Too Many Bones

Took my group two full sessions just to get through the rules before we rolled a single die in anger. Learning the rules to this one really is a stiff barrier to entry, we sat around a table reading iconography off reference cards for the better part of two hours the first night, and I remember thinking, ok, this had better be worth it. It mostly is.

The Gearlocs, that’s what they call the characters, each build out a totally different skill tree from dice you literally physically build, training new die faces onto blank dice as you level up. That’s the hook that got me, honestly, combat plays out kind of similar to Heroes of Might and Magic III in how satisfying the unit-building loop feels, except here it’s your own character sheet you’re customizing one die face at a time. I hadn’t played anything quite like it.

Combat runs on a 4x4 grid and is more tactical than I expected going in, positioning actually matters, and the “bones” mechanic where bad rolls generate a resource you can spend later means your misses aren’t complete failures, loss aversion turned into a system instead of just frustration. I’ve had rounds where I was actively hoping for a bad roll because of what it banked me, which is a strange feeling for a dice game to produce.

Where it wears on me is the fiddliness. There’s a lot of tracking, a lot of tokens, a lot of “wait, does this trigger before or after that,” and after about fifteen plays the builds started to feel like you’re only ever using one or two optimal builds for a couple of the characters rather than several good ones. The health chip situation is also a minor gripe, I’m honestly not sure why they skimped there when everything else in the box is stellar production.

Still tabling it a few times a year, still enjoy it every time I do, just don’t expect to learn it in an evening.