Too Many Bones

A regular of mine at sales, a woman who mostly buys glassware, cornered me once to ask if I’d ever tried this because her grandson wouldn’t shut up about it, and that’s about as unlikely a path into a two hundred dollar dice-chucking RPG box as I’ve had. I understand the sticker shock complaint people have, this is not a casual purchase, but I also understand within about two sessions why people pay it.

Your character is built entirely around a personal pool of unique dice, dozens of faces per die that don’t match anyone else’s, and leveling up means literally adding new dice with new faces to your bag. That’s the whole engine, and it means combat, which happens on a small tactical grid, is really a puzzle of which dice to commit and when. It can absolutely be overwhelming to a new player staring down two hundred plus dice with no shared vocabulary yet, I watched someone glaze over completely on their first sitting, but once a character clicks it clicks hard.

Here’s my actual bias showing: the dice themselves are some of the best made components I’ve handled in this hobby, real heft to them, a satisfying clack in the bag when you’re fishing for the right ones, no light hollow rattle the way cheaper dice-heavy games sometimes get. Whoever specced the material for these understood that a game this dice-dependent lives or dies on how the dice feel in your hand, not just what they roll.

Luck still matters more than the depth of the system wants to admit, a bad string of rolls against a tough boss can undo real strategic planning, and I’ve seen that frustration voiced by players who otherwise loved everything else about it. Fair complaint. Doesn’t change that this is one of the most tactile, best-produced things on my shelf, worth the investment if the price doesn’t scare you off first.