fight because it kind of lets you go out of the gates of the main city like upgrade your character a little bit and then the normal encounters are different there's a stack of encounters plus each boss will bring in their own special encounter and you can actually add encounters through the course of the adventure depending upon what you find in the game glute can lead to different avenues and Realty yeah it's really cool there's certain loot and even I noticed last night my character even is tied to a certain one of those encounters - if I do something it actually triggers one of those encounters that gets shuffled in interesting so then the what you'll do is you'll do each of these special encounters the counters have two sides to them our one is a story flavor and the other side is two options in which the group gets to decide which of the two options they wish to do for that Keillor day remember each of these cards is a day and you have to beat the boss in a certain number of days so once the players pick one of these two encounters they have to do it sometimes their fights against the monsters most of the time yeah but then sometimes like we find out yeah there's nothing at all yeah nothing at all or you could get Luke Luke goes off to your side and can be used during adventure some loot is permanent some it's expendable and will go back into the deck once it's been used some of them give you training this is the most important function of the game each of the characters has four inherent abilities to have health which represents you know how much I have hit points they have dexterity dexterity is two things it allows you movement on the board and plus it also allows you to roll an x number of dice if you have five dexterity you get to pick five dice to roll if you have two dexterity he only gets a roll two dice for that combat and that connects up in an interesting way with the attack and defense status so the Attack stat determines how many attack dice you can roll for an attack defense obviously how many defense dice you can roll right so these tie back into Dick's theory so if I have a two dexterity but a three attack it will make no sense because I'll never be able to roll three dice because my dexterity is only two correct so you have to make these decisions to try to the dexterity is really important in my opinion it's probably one of the core of those four you really need to start boosting up yes and then you get those attack dice but as we were saying when you're spending upgrades to you can get dice down here that also do effectively attack or damage maybe even defense that don't count as quote-unquote attack or defense die right so when you get training points you're allowed to spend them in a variety of different ways you can upgrade any one of those abilities that we just mentioned when you're upgrading your attack or defense you actually have to rule to see if you get it and the more attack or defense you have the more dice you have to roll on the less chance to get upgrade but if you miss that upgrade you can always do a free health or free dexterity if you so wish you can also upgrade your player board and introduce new dice into your skill sets two ways to do that either you can upgrade a place with a star the star is like a beginning location or a beginning dice to be able to do something or place it's connected by an arrow to one of those locations you've already previously upgraded when you do that you simply take the die out you're trading you put it in that location now that doesn't mean that it's yours to use immediately or you get that ability you actually have to roll those in combat and use them or even expend them in order to do stuff right it's just one more die you get to roll as part of that dexterity number that we were talking about earlier so the more die you have and higher the dexterity the more options you have on your turn that's right now if you encounter something instead you have to actually face a specific number of batty points for that encounter the batty points are determined by the number of players sitting around the table and what day it is so I say for instance we're on the fourth day and there's four players that's four times four equals sixteen batty points so how you do that is you would take the highest possible number which is 5 in this case times 3 plus a 1 chef's you'd face three level 5 buddies and then one level one for a total of 16 exactly so the longer you're playing as a team once you get to that point where that equation equals 20 or higher to tough boss that's where we're going to bring in a 20 point batty and then the remainder points are made up of the fives and one yes and there's even points in the game where you'll have more than it's available when you start a combat only for creatures or baddies are allowed to be playoffs so you don't have a pool off to the side that once something is killed I'll be introduced in the next round we're not going to get into combat but adjacency in combat call that's really fun it's really unique come it's fun it's fast it's not overly complicated there's no ridiculous line-of-sight or anything like that it's you know and it doesn't look like your typical dungeon crawler because there's not miniatures all over the board you've got your chip with the health right underneath it which is a genius yeah mechanic for these sorts of games yeah yeah it's fun it's fluid and still very challenging and strategic too because you have to be melee cutters and melee in this range range can shoot anywhere on the board there's no line aside as you mentioned but mainly have to be perfectly adjacent for throttling orthogonal aj+ you have to be expending your decks or dexterity to move adjacent to things and then the monsters will move around according to at the stronger Kree are stronger gear locks or gate locks with less hit points on them and ecstasy it has some intelligent yet very simplistic AI basically built in for the enemies so anyway there's combat as well and you'll keep doing this round after round until the creatures are done and you'll keep moving from day to day today until the body or to the pirate is killed or not killed all the tyrants come with their own special dye which is inherent to them they also come with their own special card that they do specific abilities but the ones that we have fought he actually has henchmen and you have to kill all the baggage Minh before you gain to do any damage to him right it creates some really weird synergy in the game and it makes it extremely difficult but it's cool too because the variable aspect of once we've scored I think it was six of those points in order to even try to attempt to fight them you can choose not to yeah I can do another encounter but just knowing that that's another day yeah and it makes the unity encounters get harder and harder so we have to say we're not going to give you guys all the rules let's talk about let's talk about the pros and the cons that's one of the things you just mentioned I love that aspect that you can attack the baddie at any time once you hit a specific progress yeah so if you wish to keep training and trying to find new encounters that allow you to upgrade your character you can choose to go on those adventures but not over overreach and go beyond the days needed in order to tickle them exactly and I think too those decisions aren't overly complicated by the fact that since you are playing these in two distinct scenarios when you're making these choices like if you've ever played a video game RPG and you're making these sorts of choices about how to spend your points it's just a scenario that you're playing that night because the next hour you play you wash this and half the fun or more than half the fun is building your character throughout the center there is a remarkable sense of progression in this game oh sorry you felt that but I definitely when you're building up your character