Players: 2-4
Time: 15-45 minutes
Difficulty: 2 (of 10)

The Components

Bone Wars is distributed in a double tuck-box with 108 cards and a rulesheet.

The Cards: The cards in Bone Wars are all printed in full-color (though mostly using various sepia tones) on medium-weight glossy card stock. There are three types of cards: 4 paleontologists, 33 bones, and 71 events (the latter including 18 dinosaur cards).

The paleontologist cards and most of the event cards feature sepia-toned art by Bryant P. Johnson. At first when flipping through the deck I find them a bit dull because of the limited palette, but in actual play I thought they really lent themselves to the 19th century feel of the game.

The bone cards and the dinosaur cards, meanwhile, all featured very nice drawings of dinosaurs in what our resident biologist told us were "standard style". I thought they were very evocative and looked a lot like dinosaur drawings that I'd seen in various books; the drawing and even the font choice just looked dead on, nailing the theming.

Some work has been done on the cards to make them easier to play. For example the event cards are labeled with one of three phases (field, museum, controversy), using both words and icons. Likewise the dinosaur cards and the bone cards are color-coded, to show you which bone cards work the best with which skeletons.

There's a minor usability misstep involving the use of italics. Italics mark usually used to mark play text and unstyled letter to mark color text. This is the opposite of what I think it should be, but more importantly it's the opposite of how the dinosaur and bone cards are laid out. This caused at least some of our players minor players.

Unfortunately there's also a major usability problem with the cards. The dinosaur cards name a dinosaur, then list the characteristics for his three bones (head, limbs & vertebrae). Each of these areas can have very specific criteria. For example, the tyrannosaurus, one of the simpler dinosaurs has a head with "carnivore teeth" and a "wide skull", limbs that are "biped", "pubic bone points forward", "short arms", and "two fingers", and vertabrae which are "hollow vertebrae" and "straight neck". You then play bone cards which have some or all of those characteristics. (A not-quite right vertabrae for the tyranosaurus has a "hollow vertabrae" and a "S-shaped neck".) Based on how close you were, other players might later be able to replace your bones with better choices.

The problem is that it's almost impossible to read all that small text from across a table, meaning that if you're going to replace a bone on a dinosaur you pretty much have to pick up the dinosaur and the current bone to read them and see if yours is more appropriate. Which totally telegraphs your intentions. This can also be very time-consuming since you're looking at 8+ characteristics. We really saw this when a few "Collaboration" cards were played, which caused a player to look at a pile of dinosaur cards and decide to keep one. This took long moments as the players tried to compare all of their dinosaurs and all of their bones--and I didn't feel like any of these players (one of whom was me) was being particularly slow in this selection.

Overall the set-matching which is the heart of the game was awkward, non-inuitive, and time-consuming. This is partially due to the fact that you have to compare so many things and partially because plain text was used; icons probably could have sped things up a lot.

Rulesheet: A folded-up black and white rulesheet. It was a little awkward in some places, but explained the game without too much trouble.

Overall, Bone Wars's Style was hard to rate because I thought the theming was phenomenal--an absolutely beautiful modeling of paleontological bufoonery--while the card utility was quite bad because it was so hard to match up cards. Beauty and quality, the other measures I usually incorporate, were both above average. Weighing that all in I decided to give Bone Wars a high "3" out of "5" for Style: slightly above average. It might well have earned a "5" if something had been done to make the set-matching more sensical.

The Gameplay

The object of Bone Wars is to successfully build your own dinosaur skeletons and at the same time humiliate your opponents who build theirs incorrectly.

Setup: Each player is given a paleontologist who has a unique special power. The bone and event decks are shuffled. Each player also starts with 1 prestige (victory) point.

Order of Play: Play in the game goes through three broad phases in each round:

1. Field Season
2. Museum Work
3. Controversy

In each phase all players take their turns, in order starting with the first player. Each player can take one action on their turn (usually playing a card). Play in a phase continues around the table until all players have passed in order, so you can have quite a few turns in a phase if you have a lot to do.

Starting a Turn: A turn starts with each player drawing 4 event cards and 4 bone cards.

Event Cards. These cards mostly allow players to take certain actions during the three phases of the game. Most of these actions are offensive attacks on other players, but some are defensive instead.

Also in the event deck are dinosaur cards which describe a dinosaur and are required to play bone cards. Dinosaur cards come in a couple of different colors for differentiate general types of dinosaurs.

Bone Cards. These cards describe individual elements of dinosaur skeletons (head, vertebrae, limbs). They're what you use to actually create a dinosaur, and also are color-coded.

The Field Season: Field event cards can be played during this phase.

These cards often allow the theft of bones from other players. There are also some Field Crew cards which are placed next to your archaeologist and which give you some permanent benefit. They're a nice bit of color too.

Museum Work: During this phase you actually make dinosaurs.

As a turn you can play one dinosaur card and two or three bone cards, no more than one of each type (head, limb, vertabrae). The colors of these cards don't have to match, but if you make a dinosaur with differently colored bones, then it's probably very incorrect, and will thus result in lost points in the contoversy phase.

