Hello everybody and welcome to our review of what may well be one of the most ridiculous productions maybe ever? Suddenly, it's the first time that we've seen neoprene mouse mats as a board game component So too many bones is a very well liked cooperative adventure game where you and your friends are going to play the roles of a cheeky little species known as Gear locks and these three little people their idea of a good time is to slip on a knapsack form an adventuring party, and head off to... ah... kill a tyrant Goodness me. I didn't know where I thought it was going. Too Many bones is also a very expensive board game Which means I'm going to have to compare it to the monster thwacking co-op epic Gloomhaven Which Matt had a great time reviewing a couple of years ago? So just to recap Matt got to review the game That's known on BoardGameGeek as the greatest board game of all time and I get to review the one That's known for being waterproof So in a way we're both winners but as easy as it is to make fun of this plasticky production It is not in fact, the high-water mark of too many bones rather these thick bits of a tip Of a design iceberg that is inventive and absurd all the way down In all honesty playing this game. I went in with high expectations and it still blew me away Which is ironic because in addition to being waterproof it also card blow away This is how a game of too many bones starts four three two Or even just one player on their merry lonesome are going to embark on a quest of thrills spells and with a bit of guile a successful assassination The target you and your friends choose determines the length of the game usually between two hours if you are hunting the Goblin King or four hours if you wanted to grab Charge of hunting down one of your own kind gone rogue So where other adventure games tend to offer a grand campaign where you keep track of your progress from night? Tonight too many bones is instead something more like a trashy movie You set it up and then in just a few hours, you're gonna be stood outside the tyrants chamber sharpening your knife For the finale, but whether you win or you lose you're absolutely going to want to play this again I'm not just because too many burns has a wealth of randomised scenes instead you're gonna want to play it again because of This these are the bones of too many bones in more ways than one forget the adventure because the adventure is all about You and you are going to be all about these gorgeous dice at the start of each adventure Your character will just be this neoprene mousepad run through like Swiss cheese and one Intimidating double sided unique reference shape all of this determines how your character acts in combat? How combat works is that monsters line up you all roll for initiative have a mild panic about who's going to stand where and then? Things get dicey on a monsters turn. It's going to move and attack the nearest gierlach That means rolling its attack dice using its special power and chipping away at your health For kids their chips on your turn you get to choose and roll a number of dice equal to your dexterity with your attack and defense stats showing how many aggressive attack dice and protective defense dice you have available or you can roll any of the skill dice you've unlocked and this is where things get just Awesome on every step of your adventure. You'll be drip fed training points that you can choose to spend However, you want whether that's improving a stat or unlocking one of your characters Totally unique skill dice that turned combat into a mad Stumbling cunning dance. Let's talk about the four gear locks that come in the core set of too many bones Boomer I played her first So she's very close to my heart Boomer is a demolitions expert who has to find time in a heat of battle to roll Component dice to let her assemble Grenades that she can then use as booms big booms bigger booms napalm flashbang smoke grenades She also has no help so having boomer in your party turns too many bones into the Lord of the Rings except instead of protecting the ringbearer you're protecting somebody who spends the whole adventure of planning a controlled demolition of The villain if you like the sound of protecting your friend, maybe you should play patches who's here to help Probably this combat medic can produce med kits that you roll then heal your friends But even more excitingly are all the experimental toxins and nutrients that can buff other party members Maybe they can also just blow up and patch his face possibly killing him My favorites I hear is the ominously titled liquid life which wakes up a gierlach who's been knocked out which we realized puts you back at the top of the initiative track so if we could get boomer knocked unconscious we could send her bursting back to life with drugs allowing her to Detonate an hour bare before it took flight best game ever Every party needs a leader and an idiot Pickett is both by merit of him being willing to stand at the front of the group and get hit you see he's got this lovely shield with all these hinges and Pistons that give him a wealth of turbocharged defense dice, but also the ability to deliver a Pneumatic shield bash BAM that turns all of his defense into one huge attack In a game as deadly as too many bones Pickett is as popular as he is Frequently unconscious. Finally, we have tantrum living proof that the makers of too many bones couldn't restrain themselves even when designing a normal boy with an axe tantrum is actually the most complicated gear lock to play because you have to manage his with the fastidiousness of an accountant do it right tantrum can Insta-kill anything do it wrong? And he will have an actual breakdown. We've all been there Although perhaps we haven't all also collected bodies and then eaten bits