Overview: Adventure Time
Too Many Bones is a cooperative dice-building adventure game for 1 to 4 players The game plays out as a series of encounters. Scenario cards are drawn from a deck and a story is read to the group. After describing the scenario, the group will have to choose one of the options provided. The group can choose to take the easy way out or if they are feeling up to the task, take the harder route and potentially gain a better reward.
This continues until your team decides they are strong enough to take on the tyrant. When the time comes, one last scenario is read and the fight against the tyrant begins. The game is won if the tyrant is defeated. Otherwise, they continue playing until they run out of time.
Most encounters in the game involves a fight against monsters. The difficulty of the fight scales with the number of players as well as the number of rounds left in the game. Fights are resolved by rolling dice which represents skills the character can perform. If the Gearlos manage to defeat all the enemies, they gain experience and/or items. If they lose, they get nothing from this encounter.
Like classic rpgs, your characters will start the game inexperienced and weak. However, as you progress through the adventure, you will become stronger and learn variety of skills to help you on your quest. New skills mean more dice to use during combat.
The thing that drew me to Too Many Bones is the components; they are amazing! I would get this game simply because it’s jam packed with quality pieces. Poker chips in place of tokens, indestructible character sheets and Neoprene play mats. I must say it again, amazing! Not to mention there are 100+ custom dice which comes in nice plastic trays to keep your game organized.
Speaking of dice, I’m not normally a fan of luck playing a huge role in a game and seeing all them made me a bit skeptical. Fortunately, the distribution between hit and miss was really well balanced. The stronger your dice, the more bones (misses) on its faces. And even when you roll bones, they can be traded in for a backup plan action. Our game saw a few bad rolls but never once did I feel cheated by chance.
I was fine with all the dice but I did not like the encounter card at all. Maybe I was too tired at the time but the story was not engaging at all. I tried to like it but I couldn’t. It was only a few days ago and I can’t recall any of the encounters. There was something about killing rats? Why we had to is a mystery to me. My point is, the story was not engaging at all. The game would have turned out exactly the same if we went straight to the options at the end of the encounter.
Not your everyday dice rolling game
Too Many Bones was better than I thought it would be. It wouldn’t be the first game I bring to the table but I also wouldn’t mind playing it if somebody brings it up. The game mechanics are simple enough to quickly explain to a new group of players. On the other hand, the character development provides enough depth to keep experienced players coming back for more.
The game has a good amount of replayability as the base game comes with 4 Gearlocs to play and 7 Tyrants to fight. Perhaps you’ll start losing interest in the stories on the encounter cards after so many games but I think they’re the weakest part anyway. For those who truly enjoys the game, there are also 3 more Gearlocs released which can further expand your game
