Picking Bones | Journal #23 | Monster Hunter World: The Board Game
Welcome back, Hunters!
With the release of the Picking Bones expansion right around the corner, today we’re going to follow the Scoutflies and track down some early information on the monsters contained therein!
Monster Expansion
First up, Picking Bones is an expansion for Monster Hunter World: The Board Game. It’s formatted a little differently to the sets you’ve seen so far for this game.
It actually has a little more in common with some of the expansion sets for the Iceborne board game. Picking Bones isn’t a core set so there’s no hunter minis, game board, or base decks that you’d find in Ancient Forest or Wildspire Waste.
Picking Bones is an expansion intended to plug straight into your Monster Hunter World experience by adding even more monsters to hunt, and equipment to forge!
This expansion contains all the armour your hunters can forge from these monsters as well as all the possible weapons that can be forged for all 14 hunters! If you can forge it in the video game, it’s in this expansion!
Now, let’s take a gander at those new monsters!
Tzitzi-Ya-Ku
This odd monster blinds both prey and enemies with a special pulsing organ near its head. It then uses its strong legs to deliver finishing blows.
Tzitzi-Ya-Ku’s organs begin to radiate before it releases its blinding pulse, giving you enough to escape and flank it. Damaging this organ will dramatically decrease the flash’s effective range.
Of a similar difficulty level to Tobi-Kadachi, Pukei-Pukei, and Kulu-Ya-Ku, Tzitzi-Ya-Ku is a good choice to hunter after you’ve forged all the weapons and armour you need from the first monster of your campaign, Great Jagras or Barroth.
Beware Tzitzi-Ya-Ku’s tendency to stun its foes from a distance with bright flashes from its frilled head! You’ll see this in action on behaviours like Charging Flare:
Get caught by this and you could be stunned twice in a row!
Great Girros
A monster that scavenges for meals dropped from the Coral Highlands. It acts as the alpha leader of a Girros pack and sports giant fangs that paralyse its prey.
Taking down lesser Girros will make the rest of the pack scatter, and should be top priority. Breaking the fangs of a Great Girros will make its paralysing agent much weaker.
Of a similar difficulty level to Tobi-Kadachi, Pukei-Pukei, Kulu-Ya-Ku, AND Tzitzi-Ya-Ku, Great Girros is one of the earlier monsters you could face in your Monster Hunter World campaign.
Not only does Great Girros bring a large amount of paralysing attacks to bear, but it also commands whole packs of smaller Girros that it can send your way. Their attacks can deal paralysis too!
When facing Great Girros, there’ll be one Girros pack token per hunter on the game board too. These pack tokens have their own behaviour deck that’s sometimes triggered by the Girros pack symbol on Great Girros’ behaviour cards!
Paralysing Spit deals paralysis, damage from ranged, and triggers the Girros packs to attack!
Radobaan
A gigantic brute wyvern that eats the bones of carcasses found in the Rotten Vale, using some of it as armour. It also rolls into a ball as a form of attack and transportation.
Attack it as it rolls around to throw it off balance and knock it down. Chunks of bone can be mined from its body once it’s down. Shattering its bone armour is the key to winning a fight against this beast.
Radobaan is covered in Bone Armour represented by bone tokens on each body part. At the start of the fight there’ll be two bone tokens on each of Radobaan’s body parts. Each token increases that body parts armour by 1.
Using attacks with break damage will remove bone tokens from Radobaan. In some ways this is quite similar to Nergigante’s spike tokens. However, unlike Nergigante, Radobaan can roll over them to pick them back up!
When bone tokens are broken off Radobaan, they’re placed near the monster on the game board. When Radobaan moves onto a node with a bone token, they pick it up and it gets placed back on their physiology card!
That’s all we’ve got for today, remember you can pre order the Picking Bones expansion here. Join us again in a future article where we take a look at Kirin!
