Normally I’d add in a video here of the game play. But for Unbreakable, there really isn’t much game play. It’s an established system, so less new content on it. So let’s go back to an older Rolling Solo video to show off the game system of Too Many Bones in general.

Too Many Bones: Unbreakable – Crowdfunding

So, like I said this is the point where I jumped into the game. My first experience, though with the game was the playthrough above, and then playing a bit of a demo of it at GenCon in 2019. Let’s just say that GenCon and a bit of a demo really isn’t the way to try out the game. Chip Theory Games doesn’t make light games. So while I enjoyed it, I didn’t love it.

Fastforward to this crowdfunding campaign. And why jump in at this point. Well, it’s supposed to be the last bigger box expansion, possibly. But it is more because these characters sounded cool. I’ll get into them in more detail, so it seemed like a jumping in point that was nice and safe. Since then, of course, I own more and I’m ready to get it to the table.

The Level Up System

Let’s start by talking about Too Many Bones and the big thing that is really tempting about this game. As you play the game you get to level up as you go. That means unlocking new abilities or increasing stats. From what I’ve heard, often stats are just as good as abilities or better. Because survivability is important. But let’s talk about the abilities.

Each character has their own board and dice that they can use to level up. And each character levels up their own things. Let’s talk a bit about the characters here. Because that’s what is so key to the level up system.

Gale

Gale is going to use their mechanical abilities to manipulate the wind. This is all done in the standard way via the dice rolls. Generally around wind, she’s going to try and control the battle board to some extent that way, moving enemies

Figment

Figment is a time traveler. Coming to the past when the world needs them most, Figmant manipulates different elements of the game. Allowing turn order to change or messing with other elements of combat.

Compared to the original characters which were more standard fantasy tropes, Gale and Figment standout in what they can do. So their leveling paths are going to be interesting.

Campaign but Not

So, let’s talk about this as well because Chip Theory Games does this a lot as well. They create games that are campaigns but really aren’t campaigns. In this case it is and isn’t one at the same time. There isn’t that story progression that you are reading. It is the story of what your characters do, fight, and how they upgrade. But it’s not a specific narrative path. So that allows them to get it very generic and shorter.

But it is a campaign because you do level up. Your characters progress throughout the game. The whole last section that I wrote about, you can see how it would be a campaign game. Except for the fact that the story isn’t there.

High Quality

Finally, let’s wrap up by talking about how nice a game that Chip Theory Games makes. Everything that they do is very high quality. They don’t give you a dual layer or single layer cardboard player board, no, it’s a neoprene mat. They don’t give you generic dice that you need to match up to something, custom dice all the way. The poker chips for most things aren’t cheaper quality and even the more basic health chips are really nice.

Everything about the game is quality. And that has stayed consistent across all of their products. Now, that seems like a lot and it does make the games expensive. But they started that way and because it has stayed that way, nothing is incompatible which means that you can play with a lot of different characters that they have put out in Too Many Bones.

Final Thoughts on Too Many Bones: Unbreakable

Is this just an excuse to get into a game that I liked, possibly. But it is a game that I want to dive into. There are a lot of very cool elements and I want to explore this world. I know people love it as a solo game. So I want to explore it as that. I want to play it with friends, I want to see how all the different gearlocs play that I have.

I know that for a lot of people it is a lifestyle game. And I know that it isn’t the easiest game to learn. But I’m excited to dive into it and see all that it has to offer.

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Level Up

Story Based

The first one, and I have an example for each, is what you get in Stars of Akarios. In Stars of Akarios there are prescribed spots where you get things. So when you get a new pilot skill or a co-pilot, when you can upgrade the Sparrow, things like that. It is at a specific interval based on the story.

Now this might not sound like it gives you much choice. But it is not as strict as I made it sound. Sometimes it is fairly specific, like with the co-pilot, the option is limited to what you’ve done. Or the attack and flight patterns you start picking from are limited. But you select from those groups. And you have specific tracks that let you modify your draw deck or ship stats which does give you choice.