of them to recover health I worry that tantrum might hate Tantrum most of all the best compliment that I can give the characters in too many bones Is that when my friends and I finished our first adventure? As appealing as it was to try brand new gear locks with new dice or swap We found sticking with the same character even more appealing You see now we knew a bit more about what we were doing we could build our characters differently next time or just Fight a longer adventure which would give us more of a chance to fill out even more of our the mouse map There for me the most excited I've been about a mouse map importantly character development into many bones is not Some grimy dopaminergic loop where players are kept docile by numbers that just go up. No, no no, you've got to understand that this dice game is Wicked, I mean even once you've decided what you're gonna roll on your turn There's even more decisions after that because oh well You always get attack in defense guys back if you choose to use the skill dice for what their role They're gone for the rest of the fight So if you didn't get a particularly good result You can instead choose to just pop them back in your gear lock and use them Again at a later turn and there is something I find Exquisitely funny about this, you know This is a hard game players are all fighting for their life and you pick your dice and you roll them and then oh, oh You make a noise like a plumber who's just been asked for a quote You know what maybe I'll just pop these back in in my mat you tell the other players man don't do that I'm being eaten by a golem. And what's terrific is that you even faced yet another decision if you roll bones Too many bones is equivalent of straight up misses. You see if you roll bones you can choose to Stick them here in your backup plan. Literally Banking your failures that later on in the fight. You can spend to pull off incredible maneuvers unique to your character, but even within this system of bones I found Comedy, you know, there's something funny about you're all dice and get a terrible result you go. Ah, we're screwed wait No, we're screwed and actually on the subject of comedy let's have a brief aside So over the last five years I've become increasingly grumpy every time publishers put a generic fantasy or sci-fi theme on their game Too many bones was a game that reminded me. No, I Love fantasy. I buy myself fantasy novels every Christmas I just Don't want publishers to use fantasy like so much generic wallpaper I don't want them to use tropes instead of using their heart too. Many bones is a 1980s romp where I can so see Pickett being played by a young Warwick Davis the encounter cards that you draw randomly each day are so varied and creative as to make you feel like you're on an Actual adventure one day you might have not enough meat in the pot so you have to go and bash a bunch of forest critters on the head and it's fun next day a Dragon shows up and you have to decide you're gonna run for your life or stand and fight. We've got plucky but self-sabotaging characters a combat system that gets you excited but is prone to disasters but where disasters are where you shine and even the treasure is thematically Perfect with underdog characters like these it wouldn't do to have him find holy swords or lambis bread Instead the treasure speaks of your team's own scrappiness It's just a rout but you know that it has healing properties Oh guys I found a human-sized shield and it's great and it's gonna keep you safe But if you're carrying it your tiny little person can't carry anything Else and then the really really good treasure has the best storytelling of all known as trove loot This takes the form of your gear locks first finding a locked box and then at night Every player gets a chance to pick the lock. It's because your team is powered by puck as if you were a gosh-darn Zither, in fact in one game my friends and I managed to win a lock-picking contest by using a crowbar we'd found earlier Which I swear to God is something out of The Hobbit The designers didn't predict that but in creating a world that's so totally consistent so full of heart They did still create it So I guess I should stop rambling and just say congratulations to chip theory for reminding me just how charming fantasy can be So we've looked at the US in this adventure now, let's look at the them you're going to be fighting And this is where too many bones gets. I'm not gonna say bad but I am gonna say Unusual, you see some fantasy games make combat exciting by offering a tense. Finely balanced puzzle I'm thinking of gloom Haven there or some games like Imperial assault get players invested by making you all feel empowered and immersed too many bones instead Offers combat, that's interesting because it is and this is a technical term mean as balls basically the enemies you're gonna be fighting come off this decreasingly convivial conveyor belt of bad dudes with huge skills This game has no idea what you're fighting and it doesn't care Look at this game as a schoolteacher who can hear kids getting beaten up in the toilets But I just can't seem to tear themselves away from a snack and maybe some light reading look at this guy this ferocious Albert attacks and Instantly inspires the next monster in the queue to act early and hit harder What is the next monster in the queue Oh this dragon delinquent belches fire at us and means we wrong lest ice Which is real bad because we were hoping to kill this goblin who on their turn will bring in more bad guys What? The good news is that before you decide where your gear locks are even going to stand in this fight You know exactly what you're fighting and exactly what's waiting to come in From the wings of this particular theater of combat as soon as you kill something The