Just a quick correction. You mentioned that skills like borrowed time have pre reqs because of the green line on the mat. Not the case. If it has a star symbol it can be trained at any time. You could train Borrowed Time as your first skill in the beginning of the game. If it has an arrow then that shows the pre req. The skill above it "Waypoint" does have a pre req. So you could train Warp as your first skill in the game because it has a star. Then train Waypoint after that. The green line just shows the dice on that mat of that dice tree. In this case green color.

Gale is actually incredible, and in fact, maybe a bit overpowered. And actually, I think newbies like to pursue skills over stats (cuz they're fun), then people with a little skill under their belts advance stats over skills, then advanced players return to a combination.

Very nice video as always! U are one of the best youtubers in the field. Ur opinions helped me many times to decide what to do. Thank you

Good video. I love too many bones. I’ve never been drawn to just go for base stats in the game but I tend to play by the rule of cool. If it sounds cool and fun I’m going to go for it rather than just what will make the game easiest. The skill dice can just lead to some truly epic and thematic turns. I put undertow over unbreakable as well. I love unbreakable for the new and interesting puzzles it creates and the tyrants are more challenging but overall it adds to the barrier of entry for the game. I’ve always told people too many bones isn’t that hard once you get the basics of the enemies down so that goes out the window with unbreakable because you also have to learn how the map gets manipulated. I love all three versions but unbreakable I can’t recommend to anyone unless they have played the other versions enough to know them well

I absolutely love TMB! I got Undertow as your recommendation of the best place to start and now I want EVERYTHING! I''m saving up to add it to my Elder Scrolls pledge whenever I complete it. Unfortunately the trove chest isn't available but honestly, as much as I do want everything TMB, I likely won't get it all as it would be well over $1000 for everything. =*( Thank you for this great recommendation Chris!

Making me want to play TMB instead of work right now

I started with Unbreakable as it was all my LGS had, and I agree with your points, it's PROBABLY best to wait to buy it until you have at least the base set / undertow, BUT I do credit it with getting me on the TMB train and I still absolutely loved it as a first experience. You also do bring up a good point that many folks echo on the idea that investing into your stats often feels better than the actual skills, however on longer Tyrants, and definitely different Gearlocs (Ghillie for example) the skill dice feel great to upgrade and add versatility to your kit that you wouldn't have simply by just getting more attack/dex. Great review!

I quite like Unbreakable but Undertow is still the MVP here, and I for one even like core game more too. I do think Figment is one of my favorite Gearlocs to come along. Side note, I feel like you're arguing against your own points when complaining that you think investing in stats is the obvious must-use strategy and then also complaining that Cynder is too difficult... Yes. Exactly. If every enemy were vanilla then just getting max stats would be fine, but there are a lot of enemies with special abilities that counter this strategy, and if you don't diversify your repertoire of skills, you'll just die. Cynder is a prime example of this, where you really can't rely on brute forcing it; you need battlefield manipulation. Break is another one. Yes you could try to overcompensate by just maxing out your Attack stat, but what happens when you run into some 5 pt baddie with break and 7 hp? Bleed, Poison, or any alt damage methods are all WAY more effective a tool than just frontloading base stats at that point.

Our house rule is you're allowed to throw the special dice more than once if that doesn't break the game in some way and if other players agree. We needed to fix the idea that the best way to go is just to improve attack in some way and this felt like the most fun way.

Was going to mention that the tech tree example you gave wasn’t great lol - only two of figment’s green profession have prerequisites! Yeah, you haven’t got the best characters to demonstrate how good skills are. Gasket’s skill die don’t exhaust, tink and ghillie have companions that are on the field as long as their health lasts, and there are multiple characters that can attack multiple baddies at once with skills, as opposed to attack die being limited to a single target each round. It’s not so noticeable if you are always playing solo or 2 player, but some 5 and 20 point baddies, which are a lot more prevalent at 3 or 4 players, almost require some skill die to be used to defeat them. Not the biggest fan of characters heavily relying on their backup plans either, but Polaris is a definite exception to this; the orbs take a degree of familiarity to wield well, but damn she can be surprisingly deadly once you get the hang of her. Riffle is another one where you would be hard pressed to work well without investing outside of their base stats. Trust me, there are a lot more duster type characters available than there are stanzas lol. Wholeheartedly agree that unbreakable is probably the last expansion you want to get for the series; undertow is the best gameplay mechanics wise, but you get a lot more variety in the base game. Unbreakable seemed like every baddie was either poison, lava oriented, or breaking your dice (ie sword breaker), so it kinda seems a lot more grindy compared to the other titles. That being said, once you have worked through other tyrants before, Cinder was a cool head scratcher of a puzzle for us to sort out a solution to. Definitely has its place, but i don’t think it’s the best starting point for new players.

So, I basically have to defend gale. First of all if you rly wanna go for efficiency health is basically a trap, because its one use per battle, instead go for def. I agree that the movement of Gale is somewhat lacking, but Status Immunity is awesome. And the best by far the dmg tree is much better than just use at range. It makes your 3 dmg skills into 3 poison/bleed skills, which is massive. It makes the pure dmg one potentially one shot a 5p baddie, but even in its worst case its 4 dmg (assuming the poison case). I think Gale is brilliant. You get Innate +1, you do your 3 bones plan, get the poison/bleed effect and now you are a dmg monster! That it amazing progression in my opinion.

I need to get more plays in, but I enjoyed the puzzle I had with Unbreakable map mechanisms and think it's an upgrade on core maps. While Figment was the better of the two, I still had a lot of fun with Gale. Polaris was my standout fav though.

I am a massive TMB fanboy (yes, I have everything) and I totally agree with your critique about Unbreakable.

Is it last or latest ? 😃

12:20 - totally agree. And because of this fact, the game lost its appeal for me....that and 3-4 hours of playing only to run out of time here and there.

core game is better than undertow? not sure which one get

I didn't know that about the special abilities being a one-time use. That's kind of disappointing. The fun, for me, in these kinds of systems is the special abilities. I want to unlock a special ability and at least be able to use it in every fight after that.