A friend of mine said it is D&D 4th Edition-lite. Maybe that is? I haven't played that.
It is a dice builder that you go on adventures and fight baddies. It sort of strips away the visual of the board and super-detailed minis and gives you really nicely made mats, dice, and poker chips. It is about the actions and choices. The art isn't a huge deal because you only really see your own character on your mat but you are staring at their chips that only have heads/faces.
All their components are super nice. Stitched neoprene mats, card tuck boxes, dice holders/trays with lids, chip holders in the insert...this is all standard with their products. They also don't sell at retail so you either do from their store, at convention, or KS.
How TMB works is you pick a tyrant, shuffle their encounter cards in with a certain amount of regular encounter cards (each tyrant has a different game length so different number of cards used) and add the Day 1-3 on top. Object is to kill the tyrant. You can only fight it if you make enough progress via progress points. Each Day typically has one progress point attached to it, a few don't. So on Day 1 you flip over the card and you read the story/flavor text and decide what to do. Most cards give you at least two options and let you know what the rewards are. It could be to not fight, fight, fight with different challenges/conditions, or sometimes literal dexterity tests (one has you flicking one of your dice between two poker chips to see if you get hurt on a catapult or not, easier said than done) to pass the day.
If you fight, you pull out the battleground mat which has slots for up to 4 monsters and 4 gearlocs. I believe it is a 4x5 spaced grid. Each gearloc die is rolled to determine initiative and baddies have set ones and you arrange their order on the mat (there is a cool cut-out on the side that is the order). Then you fight. Baddies can move two and then attack. Each chip has their attack value, who they target and health. Gearlocs can only do things based on their Dexterity. Dex is essentially action points. You can use one to move but then you can roll fewer dice. But you move or not first then decide which dice to roll and then hit your target or do your action. The characters are significantly different and have their own player aid that tells you what all their unlockable dice can do. It even gives you recommendations on what to level up if you are new. Skill dice you unlock are exhausted after you use them but you always have attack dice and defense dice you have access to every round unless something bad happens.
The baddie system is kind of cool. They come in 1 point, 5 point, and 20 point (Undertow has 3 points but that is special occasion). You determine a baddie pool by taking the number of gearlocs in your party and multiplying it by your day. So 4 gearlocs on day 4 means 16 poins. You would take three 5 point baddies and a 1 point baddie and fight them. There are about 5 different baddie types and each Tyrant uses only 2-3 types so it mixes up what you face each time. One might be just orcs, another might be scaled creatures, beats, and fungus/swamp beings. It varies a good deal.
It is called Too Many Bones because most dice have crossbones on it. They are essentially misses but if you get enough of them you can trigger special powers or permanently make your gearloc slightly better with your innate ability. Patches is a medic, can use that to heal while another character can use it to get stones to range attack and another use it to get axes to do good damage.
While it isn't flashy in one sense but all the components are super nice and stands out on the table. Another nice feature is your health is visual. You use red poker chips stacked below your gearloc chip to show how much health you have. Same with all the baddies. It creates a nice visual effect and since the chips are nice quality, it feels good in your hands.
After the battle is done, you get your rewards or compensations. You can hold 4 items, you can trade items, you can heal, you can try to pick a lock (special Trove card and you roll special dice in its own little mini-game). But you are limited what you can do. Then you flip over the next day and repeat it over.
I was standoff-ish at first but then I played it at PAX Unplugged and bought the base game with 2 gearlocs at the event and haven't looked back.
Here's the offerings...
- Base game TMB gives you about 5 Tyrants (bosses, might be 7) and four heroes. There are separate solo cards but most people play with two gearlocs (heroes) when playing Solo.
- Undertow is a standalone expansion that most people jump on as an entry point since it is cheaper and isn't as big of an investment. I don't know how many Tyrants but gives you 2 new gearlocs (one is a bard)to play that can be combined with the previous version.
- You can buy expansion gearlocs that gives you everything you need to play them (character chip, a bunch of dice, mat, character details). Each one plays completely different. Like Gasket is a hyrdo robot that doesn't exact dice but needs water to function with you have to maintain.
- Age of Tyranny and 30 Days expansions add more content two the game such as more baddies, more adventure cards to change up days, boons/scars, and a way to connect multiple sessions into one long campaign to kill 7 tyrants. Campaign is not compatible with Undertow which is its own campaign I believe, don't have it.
- There is an Adventure Map that is purely for show that let's you have a visual representation of your progress instead of just counting. Does nothing else.
- There are premium health tokens but they are just slightly nicer than the health tokens the game already comes with.
- Chip trays, but you could buy cheap chip trays online which I was going to do before they announced the Trove.
I have TMB, Gasket, Nugget (said to be a good solo player), Age of Tyranny, and 30 Days. I'll be getting Undertow with this KS. If you are really unsure, look into Undertow as an entry point. If you are going to Origins, they will be there and seek them out to try it.
Gearlocs types
BASE
- Healer
- Shield/tank
- Bomber thrower
- Berserker
Undertow
Expansions
- Hyrdo-mech
- All-around fighter
- Ranger with pets/companions
- Techy/robot/drone builder
There is also a growing Facebook group that you could ask to join and see if anybody is local to show you it. I warn you, they are so in love with the game that you might get caught up in their hype. They've made a number of 3d printed supplies for the game like color coated gearloc trays that hold all their dice.
Sorry for the wall of text but hopefully that helps you out.
