Too Many Bones vs Too Many Bones: Undertow: Which Should You Buy?

In the original Too Many Bones, you pick one of four oddball Gearlocs and fight your way across a map toward a final boss called a tyrant. The clever bit is that you don't start with powers, you train them. After each scrap you earn new ability dice and roll them into your growing pool, so your hero gets visibly stronger fight by fight. Players keep saying it captures the joy of leveling up in a video game better than almost anything else on cardboard, and I think that's the fairest one-line summary of why people fall for it.

Undertow keeps that same core loop (pick a Gearloc, build them up over a series of encounters by adding and leveling skill dice, battle it out on a chunky mat covered in poker chips) but adds its own signature twist: the backup plan. When your dice whiff, those misses get banked and can trigger useful effects later, so a bad roll still does something instead of just wasting your turn. It's a small change that softens the dice luck in a really satisfying way, and it's the mechanical reason some folks prefer Undertow even though it's the smaller box.

Let me be upfront with you: neither of these teaches itself. The original's rulebook is famously a mess, with key rules buried on the player aids instead of the book, and one reviewer admitted he spent a third of his playtime looking things up. Undertow somehow doubles down. Players consistently say to read the rulebook, watch a video, then read it again, and they're right. Your first session or two with either box will involve flipping pages mid-fight.

The gap between them is real, though. The original sits at Medium-Heavy, while Undertow is flat-out Heavy, around a 5 out of 6 on complexity, and it can stretch to three hours. If you're newer to big co-op RPGs, the original is the gentler on-ramp (relatively speaking). If you already love crunchy systems and want the deepest version of this dice-building idea, Undertow rewards the climb.

Table presence is a tie, and a glorious one. Both boxes give you weighted poker chips, heat-printed dice, and stitched neoprene mats, the kind of components people call the best you'll handle in this hobby. Fair warning on the original: it's pricey, there are no minis for the money, and the character art lands squarely in the uncanny valley for some people.

Replayability is where player count really matters. The original packs four wildly different Gearlocs plus a big stack of baddies and tyrants, so a group of three or four can rotate heroes for ages (just watch for one player quarterbacking the co-op). Undertow's base box is really a 1-2 player game unless you buy more Gearlocs, but within that lane it's endlessly tinkerable. People who love min-maxing a build replay the same Gearloc over and over, just changing what they level, and you can run a full character arc in a single evening without committing to a sprawling campaign.