Making Too Many Bones: Unbreakable, Part 1: Building the Game
Welcome to the first deep dive on CTG's latest title.
Welcome to the first in a five-part series about the making of Too Many Bones: Unbreakable, the final standalone expansion in the Too Many Bones board game series from Chip Theory Games, where I work as a writer and developer. This huge project is now being shipped to board gamers around the world, and to highlight the different facets of how it came together, I will be tackling individual aspects of its creation over the next two months. Enjoy! Edit: Now that the series is complete, you can see part two here, part three here, part four here, and part five here.
Getting started
In the summer of 2021, the development department at Chip Theory Games held a long brainstorming meeting. We’d known for a while that we’d be making another game in the TMB series, and the crowdfunding campaign we were planning for the fall was projected to be big. We’d all been working on ideas individually, but the meeting was our first pitch session and our marching orders for what facets of the game (and associated expansions and accessories) we’d each be working on. It was a big moment for me personally, as it represented both a new step for me at the company and a reflection on my history there.
I got involved with Chip Theory at the end of 2017, when a college friend of mine, Josh Wielgus, asked for my help copyediting the current print run of the original TMB game and the first printing of Too Many Bones: Undertow, the series’ first standalone expansion. For the uninitiated, Too Many Bones is what we like to call a “dice-builder” RPG. It is set in the world of Daelore, a goofy fantasy realm where players take on the role of a unique fantasy creature called a Gearloc (think kind of a cross between a halfling’s stature and a dwarf’s temperament, but with really long ears). Unlike a pen-and-paper RPG, your character skills are represented by unique skill dice slotted into your character mat (all of the play surfaces in CTG products are made of neoprene rather than cardboard), and you roll those dice to perform unique abilities on a close-quarters battle mat. On that mat, you will take on a variety of baddies and, if successful, will be able to challenge a unique tyrant in battle to save the realm.
TMB’s success and my participation in it put me on a track for continued work at CTG, first as a freelance writer and editor on Cloudspire (which I talk more about here), and ultimately resulting in my official hiring in early 2020. I had contributed a few game development ideas over that time period, but by 2021, I was being given my first chance to contribute to the game design and development on the ground floor, working on the first TMB title to be launched during my full-time employment. It was a big job, so we needed a lot of people to pitch in.
Thinkin’ themin’
In addition to my development duties, I would be writing the majority of the game’s flavor text and world-building materials (with assistance from Josh Wielgus), along with a new novella set in the Too Many Bones universe. All of Chip Theory’s games feature mechanics that are heavily influenced by theme, so our table-setting meetings included ample discussions of what exactly that theme should be.
We’d set up in previous titles that the heroic Gearlocs would be headed into The Break, a giant chasm in southern Daelore that had devastated the land after an experiment gone awry by a mad Gearloc scientist named Nobulous Grint. Nobulous had been defeated in the previous expansion, so I thought Unbreakable could be about Daelore’s precarious power structure and how Nobulous’s death left a vacuum that a number of unstable elements were now at war to fill.
We also decided that we could go a little wackier, a little grosser, than we had in previous installments. Josh Carlson wanted the new baddie type, called break, to largely be made up of cave-dwelling troglodyte creatures who were mutated versions of Daelorean residents affected by The Break’s radiation. Since Nobulous had underground labs, we populated the rest of the break-type baddies with his failed or escaped examples of genetic experimentation, and the other baddie types in the game were named and drawn with a similar flair for the dramatic.
I named most of the enemies and sourced art reference on all of them to Creative Director Melonie Lavely, who provided art direction to the game’s two illustrators, Anthony LeTourneau and Federico Pompili. Melonie, Anthony and Federico did next-level work on Unbreakable to create the franchise’s most evocative setting yet, with enemy designs that keep me smiling two years later. But, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Back to the meeting.
(Under)Ground rules
Josh Carlson, CTG’s co-owner and lead designer, told us we would be split up into teams. I was paired with Josh Wielgus, who I’d previously collaborated with on Cloudspire and past TMB products, to design the game’s many encounters. Designer Logan Giannini was paired with CTG’s other co-owner, designer Adam Carlson, to work on the game’s new tyrants, along with Rage of Tyranny, an expansion that provided new, more challenging ways to fight the tyrants from the franchise’s previous titles. Josh Carlson would be paired with rules guru Shannon Wedge to figure out this game’s unique rules and new enemy skills. Finally, we would all be designing one new Gearloc character. The team would grow from there, but I’ll dive into that in another piece.
Josh quickly outlined the big new status quo change for the Unbreakable expansion: lava. While the original TMB battle mat is a four-by-four grid with Gearlocs starting on one side and baddies on the other (Undertow offered a few innovative tweaks to this same basic formula), the Unbreakable battle mat would take that grid and literally perforate it, placing chip-sized holes in each of the 16 positions. Into those holes would go an equal number of lava chips, with solid ground on one side and molten rock on the other.
When characters and (most) enemies end their turn on a lava-side-up chip, they would take one damage (no insignificant occurrence in a game like TMB, where every bit of health makes a difference). The exception to this would be the new break-type baddies, which are immune to lava (and in some cases, use lava to their own nefarious benefit). Baddies, loot cards, and encounters could flip lava to rock (or vice versa) as called for, creating a dynamic, ever-changing battle mat that would encourage a greater degree of character movement and dynamic positioning than in previous games in the TMB series.
With those marching orders, we got to work. Over the next couple of installments in this series, I’ll dig into the overall development period, with a special emphasis on the new Gearloc characters. Finally, for the last piece, I will drill down on the world-building for the game and specifically my writing for The Cog Book novella. While I’ll primarily be covering the elements of the game that fell under my purview, this whole process was very much a team effort, and my goal for this series is to show how many capable hands touch the creation of a project of this scope. I’ll see you next time to talk development.
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What else is good on the internet?
Leon Neyfakh (of Fiasco and the first two seasons of Slow Burn) and hip-hop commentator Jay Smooth recently released all 10 episodes of Think Twice, a podcast miniseries that examines the life of and allegations against Michael Jackson. It’s an interesting series that is interested in how Jackson and his public played off each other and how those interactions affected both parties, as well as the lives of his alleged victims and others in Jackson’s orbit. The show is on Audible, and though I usually don’t recommend giving money to Amazon, it’s well worth a month’s subscription to support good audio journalism.
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From the field
No new writing from me this week, but if you want to watch me working with some of the Unbreakable content, check out this video of a TMB playthrough I did with fellow developer Salem Scott (and later, social media manager Andrew Santoro):
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Follow me on Twitter @RTHowitzer, read my Letterboxd reviews @mrchumbles, listen to my Star Trek podcast at outofcontreks.podbean.com, or email me at outofcontreks@gmail.com.