Too Many Bones

You grab a fistful of custom-engraved rubberized dice (your Gearloc's evolving skill pool plus base attack/defense dice), shake, and roll into a tray, then physically lock-in successful faces while re-rolling failures up to a per-turn limit. Between battles you spend Training Points to add new skill dice to your personal pool, swapping in better dice as your character levels — the satisfaction is the slow accretion of dice you actually want to roll. Combat is a tactile loop of roll, lock, re-roll, then placement of poker-chip baddies on a 4x4 neoprene battle mat.

A campaign is 7-10 'days,' each consisting of: (1) draw an Encounter card with a branching narrative choice; (2) resolve the choice — often a stat-check roll against your dice or a routed branch into combat; (3) if combat, fight on the 4x4 mat using initiative-tracked turns where each Gearloc and Baddie acts in order, spending dice for attacks/skills/defense; (4) collect Loot and Training Points; (5) Recover at day's end (heal, scout next day, attempt to pick locked Trove Loot). The campaign ends when you reach the Tyrant — a final boss with unique dice and rules — and either defeat it or your party falls. Persistent state across days: HP carries forward but recovers, dice pool grows, loot accumulates.

Each turn you decide how many dice to commit, which to lock vs reroll, and how to spend their faces — every face is a choice (attack, skill activation, defense, or banked Bones for emergency abilities). Positioning on the 4x4 mat is enormous: melee Gearlocs like Tantrum want adjacency, ranged like Patches want line-of-sight from the back row, and Baddies have their own movement priorities. Between battles, the meta-decision is dice-pool composition — which of 16 character-specific skill dice to unlock first, balancing offense vs utility vs defense — and whether to push deeper or rest. Option counts at a typical turn are wide (5-8 reasonable dice allocations) and the planning horizon is 1-2 turns because Baddie AI is deterministic enough to forecast.

Dominant skill is probabilistic risk modeling: every dice roll has a known face distribution, and strong players intuit when to commit 5 dice for a 90% kill versus 3 dice for a 60% kill plus a positional hedge. Second is spatial/tactical planning on the cramped 4x4 grid — chokepoint control, exploiting Baddie movement rules, denying flanks. Third is dice-pool curation across the campaign: knowing which Gearloc skills synergize and pruning weak dice early. Memory load is moderate (Baddie behaviors, status effects). Mental arithmetic is constant but light (summing attack values, comparing to defense). Weak players tunnel on damage; strong players treat each die as a multi-purpose resource and read board state two threats ahead.

Be a quirky 'Gearloc' adventurer in a steampunk-fantasy frontier, building a custom dice arsenal across an 8-12 day campaign that ends in a boss fight against a named Tyrant — D&D-flavored RPG progression without a Dungeon Master.

Anthony LeTourneau-led whimsical-grotesque fantasy: muscular Gearlocs with exaggerated proportions, saturated palette, hand-painted Baddie portraits on poker chips. Stylized cartoon fantasy that leans goofy rather than grimdark — closer to Adventure Time meets Warhammer than to Tolkien.