Submited By: Tim The Wonder Squirrel on 04/06/2006
I dug it. There I said it. I really, really enjoyed Runebound. It was seven flavors of fun. Though I’m getting scared that I may end up a Fantasy Flight Games fanboy with as many of their games I’ve been playing lately. Oh well, I s’pose things could be worse.
The game is pretty easy to grasp and though I believe it originally came out in 2004, it’s already on its second edition. I understand that it was done to resolve some balance issues with the characters and make for a more interactive experience for the players. So far as I can see it’s worked smashingly.
Fantasy Flight again has made a game with a fantastic level of quality. The cardboard is sturdy and thick, the card stock is heavy enough to last quite a long time, and each character in the game has a detailed miniature to use for moving across the board. All dice necessary to play are included as well.
It’s a 2-6 player fantasy board game that is supposed to be around 2-4 hours to play (though my first game was a bit longer, but I attribute that to a lot of goofing off, heh). It’s pretty easy to set up, mostly just unfolding the board and matching the cards and tokens to the icons and colors on the board for placement. Each player is then randomly assigned a character (which I love btw, in my group there is a tendancy to stick with a favorite marker or character and this method forces them into new territory) with its various stats and abilities.
Players all start the game in the same start town location on the game board. They move around the board using special dice that are supplied with the game. Each die face has pictures representing the various different terrain types you’ll see on the board (plains, roads, rivers, mountains, hills, forests, and swamps). The number of times a particular picture occurs on a die is representative of how hard it is to move to. I actually enjoyed this mode of moving about. There were times that I could zip across the plains but then times I got stuck in the mountains for a few turns.
As you move across the board you encounter adventure nodes. At these particular spaces you are able to draw a card from the appropriately colored deck of adventure cards that corresponds with your space (there are four levels of difficulty ranked green, yellow, blue, and red, green being the easiest and red being the hardest). If you are successful in your encounter on that location you then are awarded experience and a reward (usually in the form of gold but othertimes the card itself would be the reward, granting some form of special ability or bonus). Once you have earned enough experience you are able to turn them in for stat bonuses, making combat easier as well as allowing you to progress to the more difficult challenges. You can also spend your gold that you earn from your fights in the various towns on new equipment or allies to accompany you.
The combat in this game is worked out on two ten sided dice. You can attack in one of three different way: ranged, melee, or magic. So depending on your character and gear, you may have a strong bonus to hit with magic but hit for more damage with melee, making for some interesting choices.
However, as much as I liked this game, there were some things I didn’t care much for. My first complaint is the rulebook. I am noticing a trend in Fantasy Flights books to be a little chaotic and inconcise. And while its certainly possible to learn the game well enough, a few changes to the book would have made an easier time of it (I seriously recommend just practicing combat and movement before the game starts just to get the hang of it). My other complaint stems from the first and is that the win conditions typically require a long “build-up” phase. Meaning that its unclear from the book how to win (unless using the variant rules) and that some of us with bad luck can be stuck for a very long time (one of my group ended up stuck as level 1 for almost the entire game) with little progression.
I think that folk who are used to playing games involving dice will appreciate this more than those who are used to less random strategy games (D&D players will likely enjoy, german board game fans less likely to). I feel that its worth ***** but would get a 9/10 on a higher scale due to the issues I had.
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