Too Many Bones

I put off buying Too Many Bones for a long time because of the price, and I get why people hesitate, this isn’t a casual purchase. What changed my mind was the Trove Chest, an insert that also functions as setup and teardown in one motion, which sounds like a small thing until you’ve owned a big campaign box that takes twenty minutes to pack away every session. That alone would make me recommend it. The game underneath is better.

Each Gearloc plays like a genuinely different game, not a reskin, and the skill tree branching means you won’t unlock everything in a single campaign, which is by design, you’re supposed to come back and run a different build later. The battles have a real rhythm to them: you look at what you’re up against and think there’s no way I win this, and then sometimes you do, one or two health left, and that specific feeling is why I keep coming back to it over games with cleaner math.

The rules-to-payoff ratio is real and I won’t pretend otherwise. Keywords stack up fast, on both the Gearlocs and the enemies, and even after a dozen sessions I was still flipping to the reference sheet more than I’d like. That overhead doesn’t fully go away with practice, it just becomes a familiar kind of friction instead of a new one. It’s also a genuinely hard game to learn and I’d argue a harder one to master, so temper expectations if your table wants something that clicks by the second play.

The component quality is the best I’ve seen from any publisher at this scale, chips with real heft, dice that feel deliberate rather than just plentiful, felt mats so cards don’t stick. It’s a hard game to love casually. It is not a hard game to love once you’ve put the hours in.