bad news is while you know the shape of what you have to do. That doesn't always help in my experience It wasn't totally unusual for players to be ko'd before their first turn having to sit the rest of the fight out Which in turn can make fights literally unwinnable that's not a huge deal because all that means is that you lose a day and All that means is that all the monsters you're gonna fight in the future get stronger like I said No big deal. Anyway, this is where scouting comes in at the end of each day. When players are resting they can choose to Scalped what that means is you're going to look at the next monster coming off the conveyor belt and you can decide To either leave it there or put it back on the bottom of the stack great except players have to choose whether to scout or recover all of their health by resting Otherwise you go to the next fight wounded fun fact If you lift the box of too many bones up to your ear, you can actually hear the designers laughing Now your mileage may vary, but I found that my group was laughing too you see too many bones is a really unusual thing because this system of Choosing what dice to train and then in combat choosing which dice to roll is in the words of max gloom Haven review crunching Hang on I can do one better So to summarize this game is crunchy and smart, but it's also hmmm Stupid and random and I think for fans of fairness that's going to be really annoying probably a deal breaker, but for me, I Had to rethink it fit an adventure game Perfectly against should be fair Adventures left. So when pipit and Mary took on Watley 5 ring race at Weathertop. That wasn't fair But the story was better for it that too many bones is playing hardball makes every victory on the combat map feel earned That the game is so unfair means on the not infrequent occasions that you work out a sneaky little exploit you feel cunning and not like you're cheating and when the encounter deck happens to produce one two three days of peaceful travel with lots of time for training In a row you feel blessed and not like you're somehow not playing the game Remember Picket? Who turns defense dice into attack? Well in one game we managed to and some armor letting him turn defense runs into rare defense twos mechanically telling him into a three-foot-tall cruise missile it was Unbalanced and it was terrific fun along the same lines when you finally get to the tyrant and you have to set up this hellacious fight with all these Absolutely massive monsters. None of it really matters If you can just get to the tyrant themselves and kill them that ends the fight instantly it wins you the campaign So then hit this showdown you and your friends rather than figuring out how to win the fight are instead discussing the most slippery plan you can It's not that there's not an incredible amount of lovely tactics in too many bones. It's just that also this game is a mad gambling scramble with players often leaving stuff to chance in other words this is an RPG, but it's also a dice game and it is a great dice game So that just about sums up my glowing praise for too many bones. Now. Let's move on to you talking about some problems Talking about some problems Yeah, yeah, it's probably not worth doing musical breaks for when I have to be mean. Too Many Bones is perhaps Misleading this is controversial. But I happen to think this game has the correct number of bones Well, they could call that is too many rules or perhaps just too many ideas You know every new monster you fight that's a rule every character you play they've got rules every face on every dice That's a rule or did you just roll a Miss? Congratulations, you've unlocked more rules now There is of course - I'm not finished - every new day means new rules Did you unlock some treasure more like unlocking some rules and you find a boss more like you'll find some rules Are you done? Yeah, right when you leave, where do you go me? I cease to exist, right? Okay, cool Just checking. So, to draw a recent comparison when we reviewed Batman Gotham City Chronicles a few weeks. I talked a lot about the Unforgivable problem of having to spend an age Teaching your friends the game and then going on to play with your nose constantly poking in and out of its 50 page rulebook Too many bones is not as bad as that because you can read the manual pretty quickly But more importantly you only have to teach your friends a bit of it You can just start adventuring and then teach your friends all the little itty-bitty rules when they become relevant Which is awesome But what too many bones gains from being easygoing it then loses when you need clarity Sometimes you want clarity because you're fighting a monster for the first time. Sometimes it's because you don't know how to abilities interact Sometimes it's because the designers have once again tried to fit an entire experimental minigame on the back of an encounter card with about three tweets worth of Text in my fifth or sixth games of too many bones I was still checking rules when I really should have earned myself a comfortable honeymoon period Usefully for me, all of this nonsense is very easily summarized by one mini game called dangerous darts you flip an encounter card It says, oh check the manual for the rules of dangerous starts you check the manual. There's just three paragraphs of rules This game doesn't want to burden you with rules It just wants you to have fun, but the paragraphs don't really make sense so you'll see that icon there that YouTube icon and so that means there's a youtube rules explanation you go and it's nine minutes long That is the equivalent of watching a fun movie with your friends and then your friend pausing the movie so they can explain Some other themes in it for nine minutes. I was in middle-earth You better have a good reason for