When you make a dinosaur you get one prestige per bone used.

There are also certain event cards which can be played during this phase. Most increase the value of skeletons.

Controversy: During this phase players adjust the dinosaurs by playing additional bone cards. They can not only adjust their own dinosaurs but also those belonging to other players.

Bone cards may be added to dinosaurs if that bone type was previously missing from the skeleton. These bone cards must match the color of the dinosaur.

In addition existing bone cards may be replaced if they're wrong. The new bone card must match the color of the skeleton and it must have better matched characteristics (determined by looking at those individual elements on a bone, such as the S-shaped spine). I spoke earlier about the fact that it was generally hard to see how characteristics matched up on the cards, and this is where it really comes up. If you want to replace someone else's bone you generally have to pick up the dinosaur card, read all the characteristics, then compare the bone card in your hand to the one on the table, reading all the text. There's no way to do this either quickly or subtlety, which is overall a shame.

If you add or adjust a bone on your own dinosaur you get one prestige.

If you add or adjust a bone on someone else's dinosaur you get one prestige and the owner loses one prestige.

Controversy event cards can also be played during this phase.

Ending a Turn: After the end of a turn each player discards all his in-hand bone cards and discards down to four event cards.

Winning the Game: The game ends at the end of a turn where one player has enough prestige (8 in a 4-player game, 12 in a 2-). The player with the most prestige is the winner.

Relationship to Other Game

Bone Wars is a bit of a hybrid game.

On the one hand it's a set collection game. There's many of these, from German games like Coloretto to classics like Rummy. Bone Wars is a very unique entry into the genre because it allows you make bad sets (by playing a dinosaur with mismatched bones) but at the risk of losing points done the line I think that's a very unique & innovative set-collection idea, though I'm not convinced that it's utilized to its best advantage here because replacement of bad cards seemed very common in my two games. There's not much of a push-your-luck element if you always get punished.

On the other hand Bone Wars is an American beer & pretzels game, with heavy theming, a fair amount of randomness, and some "take that" gameplay. Other American take-that games that I've reviewed include Portable Adventures and Battle of the Bands. Some classic Beer & Pretzel games can have interminable and even annoying gameplay. Like other more recent entries, this one keeps the take-that play in check so that games can come to a reasonable conclusion.

The Game Design

Bone Wars is a game with a lot of potential. The set-matching system is clever, and the ability to mess with other peoples' dinosaurs gives some well-defined player interaction, without it being over-the-top. You can protect yourself by creating well-designed dinosaurs, something not possible in many beer & pretzel games. Beyond that there's some interesting strategic play, as you decide when to build good dinosaurs and when to build bad ones. Finally, the game plays smoothly and quickly.

It should be noted when discussing Bone Wars' design that it is definitely a beer & pretzels game. As already discussed there's take-that gameplay and a fair amount of randomness. I don't offer judgement on these elements either way, as they're a well-recognized part of the genre, but they are worth noting.

Unfortunately, there are also some real flaws in the gameplay which can cause the game to fall apart in certain circumstances.

The issue of drawing bone cards is potentially the worse. The supply of bone cards goes down as the game progresses. The rules say that if there aren't enough bone cards then the first player draws all of his, then the second player, etc. In other words if you happen to be to the right of the first player .... well, you're going to lose the game if the bone card deck runs dry. Fortunately we didn't quite run this deck down to the 16 cards that would have caused problems in either of our playtests.

The scoring system is also out of kilter. Our first game lasted about 5 minutes, just through the first round, because one player managed to hit 8 points on his first turn. I suppose this could have been a huge fluke, but really it points toward there not being enough depth in the score range, thus allowing the possibility of a player shooting the moon on the first turn. (Our second game lasted three rounds which was much more appropriate.)

There were also two more minor problems.

The rules on who the first player is aren't clear at all in the rules, but it looks like they stay the same person. If this is true that person (and potentially the last player also) has a fair advantage through the whole game.

Lastly the method of losing points for controversy feels wonky when you lose a prestige because a bone that another playe played was replaced. Maybe this was intentional; I can even see game balance reasons for it. But it just doesn't seem fair for you to leave a spot in your skeleton, then for someone to fill it in with a bad bone (costing you 1 prestige) then for someone else to replace that bad bone (costing you 1 prestige).

Overall I had a bit of problem scoring Bone Wars' Substance, just like I did its Style. I think it's got some good ideas and plays fairly well, but that it's riddled with various rules issues, some of which (notably the card drawing) have the potential to break the game. With some good FAQ and erratas to correct these problems I'd probably give Bone Wars a "4", but I have to rate the game as its currently available and thus I give it an average "3" out of "5" for Substance: some great ideas with some problems in the execution.

Conclusion

Bone Wars is a brand-new beer & pretzels cardgame by newcomer Zygote Games. It's full of great ideas, great theming, and interesting gameplay, but it's also got some real issues with usability and some gameplay issues that can cause serious problems if they happen to come up. If you like American-style card games, with some randomness and some take-that gameplay, this is probably worth at least a look despite the issues. If you're a science teacher or otherwise find paleontology interesting, you'll probably want to pick it up no matter what.