Too Many Bones Has the Best Dice I Own and the Worst Box to Store Them In

Every custom die in this box is heavier and better carved than any dice I’ve owned before, and I say that as someone who’s picked up more than a few metal upgrade sets over the years. Too Many Bones is a co-op dice-building tactics game with a fantasy steampunk theme, and the writing is genuinely funny in a way I wasn’t expecting from a box that mostly asks you to roll handfuls of custom dice at a small combat grid. First read of the character books actually made me laugh out loud a couple times, which almost never happens with a rulebook.

Box itself is the one real letdown. It’s a strange non-standard size, heavy enough that I ended up carrying mine to game night in a canvas boat bag because nothing else fit it right, and the interior storage doesn’t hold up to the rest of the production at all, dice roll loose, trays shift, and I’ve had to buy an aftermarket dice tray insert just to keep things organized between sessions. Frustrating because everything else, the art, the writing, the sheer number of dice per character, is the best I’ve seen from any game on my shelf.

First game against even the easiest tyrant ran well over two hours while we were still learning our characters, and the learning curve is real, each Gearloc plays different enough that you basically have to relearn the game from scratch with a new one. Someone on a forum compared this to Assault on Doomrock and I get it, similar tone, similar humor, but Too Many Bones has way more character variety and a deeper combat system underneath the jokes.

Worth the investment if the price doesn’t scare you off. Just budget for a third party insert, because the one it ships with isn’t doing the components justice.