taking me out of it. In other words too many bones explains its rules hardly That's how it can have every face of every dice doing something completely different but what this means is that playing the game and interpreting what you're doing is the legal equivalent of Off-road driving with frequent bumpy guessing and googling although as an unintentional bonus you can look forward to corrupting your online data footprint as search engines start to think you're genuinely upset about having too many bones, but once again this is a problem that actually didn't bother me and my friends too much part of that is because too many bones is a cooperative game which means when you hit a weird ruling it's not difficult to figure out something you all agree on as to how the Game should work and then move on because it doesn't advantage one particular player over another But the other reason we didn't find it difficult is my friends and I are the meatball tooth veterans of a thousand board games you on the other hand might be someone who struggles with rules and if that's the case my goodness, you should absolutely avoid owning too many bones the board game that is although Otherwise, I understand that bio phosphonates can help. So let's talk about price baby. Let's talk about currency Let's talk about all the ways that you can buy with certainty So this game is a hundred and thirty dollars plus shipping and is only available direct from the publisher Shut up and sit down has of course thrown it's considered a double weight behind expensive games in the past Matt loves gloom Haven controversially. I love blood on the Clocktower. We both love games like food chain magnate or Twilight Imperium This game is a lot more expensive than any of those It's also less reliable as you've seen all the tyrunt's and counters and you've tried all the characters This game reveals itself as having a bit of a shelf life, which is ironic because it doesn't fit in my shelves This is where all of those plastic components come home to roost in a big Plastic nest because there's no denying that too many bones is fabulously tactile to the touch But some of it has the vibe of a teenager spending all of their money on a convertible these Planets could have been cardboard. Why are the cards? Plastic, why is my reference sheet? stab-proof Using weighted poker chips as the monsters doesn't even make a great deal of sense because they're so small That you can't even see them properly I was on my third Game of too many bones before I realized that because of I wasn't even reading monster names anymore or looking at the teeny Fingernail-sized faces. I was just reading their powers. We weren't being attacked by two golems and a dragon We were being attacked by two brakes and an engulf I can prove my point if we just deploy a standard sized reference pair next to one monster chip The absurdity is all too clear my feelings on this Only hardened once I played too many bones about six times and started to want more content because it is out there. You Can buy new characters new encounters even a campaign mode, but all of these are 25 bucks a pop Plus shipping I said earlier that I was charmed by this world I don't want to have to pay rent in it because all of this plastic is driving up the price The good news is there is a more reasonably priced option If you don't want to take the plunge on the core set of Too Many Bones, there's a set called Too Many Bones Undertow Which comes in a still pretty dang Expensive $80 plus shipping but: A stock availability of that at the time of this review is very low and B that game only allows you to play with two it only comes with two gear locks and I had the most fun playing too many bones with three people Now as a counterpoint we did end up Wholeheartedly recommending the fantastic Arkham Horror living card game Despite that game not being that much cheaper than too many bones in terms of money spent to hours of gameplay The counterpoint to that counterpoint is that Too Many Bones that has a much higher Initial outlay of money before you even know if you like it But also mostly this game did not have to be this expensive. Take a look at this This is 40 days in Daylore Which we were very kindly sent by the publisher which includes simply new baddies and encounters for Too Many Bones Let's take a look inside. Let's see how they packaged this the 10 new chips come in this what is this? This is a board game. It's not The Rock with Nicolas Cage. These chips are not a virus that's going to kill mankind. The cards you get come in their own plastic box You have to understand: this and this this is what you're paying for and this is getting shuffled into the base box anyway What am I supposed to do with this? Keep my loose leaf tea in it? So there's our review of Too Many Bones, the smartest most dumbest game that we've reviewed in ages a game So full of heart and ideas that I had no trouble Overlooking its flaws, but where those same flaws make its price point even more ridiculous. So I will close by saying this This is a game you buy to treat yourself or even better maybe to treat somebody else what a lovely birthday present this game would be. If you've enjoyed this review with its mix of Humor and criticism and unusual levels of moisture. Hey! We've got other videos if you click here, look, you can watch my Game of Thrones review that features me in the bath I think, or hey the Arkham Horror card game review. I think that has me and Matt in the shower So do click on that, there's semi nudity for you, which is half way and no nudity at all
I backed this game during its first Kickstarter, primarily because it looked like a fun solo game. I've since picked up everything I can for it. Recently had the opportunity for my first 4 player game. This review is pretty spot on.
