It's Not Really "Bad" Bones, But...

Every so often, a board game comes along that's trying to capture a digital game experience in physical game form. Bad Bones is one of those, a "tower defense" game for up to six players.

Each player has a playmat in front of them, showing a 5 x 5 grid. You have a 4-level tower in the center square, and 5 village tiles along the bottom edge (though those tiles aren't keyed to specific columns). Skeleton tokens enter along the left, right, and top edges, drawn at random from a bag and placed on your board according to a series of symbols. They move once each turn, obeying arrows on your playmat that gradually direct them toward your tower and villages to cause destruction. Your goal is to stave off disaster longer than your opponents; the game ends when one player is knocked out, and the best remaining score is the winner.

Your tools for dealing with skeletons are traps and a hero. Once each turn, your hero moves around your grid, instantly mopping up any skeletons it touches (or that walk into the hero). Your traps are a series of tiles you have in reserve, each turn adding one to your board or removing one for repairs. Traps can deflect skeletons in new directions (to potentially march off your board), fling them via catapult toward your opponents, devour them in a fountain of dragon fire, or lure them toward valuable treasure. But traps are also worth points to you if you don't lose them, and each can only withstand a little damage from skeletons before being destroyed.

There are aspects of the game that work well, but it all probably still adds up to an experience that's not really "for me." I can get into the core principle here of a game where you don't exactly "win" so much as "cope." This game is set up to overwhelm you. You can't keep up with all the skeletons heading your way; you're just trying to hold out a little longer, a little better, than everyone else. I found that surprisingly fun.

But there's a lot of "take that" to this game. Many of the traps in this game provide methods of deflecting your skeletons to an opponent's game board -- sometimes simply to the player on your left or right, but often to the player of your choice. Kingmaker scenarios and "gang up on the leader" plays are inevitable in this experience, and I think make it a lot less fun.

The rules also walk a line of being fairly simple, but maybe not quite simple enough? I've played the game a handful of times now, and more than once have run into situations where one player's misunderstanding of the rules really broke the game in a critical way. Because play is chaotic and simultaneous, checking what everyone else is doing isn't really easy, and it isn't until many rounds in, when you look at someone else and wonder how they could possibly be doing so well (or so poorly) that you suddenly realize something has probably gone wrong somewhere.

The game takes only 20 to 30 minutes to play, a run time that doesn't really change much no matter how many players participate. That does carve out a bit of a rare niche for Bad Bones: a fast game for a higher player count that nevertheless doesn't feel quite like a "party game." Still, it's not going to satisfy any strategic itch for the type of player who craves that -- which I must admit is me, even in a "fast and easy" game.

So I give Bad Bones a C+. It's not a game I'd refuse to play outright, but it won't ever be a suggestion (or recommendation) for me. Still, if chaos management in the style of a mobile phone game sounds intriguing to you, there's a very good chance you'll enjoy it quite a bit.