I backed this on Gamefound in April 2023, all-in, the kind of pledge where you tell yourself you’re being reasonable and you are not. Estimated delivery was September 2024. It slipped to November, then it actually showed up in January 2025, which by crowdfunding board game standards is basically early, and I say that with real gratitude and zero sarcasm.

The pitch is Too Many Bones with the rough edges sanded off, and having played a good amount of both, that’s accurate and also undersells it. Combat happens on an actual hex map instead of TMB’s 4x4 grid, so positioning is a real decision instead of a formality. Skill trees are modular now too, you can mix pieces from different trees instead of being locked to one character’s fixed progression, which fixes the thing that always bugged me about the older system.

The Dized companion app tutorial deserves real credit, it plays almost like a Jaws of the Lion style walkthrough for learning the flow, and I know plenty of people in this hobby have a reflexive allergy to needing an app for a board game. You can absolutely learn it from the physical booklet instead if that’s a hard line for you, but the app made my first session dramatically smoother than my first Too Many Bones session ever was.

Two-player is solid, three felt like the sweet spot in my group, and I haven’t tried it at four yet so I can’t speak to how it scales there. The cooldown system replacing straight dice-retirement is the single best change, using a skill die more than once in a fight without it just vanishing changes the whole rhythm of combat.

Not everyone’s sold, one reviewer called the rulebook “obscene” at 94 pages and said a single in-game day eats almost a full working day, and that’s not wrong exactly, this is a lifestyle game in the Cloudspire sense, a real investment of time and shelf space and money.

Four stars. It knocked Too Many Bones down a notch for me without fully replacing my want to see where the skill trees go from here.