But the whole idea is that you don’t gain experience (XP) or anything like that. That is not what determines when you level up. It is in the story that determines when you level up and no matter how you’ve done, when whether you snuck by or succeeded no problem, you get that level up.

XP Based

The next way I consider to be XP based leveling. Though, I break that down into two areas. This one is just about gaining XP to unlock specific skills. And the example I think of for XP based leveling is Gloomhaven.

In Gloomhaven you play cards and complete missions to gain XP. Once you obtain a specific amount of XP you move up to the next level. For Gloomhaven you get new cards and potentially more health. But those are doled out when you gain a specific amount of energy. You unlock it only then and you keep adding to that pool to unlock future levels.

This is common in other games as well. Sword & Sorcery offered a similar system, so tweaked slightly. And for something like Dungeons and Dragons, this is the normal way to level up. So it is the closest to that RPG like experience. But it is less dynamic. You unlock specific things, in Gloomhaven it’s a choice between cards. There are other ways that you can use XP that are more freeing which we will get to next.

XP Spending

The final way is through spending your experience points. And my example for this one is Roll Player Adventures. But there are other games, Arkham Horror LCG for example, which do this as well. This is the idea that as you gain XP, instead of having a specific number you hit to gain stuff, you gain stuff at specific points. Not based on story, but on how you spend your experience points.

Let’s look more at Roll Player Adventures to see how it works there. Throughout each story section you gain experience points. Those experience points don’t do anything for you throughout that story. You collect them and that is it. It is only at the end of the story that you use them. But it isn’t a standard, use them and get a new level and the bonuses that come with that.

In Roll Player Adventures what you spend your XP on can vary. You use it to level up character stats, increase the dice pool for combat, increase card play, or level up health. Each of those cost an amount of experience points. So you reduce how many you have in order to get new things which offers a more specific choice in the game. And can create a more widely branching path.

What do I mean? I play a sorcerer character in Roll Player Adventure. I start with no strength and I still have no strength. My charisma is amazing, however. Or, if I had wanted, I could build in the complete opposite direction. Another example is that we could have put all are points in health to make sure the party never dies. Leave our stats and dice pool lower, but just make sure we can survive, that’s a choice you can make.

Final Thoughts

Now, some of the systems might sound better to you. Maybe you want that freedom and flexibility that a XP spending based system gives you. Maybe you prefer to have fewer times where you level up, but possibly bigger shifts from a story based or XP based system. And maybe you don’t want to track XP at all and a story based system would be perfect for you.

Each of them offers it’s own benefit. In Gloomhaven you might level up after being soundly defeated in a scenario. In Stars of Akarios that won’t happen as likely. But each of them offers their own flavor to do really the same thing. And that is get you better at what you do in the game as you go. It is about what flavor you prefer.

Which way do you like best for a board game or an RPG system?

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In Sword & Sorcery, you control a character who is an ancient hero brought back in this time of need. You are exploring and different scenarios, getting options presented to you as to what to do, and making choices based on the sort of party that you have. During each scenario, you are fighting monsters, collecting soul points, getting money and other loot and hopefully leveling up your character. Then, as you win, you advance to more scenarios. All in all, the basics of what you’re doing in a game are pretty standard.

Sword & Sorcery does have some unique things, the biggest one being death in the game. When your character dies, you were an ancient soul that has been brought forward in time, so you become a ghost, instead of just being dead. You can do a few things as a ghost, but the main thing you can do and what you want to do, is get to your soul respawn point, respawn, and get back into the fight as fast as possible. Because, if your teammates go down as well, you’ll lose the scenario. This feels unique to me in the game because death isn’t the end. In Gloomhaven, it’s possible to have a character go down half way through a scenario, and while there is plenty of things that player can still help with in terms of running the encounter, you are done playing your character for that scenario. Sword & Sorcery handles that differently allowing you to hop back into the fight, but at a cost. To respawn, you have to use a soul point. And while that doesn’t seem like much of a cost, the soul points are what you use to level up as well, so you’re slowing down your leveling progression, and when you get knocked out and turned into ghost form and come back, you lose a level.