you can feel them get stronger and stronger through the course of the game by adding all these new dices into it yeah it really is this mechanic alone I would love to see I mean I won't be surprised if someone tries to use similar mechanics with this dice and how the dice are used to leveled characters for other games and to fuel other games you know the more miniature based game I also love how wildly different all the characters are my character is so vastly different than your abilities and so that so different than boomer who basically every turn he's rolling dice in order to get components for grenades and then he builds those grenades and he loves those grenades and then he refreshes and duza does it over and over it's funny you said vastly too because that's what it has in common with vast idea is the character flavor is so significant different from one another and on the same in the same hand there's a lot of learning that has to be done for each character like I might play nugget and it was you play the game you could probably play just about any other character but you do have to learn those characters when you're playing because there's a whole new set of skills yeah there's seven different tyrants and each of those tyrants introduces different types of baddies there's six different types of baddies and all of them have unique abilities in them there is actually a cheat sheet here with almost 30 different unique abilities that all these things can have and these abilities are cool too the way they've woven these abilities into the mechanics of the game our genius was one of them that we none of us like is break there's an ability called break and when you attack a creature or a baddie that has break any of the standard attack dice you've used they get taken out of the that scenario yeah that writing talent on counter and so you keep chipping away this thing and it keeps breaking your weapons effectively so you have fewer attack guys so you're going to have to rely on your clothes are nice and skills you have them yeah the battles are really strategic surprisingly so in this game I had no actually since the board is so small you look at this board and think well how strategic can it be but it really is yeah I mean the abilities to buff characters the abilities to surround characters abilities to pull in mobs to specific characters it's it's unique yeah and it that reminds me we played again last night with four of us playing and it came down we were fighting the the final the boss or yeah drill and Relan yeah and two of us who died in the in their early to very early I just flat-out dying shown yeah died on the right and then it was Jeremy and I left Jeremy thankfully had that buffing ability so he was keeping me alive and I have one of these diets we talked about exhausting earlier yeah certain of your diets when you roll them they're exhausted for that encounter yeah you don't get to use them again I have this longsword that doesn't exhaust so it a brutal significant impact on my ability to deal out of damage so I was dealing as much as like 6-7 damage in some cases if I rolled well the two negatives I would say one there's not really a built-in campaign to the game I wish there was because it would give it more that RPG flavor however I don't see how it could be done because some of these encounters are going to last you 2 to 3 hours on the harder bosses yes so you're going to be progressing through this entire thing and getting most of your skills I don't see how that would repeat into a second less I built it in with an Afghan X amount that's almost to me like a pro and a con yeah because I understand what you're saying but I like it in that every time you play some people might go oh I don't keep my progress that is the fun of this game yeah because I've played we've played a few times now yeah and I've actually chosen different paths yeah you know and use different skills and you know the third time I played use this - skill which I thought at first wasn't going to be any good but you're able to move around significantly horribly on the table and you know in the late game when you find yourself far away from a creature and you're using you know two of your five dexterity or three of your five dexterity to move over extra movement really helps so the flavor of developing your character differently turn and then there's other characters we haven't even played yeah trying them on the same scenario yeah a lot of game there which means the other portion is the learning curve yeah you have to have a committed group that wants to play this game there's no way to introduce all of these mechanics to somebody especially people who are in gamer know they're not going to be able to wrap their head around all these things and then read a two-sided sheet and try to figure out what they all mean and I like very much aligned game with who would they look at an on play now they would absolutely it would be a hard no for for a lot of people but I think this game is developed and designed for those with those people in mind a lot of people to Gary for instance has a group who will would love this game yeah you know those players who will play some of those legacy games some of those campaign games even though this isn't a campaign game to come back to this week after week would be a lot of fun yeah the dice driven mechanic in this is really unique because nothing out there really like it and it really draws you in it it gives a flavor of the universe that you're building up something unique to you just to the use of dice oh and you know one more thing and so much to say about this game we can go on and on but we forgot to talk about there's loot and then there's trove loot which adds like this little mini game and to in between each encounter where you're actually rolling these yet again more dice different dice specifically to try to unlock the different tumblers and there's levers and trips and different things that you have to unlock on these travelers once you do you will flip that over and the trove looks fantastic lots of times having as an ongoing power that really enhances it you can also help other players if you're if you don't have any trailer in front of you you can use your turn to help other players unlock their triplets really unique mechanic app guys too many bones is definitely worth a look if you are into these little heavier style games yes go check it out it is called a dice driven role-playing game by chip theory games make sure you guys make comments below if you have any questions for us a lot of snow we can always ask the developer for you subscribe to us follow us on Facebook and Twitter and we will catch you guys next time bye bye [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Man vs Meeple

Views: 26,858

Rating: 4.9366755 out of 5

Keywords: RPG, Role Playing Games, Board Games, Boardgame, Tabletop Games, Card Games, Dice Games, Gloomhaven, Vast, Jeremy Salinas, Drakkenstrike, Dice Tower, Watch it Played, Board Game Geek

Id: LhawZM3e7Wg

Length: 19min 36sec (1176 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 06 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Looking forward to mine getting delivered. This game looks so fun. I haven't watched this review yet, but really enjoyed Ricky Royal's play through, and the Board Game Replay group seems to have had a blast

[u/[deleted]]

Can't wait for mine to come in. Great concept, awesome project. It took me a second to let the sticker shock wear off but I'm optimistic that it will deliver the fun. If for some reason it doesn't I'll have plenty of time to be a cranky, old man and never spend more than $100 on plastic and cardboard ever again :) No pressure, Carlsons.

[u/Hollywoodbnd86]

Ill get it if it gets a retail release.

[u/zachhorn117]

Damn, late pledge is $125. As cool as this looks I can't justify that price point.

[u/timax_s]

My most anticipated KS game, can't wait!