"Welcome, girls and boys. My name is Rattlebones, and you have been cordially invited to spend the day at my Fabulous Festival of Dice! Play games! Win prizes! Ride the train! I'll be wandering about the park, and if you're the first one to find me, you win! Won't that be delightful?"
Rattlebones is a game about transforming dice. You start with standard six-sided dice, and throughout the course of the game you can remove sides and replace them with other sides that let you do all sorts of wonderful things. Every time you score points, you get closer to finding Rattlebones and, er, winning the game. Yes, winning! It's an experience to six-sided-die for!
Game Summary
Setup
- Place the Rattlebones meeple at 55, 60, or 65 VP space (for 2-4 players). Players each get 3 d6 (black, white, gray) -- basic d6 but the '1' is replaced by Rattlebones.
- Place random tiles on the empty spaces on the board.
Your Turn
Roll a die. May spend 1-2 gold to roll an extra 1-2 dice. Then, use each die one at a time:
- if Rattlebones shows, move Rattlebones back one space; game ends immediately if it hits a player score marker and most points wins.
- if pips or Rattlebones showing, move one of your pawns clockwise that many spaces (RB=1) and use the space you land on. Typically, you may add a die face matching that space to the die you used (replace any face except Rattlebones).
- otherwise, take whatever action the face allows (e.g., earn a stock marker or star token, which you may later turn in for VP; earn VP; steal stuff from other people; etc.).
- beautiful components for kids
- fiddly dice faces
- felt random and unfulfilling
- dice-based luck with simple strategy
- fantasy/dungeon feel for a family audience
- light, family-friendly
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- dice manipulation — reassemble die faces to change abilities
- roll-and-move — dice-driven movement with dice faces
- Variable player powers — different die faces yield abilities
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- It's got a very sort of whimsical frenzy dice rolling card play kind of thing.
- it's sort of a team game but you don't know who's on your team and you're doing deck building and there's some area control.
- I hate the card play and the card play just drives me bananas.
- Cooperative Deck Builder.
- the actual mechanics of moving around in the combat was just mind-numbing for me.
- I feel like they're really careless with the theme.