The leveling is also interesting in this game. It’s interesting because it’s not a standard leveling. Characters don’t level up based on XP that is gained, there isn’t a divided amount of anything that gets you closer at a regular rate. You have a group pool of soul points, and you don’t get soul points all that fast. You also have to keep a reserve of soul points because if someone goes down and you have none, they are extremely limited in what they can do until they can get back into the fight. Leveling up is also not a cheap affair. You are spending soul points equal to the level squared that you are going up to. So at level 2 it’s 4 soul points, at level 3 it’s 9 soul points, at level 5 it’s 25 soul points. The game hands them out fairly often, but that’s a lot of soul points to get up to the higher levels.

Another part of the game that I really enjoy, is the character creation/skills aspect of the game. Each character has two sides, a lawful side and a chaotic side. When you start the game, you, as a party, decides if you are going to be lawful or chaotic. That is going to give you a different unique character power than if you have played lawful. It also gives you the opportunity to get different abilities. And when you pick abilities, you have a large variety to pick from. So how you build up a character over time is going to be different than someone else might. Because of that, you really do get a good variety in the game and it adds back in some replayability, even if you know what is going to happen in the scenarios. And, depending on if you are lawful or chaotic, you are locked out of picking some abilities which limits your choices some in an interesting way.

They also have some cool rules for characters and monsters in the same area. If there are more heroes than monsters in the area, you have majority, if you have have twice as many you dominate the area, and just for that, you get an extra hit. But it isn’t just for you, it’s also for the monsters, so if you get swarmed or split up, it’s possible that you’ll be taking extra damage. It’s a nice way to make the majority feel like it means something, but it also means that you can get piled on quickly if you aren’t careful. This is one area that strategy is added into the game where it isn’t just the die rolls.

The game has a massive rule book, however, and like a lot of dungeon crawlers, that can be a deterrent from people getting into the game. I don’t think that the rules are all that complex, however, once you’re used to them. Most of what you need to know is explained on the cards for your abilities, and resolved by die rolls. So, once you know how to interpret those rolls, it goes fast. I feel like that’s fairly common for larger dungeon crawlers where they need to cover the edge cases, but most of those things will be fairly rare so the focus of the game is actually pretty straight forward.

One downside to the game is that it’s a bit fiddly. I bought a ton of small plastic bags and that helps keep things sorted. But the game itself does not come with those, which means that it would be a lot of work finding stuff. I think that a tackle box or a cross stitch thread box would work nicely as well. I feel like this is a common issue with a lot of dungeon crawlers. Without an organizer or organization strategy for Gloomhaven, it would have the same issue as well. Also, because of the size of the maps and the amount of tokens, you need a fairly large table to play the game easily. Once you’re into the game you know what you need and it’s easier to keep track of, but set-up can be a lot, thankfully tear down is a lot faster which is to be expected.

I also will say that right now I’m playing the game two player, each of us running a single character. I think that we’re going to consider going to two players each. The reason for that was that we’ve had good luck. The friend seems to roll defense like no ones business, so their character has never been in danger and is often the one focused on. And I’ve had a lot of luck doing large amounts of damage so it’s been fairly easy. I don’t know how much more difficult it will be controlling two characters each or what that will do to the length of play, but we’re hoping it bumps up the difficulty a bit. It should because you flip an encounter card after every heroes activation, so theoretically characters will get hit more. We also have two magic users, so we are limited in what we can use for equipment and want to get more variety.

I have enjoyed this game a lot thus far. I don’t think that it’s as good as Gloomhaven, but it’s a lot of fun. The story has been enjoyable, and I like the fact that when you’re knocked out, you really aren’t knocked out of the scenario. I wish it felt a bit harder or had a good way to scale the difficulty. But there are unique aspects to the game and I’m excited for playing more of it. There are also a lot of interesting characters to play and way more than I will probably ever get to, plus expansions. This is definitely not a game for those who don’t like the luck of the dice though.

Overall Grade: B+
Gamer Grade: B+
Casual Grade: C-

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