RuneBound (2nd edition) My brother found a real cool and fun board game called RuneBound. I have played it a couple of times, now. Two people can play a game in about 4 to 6 hours. Three people can play the game in about 6 to 8 hours. Runebound has to be the best newer or more recent board game in years as far as RPG type board games are concerned. Here's a picture of the boardgame. Here's the scoop on the game. The characters have abilities that are shown on cards. There are two 10-sided dice for rolling combat and making saves. And, there are five 6-sided dice for rolling terrain movement. There is one game board filled with hexagons. The map is large scale and includes a continent area. There are numerous hexagons marked for combat and several hexagons are marked with a town. The idea is you have your character travel - nice minis, too, kill monsters and gain experience, hire allies and buy better gear. There are 4 levels of monster types a character can encounter and fight over the course of the game depending on the combat hexagon you travel to and land upon. The last, final monster types are dragons. To win the game, be the first character to either (1) kill three dragons OR (2) kill the one boss dragon. It is truly a fun game and is completely different every time you play the game. Everyone picks a player and starts in the same square. You roll the terrain dice to determine where your character can move. You attempt to have your character move to and land upon a hexagon with an encounter square marker. The encounter marker is one of four colors. The color of the marker in the encounter square determines the monsters [how powerful they can be] that can be drawn from the deck of cards for that color of encounter marker. There are event cards, too, that impact what happens in certain hexagons to when a character attempts various actions from moving through a certain terrain to hiring allies, etc. There are lots of events continually taking place in the game. Plus, the events are random. There are three phases of action for combat - ranged, melee, and magic [in that order]. For your character, you pick one phase to fight and two phases to defend. Compare the numbers on the monster card drawn to fight against the numbers for your character (and allies, too, if you have allies). Make three sets of rolls [unless the monster dies or your character dies]. Do a round two and, possibly, a round three for the fights and continue until the monster or character dies. Fights do not last long. Most fights tend to be finished in a single round, especially if you use good strategy to acquire good gear and allies while making smart decisions about what phase to attack and defend the other two phases. Hopefully, really bad die rolls don't defeat you. Although, bad die rolls can hurt or lay waste to your character. A three round fight happens very seldom. If you win a fight, you gain experience and, probably, money. Gain experience to train and collect money to buy gear and artifacts or hire allies, etc. Go fight more monsters - repeat...repeat. It's a simple game and a fun game, too. Teenagers and adults can play the game. The more familiar players become with the game, the faster the pace of the game moves along. There are lots of magical gear, allies, and monsters. If that is not enough variety, there are expansion packs you can buy for the game. Plus, in the end, die rolls can rule the day or can also ruin the day. Here is a link to photos uploaded for the game by other people. miscellaneous photos my thoughts on the game.. :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup:
Re: RuneBound (2nd edition) some review info from rpgnet This is the second edition of the Runebound game, released in 2005. I'd personally call it version 1.5, but it's one of the best, most thorough, and generally most impressive revisions of a board game that I've ever seen. Care has been taken to modify the game in many, many ways, some of them pretty subtle. I've already commented on some of the Component quality changes. There have also been some great usability changes: the markets weren't color-coded in the original edition, and now they are; and likewise the use icons on artifacts are new. There are also 12 new adventure cards in the new edition, most of them green, where I thought those were just a little short in the original edition of the game. There has been some pretty subtly balancing on the board too: the starting town is moved, and there are no longer green adventures on other towns, as there were in the first edition. There are other good changes scattered throughout the game. The original game used d20, which offered a bit too much variance and randomness, while this one instead uses 2d10 which forms a nice curve rather than a flat distribution of numbers. Event cards now change more often, because events from the same number can replace each other, which makes the game a bit more dynamic. Adventure counters occasionally refresh, improving the endgame by not clearing out the central area. Skills no longer cost exhaustion to use, making the game just a bit simpler where it really didn't need to be complex. Experience gains are now more notable, running at +2 each instead of +1, which likely speeds up the game, but also enhances the feeling of really improving your character. (In turn, challenges are tougher now.) And, you can now improve Life and Stamina, which you couldn't previously, and which adds a little variable strategy to the game. Inter-player fighting, which seemed unfair in the original edition, has been fixed. Finally, there are changes in this new game that seem fine but I don't really understand the purpose behind. Healing is more expensive (1 gold/wound instead of 1 gold/all wounds). It's now slower to move while wounded instead of slower to move when not in town. I'm sure there were others, as I noted any number of tiny changes when I was revising my gameplay section of this review. Given the good development sense shown throughout the changes, I'm sure these were all for quite good reasons as well. So, in general, Runebound second edition is quite an improvement over the first edition, though most of it is sufficiently subtle, that it's hard to point to an individual change as standout. As I wrote in my original review, Runebound is an "adventure board game". They're board games that take the trappings of roleplaying games. Most games in this category aren't terribly strategic or tactical, instead concentrate on "adventuring". Runebound (2004/5) is most like one of the classics of the genre, Talisman (1985); they both center around improving your character against a broad landscape so that you can eventually defeat a final task. Dungeoneer (2003) is another recent example of this type of independent adventure game, though that's a card game restricted to a dungeon. The aforementioned games are all fairly competitive; in contrast another classic of the genre, HeroQuest (1989), was fairly cooperative (and quite tactical as it happens). Games from some other genres of speculative fiction have been released in the category of adventure games as well. These include Arkham Horror (1987), a cooperative adventure game of Lovecraftian horror, more recently released by FFG in a new edition, and Smugglers of the Galaxy (2004), a competitive science-fiction trading game with adventure overtones. Finally, apparently Runebound has done decently well for Fantasy Flight. Besides this new edition of the game they've also got a stack of supplements planned for it. Most are small packs of cards, but there is also a large upcoming supplement called The Island of Dread which includes new heroes, a new board, new cards, and rules for sea travel. In addition they seem to be expanding the world with Descent (2005), a new board game set in the Runebound universe, but curiously using the Doom: The Boardgame (2004) ruleset instead. I'd guess an RPG isn't that far behind (2006?).
