Bone Bout is a tabletop roleplaying game about boxing skeletons.
The PDF is 68 pages, with a faded showbill vibe to the layout and some absolutely incredible illustrations. Seriously, just purely on visuals, don't sleep on this game. Every picture is expressive and funny and cartoony and dynamic.
Story-wise, Bone Bout is troupe-based, and it isn't just focused on the action in the ring, so it's not as narrow a concept as it might appear. Any story you can tell that's adjacent to a boxing ring can also be told here, although the ring is still the center of the action.
Dice-wise, Bone Bout uses a pool of d6s that represent your stamina. You choose how many to spend, but you only recover one after each roll. To fully refill the pool, you need to rest. This encourages players to husband their resources most of the time, and to go very loud occasionally, in a way that nicely mirrors RL boxing.
Levelling up happens fast, and players should expect to see progression within each game session, but Bone Bout can still run for a while, possibly stretching into a mid-length campaign. Most progression goes towards improving a character's Haymakers (special moves), but every five levels characters gain some points for their skills, which are added to regular dice rolls.
It's probably impossible to overstate how hard this game leans into its skeleton theme. During matches in the ring, you can knock bones off of your opponent. Outside of the ring, your rib cage determines your item capacity. Marrow is your super meter. Calcium is a performance enhancing stimulant. And so on.
For GM tools, there are sample NPCs, sample mysteries, and sample locations, but the GM is expected to think on their feet and flesh out parts of the setting that the players engage more with. For GMs who can voice an old-timey boxing announcer and can lay down NPCs and hooks on the fly, this should be an easy run.
Overall, Bone Bout is a gem. Its mechanics are solid and favor bursts of high player agency, and it's not locked into being pvp. The setting is fun, the art is charming, and both the game's character progression and adversity feel meaningful. If you like indie titles, absolutely check this one out.
Minor Issues:
-Page 50, "to convince a referee. they aren't cheating" This ends with a period but the sentence keeps going.