Runebound Thoughts
Oct. 20th, 2008 10:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jcfialaI found myself with a little extra money this weekend, and not finding any rpg material I wanted to pick up at Black & Read, I grabbed a copy of Runebound 2nd edition on the advice of my wife Tammy. She'd played it before, and described it as 'Talisman-like', which sounded good, and it said it handled 2-6 or so players
Out of the box, it's almost a great game. We set it up Saturday evening, trusting in the '2-3 hours' quote on the box, and started playing with the basic rules. The game is fairly easy - there's a hex map of a fantasy country, which you're wandering around (using a plastic figure for your character). Movement is rolled on special dice with icons for different terrain types - if you want to go in a certain direction and don't roll the terrain you need, then you can't. On the other hand, it being a hex map, you probably can go at least a little in the direction you want, and each die side contains multiple icons, so if you roll 'Swamp/River' and you don't have any swamps to cross, you can still go down a river with that roll. Encounters happen at certain locations with tokens on them, and you draw encounters until you hit a critter, which you then fight with either Ranged, Melee, or Magic. You're only allowed to attack on one of those three, so allies are useful for giving you more chances to attack, although they can be rather fragile. Luckily, I managed to find a magical artifact that allowed me to attack twice, which I think was one of the reasons I won the game.
The game has a few problems: For one, it gets really slow in the middle, where you're basically grinding encounters to get experience to grind higher encounters to reach the boss encounters to win. For another, the default drawing of item cards for the marketplace are wildly random - we mostly got items costing 1-6 gold showing up, which left me in the near-endgame with 20 gold and nothing worthwhile to spend it on. Happily, going to BoardGameGeek (see link above) has provided me with a list of optional rules to try out on the game to help speed it up. Also there's a few strongly recommended optional rules that we'll try out as well.
Because it's got some great good points too. For one, it's pretty easy/simple - unlike Descent, which it shares some art, there's not a lot of complicated rules, and once you get them down it's easy to play. It's got the same sort of 'wandering around and encountering the weird' that Talisman had, only you've got a lot more control over your movement in this game - in Talisman it was mostly 'roll the dice and choose left or right', here you've got different towns to go to, different regions to wander around, and the like. And it's also fun - the fights can get pretty nail-biting where you've got to roll the right number or die - but on the other hand, dying is only partially a setback, taking some gold, allies, and the most expensive item you've got on hand. I'm hoping that the optional rules I've picked out will patch over the problems with the game, because there's a lot of neat not-so-expensive expansions to the game that you can pick up to vary the gameplay, and I'd love to try them if the game works out.
It's got a good rating on BGG, so I'm looking forward to playing again.
Out of the box, it's almost a great game. We set it up Saturday evening, trusting in the '2-3 hours' quote on the box, and started playing with the basic rules. The game is fairly easy - there's a hex map of a fantasy country, which you're wandering around (using a plastic figure for your character). Movement is rolled on special dice with icons for different terrain types - if you want to go in a certain direction and don't roll the terrain you need, then you can't. On the other hand, it being a hex map, you probably can go at least a little in the direction you want, and each die side contains multiple icons, so if you roll 'Swamp/River' and you don't have any swamps to cross, you can still go down a river with that roll. Encounters happen at certain locations with tokens on them, and you draw encounters until you hit a critter, which you then fight with either Ranged, Melee, or Magic. You're only allowed to attack on one of those three, so allies are useful for giving you more chances to attack, although they can be rather fragile. Luckily, I managed to find a magical artifact that allowed me to attack twice, which I think was one of the reasons I won the game.
The game has a few problems: For one, it gets really slow in the middle, where you're basically grinding encounters to get experience to grind higher encounters to reach the boss encounters to win. For another, the default drawing of item cards for the marketplace are wildly random - we mostly got items costing 1-6 gold showing up, which left me in the near-endgame with 20 gold and nothing worthwhile to spend it on. Happily, going to BoardGameGeek (see link above) has provided me with a list of optional rules to try out on the game to help speed it up. Also there's a few strongly recommended optional rules that we'll try out as well.
Because it's got some great good points too. For one, it's pretty easy/simple - unlike Descent, which it shares some art, there's not a lot of complicated rules, and once you get them down it's easy to play. It's got the same sort of 'wandering around and encountering the weird' that Talisman had, only you've got a lot more control over your movement in this game - in Talisman it was mostly 'roll the dice and choose left or right', here you've got different towns to go to, different regions to wander around, and the like. And it's also fun - the fights can get pretty nail-biting where you've got to roll the right number or die - but on the other hand, dying is only partially a setback, taking some gold, allies, and the most expensive item you've got on hand. I'm hoping that the optional rules I've picked out will patch over the problems with the game, because there's a lot of neat not-so-expensive expansions to the game that you can pick up to vary the gameplay, and I'd love to try them if the game works out.
It's got a good rating on BGG, so I'm looking forward to playing again.