Too Many Bones has a lot of minute rules and takes a while to learn in its entirety. The ability to play the game while learning the rules piecemeal is very helpful. I enjoy the game each time I get it out, and I think of it as a cornerstone of my gaming library because it fits my tastes. I don't think it's an essential game for everyone, and I do think that it's not unreasonable to call it overproduced.
Quinns' closing comments really sum it up nicely:
"This is a game you get to treat yourself"
The components may not be as flashy as miniature filled game but they are of great quality. The chips are very practical; information is displayed well and it makes battle set up a snap. It's the set up / tear down that really wins me over and has my playing this far more than gloomhaven.
Quinns spends some time on it but I really have to reiterate: the game can be random. It is entirely possible for a character to die before they've had a turn. There are mechanisms to mitigate this but they aren't immediately obvious to new players AND sometimes those measures aren't even enough. It is honestly my biggest criticism of the game. I am going to be doing a campaign soon with some friends and have been debating instituting a mulligan rule where we can redo the first round of combat once. It honestly doesn't happen that often but when it does it feels awful (Quinns mentioned tangentially but the way the baddies are doled out the game gets more difficult every day; if you fail an encounter you don't get any rewards so the game will get harder and you won't get better. This is fine in a vacuum but coupled with the feel bads of getting 'cheesed' really can't be overstated)
Finally, I disagree replayability is a weakness. The encounter and treasure decks are a good size and even if you've seen encounter cards before the battles will be set up differently. Novelty may wear off a bit (and I really do mean a bit), it is nowhere near the situation with narrative games such as AH:tcg.
From my experience: if this game sounds like you'd like it, I firmly believe you will. It's been well worth the investment for me, but it is an investment no two ways about it.
Putting the components of a $130 game in a bowl of milk and cereal and eating out of it is peak SU&SD.
I also really appreciated the lengthy price/value discussion at the end. The rise in $100+ games recently has been pretty disappointing in terms of accessibility, especially for games that don't need to cost that much.
One thing Quinns didn't quite mention that had a huge impact on the game for me is the amount of downtime between turns. Because each player has a tons of rules unique to themselves, it means quarterbacking is pretty non-existent as your teammates have created a unique character that only they can figure out how to best use.
However, that takes time. And unlike Gloomhaven, each turn needs to be taken one at a time as the random dice aspect means that after each turn the battle has changed enough to consider different options on your turn.
So if you're playing with 4 people (like me), you're just sitting around for a long time between each turn, and then spending time on your turn and forcing your friends to wait as well.
Also, if you do buy the game I highly recommend removing / not playing Nom unless you're doing solo play. This boss has you fight it one at a time, meaning everyone else just sits there waiting to see if you die or if they get a turn to play. We had 1 person fight it for a couple rounds, die, then have me as a tank roll dice for a few minutes soaking and dealing damage until the boss died. Meaning 2 other people just didn't fight the boss. Wee.
This looks sooooo good but at the price point, I'd rather get other co-ops and dice games before this. As long as Chip Theory keeps making expansions for this on Kickstarter, I can always back the "All In" pledge one day!
Great review, although I was ready for a full-blown mid-review turnaround from the get-go, so it was neat to see that it wasn't exactly that. There's no way to sweet talk the production and question its value, although it needs to be clear that you probably can't complain about the price (well, not justifiably so, at least), but you can complain about the production which drives this price.
I am the kind of guy who goes the extra mile and gets the weighted health chips because tactility and aesthetics in board games matter a lot to me. It's part of the whole experience and while Terraforming is a great game, I play it despite its components, whereas TMB is also a good game (mechanically probably weaker, but they... are practically not comparable anyway) and I want to play it because of its components.
Really, I hope everyone finds games in the hobby they like for what they are with the components that come with them, but I'm happy that silly stuff like Cthulhu Wars, Kingdom Death and, well, Too Many Bones exist. I can totally sit on a comfy wooden chair, it's still serviceable, but a leather armchair is quite nice as well... it just might take up more space than I have available.
As for the rules: I don't mind that "everything is a rule" - I do mind that the rulebook itself is horrible and doesn't convey how the game actually plays at all. Some hands-on experience (and maybe one of the myriad of YT videos) quickly remedied that, but the rulebook, for what it is or should achieve, really fails... hard.
Get Leigh a best dollyrolling award stat.
Quinns nailed this one. I agree on every positive and every negative.
Went almost all-in on the newest Kickstarter, I’m so excited! This review made me even more so, especially as rules never bother me, and I’ve already paid so I don’t care about the price.