Welcome to the second 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 in an ongoing series this summer. Enjoy! Part one is here, part three is here, part four is here, and part five is here.
The workload
Josh Wielgus and I had been assigned to work on Unbreakable’s non-tyrant encounters. For the uninitiated, every day that elapses in Too Many Bones is played out by encounter card, which has a goofy framing story on the front and one, two, or three mechanical choices on the back.
For this cycle of content, we were going to do a LOT of encounters. First, we had to write and design all of the special, solo, and general encounters for Unbreakable itself (plus some extra cards for use in campaign play), which, with stretch funding goals, we knew would probably grow to about 65-70 cards (it ended up being 74). We also were going to be responsible for 40 Waves in Daelore, a 40-encounter expansion to the previous Too Many Bones standalone, Undertow (this expansion would also end up having 16 new enemies, which Josh and I designed). Then, as the campaign grew to be our most successful ever to that point, we added even more – first, with the addition of 40 Caves in Daelore (a 40-card expansion to Unbreakable), and then, with the addition of 20 additional starting encounters to Rage of Tyranny. This put the total amount of cards we had to write and design at 174.
One of the quirks of many Chip Theory products is that when we’re trying to sell gamers on the value of their purchase, it is often the least impressive elements that require the most work. Players always love getting new enemy chips or component upgrades, and understandably so! They look cool and they cost more money to manufacture. Encounter cards are far less impressive, given their comparably small print cost and lack of visual flair, but they require more work from more people: writing, editing, design, development, and playtesting. In short, 174 cards was going to be a ton of work.
Encountering encounters
Accordingly, Josh and I got down to business. We met at least once a week and tried to knock out the framework for at least 20 encounters in each meeting. When I think about design work, I tend to think in terms of theme-forward (letting the narrative concept of the game dictate the game mechanics) or mechanics forward (coming up with a fun mechanic idea and writing the narrative to fit it). Chip Theory’s designs are usually pretty theme-forward, but Josh and I used both approaches in our ongoing meetings.
The 40 Waves encounters were the most fun to design, as all of the encounters were made to utilize one of Undertow’s three (very fun) unique mechanics: mech baddies, aquatic baddies called krelln, or one side of the game’s double-sided battle mat that is meant to represent a raft. For most of these, Josh and I brainstormed aquatic or robot-based pop culture references or funny situations one could get up to on a boat. For a Titanic-themed encounter, for example, we had the raft slowly flooded by water (health chips), and then Josh had the bright idea to include a joke option that forced the player to put several of their dice in frozen ice cube tray until the game was over (at least one player has actually done this). In one of my favorite encounters, we wrote a Noah’s Ark themed battle, where “two by two” is literalized by making all elements of the fight operate in multiples of two (there’s also a peaceful option, where you can “send a dove” by flicking a die somewhere where you can no longer see it).
For the Unbreakable encounters, we still designed a lot of theme-forward battles, but we also had more new mechanical ground to till. We came up with several encounters that manipulated the new battle mat's lava chips, perhaps by flipping them, hiding enemies under them, or removing them from the board altogether. We also devised some interesting interactions with the new Break-type baddies, making them an even more fearsome presence when they enter play.
After Josh and I roughed out the core concepts, I would go write up the rules with more mechanical formality. Then, our rules guru Shannon Wedge would rip up whatever I wrote and rewrite it so that it actually made sense with our rules terminology (sorry, Shannon). While she was doing that, I worked on the stories for each encounter, which I ultimately brought back to Josh Wielgus and Josh Carlson, who often suggested punch-ups or rewrites. Then, as everything neared finalization, Josh Carlson would inspect the encounters on a mechanical level and offer small adjustments where he thought gameplay could be a little more compelling.
One interesting challenge to this round of content is that there were already a lot of Too Many Bones encounters in existence before this, so by the time Josh and I finished this round, we were really forced into some outside-the-box thinking. If you’re playing through one of the new encounters and see something truly bizarre (a personal favorite in this genre is the card that requires you to play an off-brand version of Pictionary using the game’s baddie chips), that was us really stretching the concept of what you could get away with in the card format while still remaining fundamentally Too Many Bones.
The nitty gritty
Of course, there are many more steps, and many more people, involved between the point of inspiration and Josh giving the final sign-off. First of all, there was TMB superfan Timo Hollenbach, who provided us with several encounter suggestions several years ago that I ultimately adapted into many of the 40 Caves and Unbreakable designs. Then, once Shannon whipped my mechanics text into shape, she and fellow playtest supervisor Salem Scott had to run the encounters by a small army of volunteer playtesters, filtering their feedback into an essential core of wisdom we could use. In the process, Shannon and Salem developed another new rule, Shaky Ground, that could be applied to several of the lava encounters to make the lava chips flip more often and create a more dynamic game state. All told, playtesting took about six months – in addition to the encounter and base mechanic testing, Shannon and Salem also had to verify the creation of 17 new sets of tyrant mechanics (designed by Logan Giannini and Adam Carlson), 71 new baddies (Adam, Josh W. and me), and six new Gearlocs (in addition to the five released during this round of content, the secret Gearloc Riffle was also tested during this time).
The tail end of a project – the refinement stage, and the proofing portion – is always the most tedious and prone to creative friction. We are a company filled with creative people, and creative people are sometimes unwilling to take the L when they’re debating design decisions, especially if those decisions involve a project they’ve poured a lot of their energy into. I’d done a small bit of design work before on Cloudspire and previous TMB titles, but this was my first big foray, and I chafed at some of the recommendations Shannon and Salem brought back from the playtesters. Ultimately, however, they reminded me that we were all on the same page in wanting to make the final product better, and I was able to let go of my possessiveness over my ideas. It was a valuable lesson for me, and I am grateful for their patience.
Obviously, encounters are only one part of the Unbreakable content cycle, and as I said, they’re probably low priority for a lot of players. By far the most popular and discussed element of any Too Many Bones release is the new set of Gearlocs, and that’s what I’ll be writing about next time.
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What else is good on the internet?
The Onion often doesn’t get a mention these days past the headline, but I’ve clicked through on a few pretty funny articles lately. Two of my recent favorites can be found here and here.
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From the field
Here’s a new review I wrote about Flamin’ Hot, a biopic of questionable veracity.
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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.