Too Many Bones has players exploring and fighting their way to a boss.

Things do get dicey.

Your adventure will consist of 8-12 battles before you reach your final destination and face off against one of a number of possible kingpins in order to win. Along the way, you will be faced with storyline decisions that will quickly have you weighing risk/reward, odds, and logic – with dice woven into every aspect! 

Too Many Bones Game Overview

Quick Rules Summary

This is quite an in-depth game so I’m just going to give a very brief, top level overview here. I’ll cover more individual bits in the positives and negatives section below.

Players have a character with unique stats and abilities all shown with dice on a play mat.

Each round of the game a card is drawn form an adventure deck. Some have story choices that will lead to players choosing where the story goes.

Others have combat where players will move around the board against game controlled baddies trying to survive and defeat win the fight

Rewards for various activities are usually to upgrade the players stat bonuses or to gain new skills, both of which are represented by stats.

How do you win?

Get to the end of the story, the last card in the adventure deck and defeat the baddie to win the game.

Main Mechanisms

This is a cooperative with a lot of dice rolling. Combat, lock-picking, you even roll to see if you’re going to upgrade stats.

USP

The USP is all of the dice and as it’s from Chip Theory games there are a lot of chips a well. Combat is basically several stacks of tokens going to war.

Theme

The fantasy theme is pretty cool. All of the characters have unique abilities and the monsters are all creepy.

Setup

Well, there’s quite a bit to it. You have to get all the players bits and bits relevant to the scenario you’re playing.

There is a lot of cool storage speeding it up a bit but it is quite intensive.

Components & Artwork

So, everything I played with was great. All the dice are nice, the chips are heavy and the dual-layered neoprene mats are cool.

However, I have no idea what is an upgrade component and what comes in the base box. The owner of the game has gone all in buying all of the optional bits.

The art is just OK for me.

Ease of Teaching

While the game is in-depth it is fairly easy to teach. It’s open information and co-op so everything can be taught as and when you need to.

Similar Games

I’d look at any co-op adventure game, be it with dice, minis or just cards. But funnily enough, non-coop Thunderstone Quest and Destinies both have similar vibes.

Too Many Bones Review

Positives

A very nice looking production.

A lot of different characters each with a few unique abilities.

The way everything is controlled with dice in the tech tree style is interesting and means you can play the same character in multiple different ways.

You have to pass a skill check to see if you can improve that skill, which makes levelling skills up easy but progressively harder.

You roll for initiative in combat, something I always like. This makes quick characters (like the one I played) feel fast.

Combat looks good with stacks of chips (representing health) stomping around the board and it’s tactical and quite chess like…

Negatives

…but it is kinda dull and takes longer than it should. My ‘fun’ combat abilities were either one and done or required ammo which was quite hard to get. After I spaffed that, I was just swinging normal attacks.

At 3+ players the combat area gets crowded, at 4 players towards the end of the fight one player is probably stuck wiht no room to manouvre.

It’s very, very expensive even if you don’t buy any of the cosmetic upgrades.

The adventure card choices are a bit underwhelming compared to how large scale combat feels.

Summary

A very good game, bogged down by downtime with more than 2 players and an off-putting price tag.

Jesta ThaRogue