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So yeah. From the realm of actual board games, with dice and plastic figurines and such... Runebound. I picked this up about three weeks ago with a couple of friends and we've had two three-person games so far, with probably a five-person session coming this Sunday.
In brief: the players are all various warriors of legend, roaming the countryside pounding hell out of small and then larger monsters, levelling up and awaiting the rise of the Dragon Lords, who kick the snot out of everybody (so far, anyway).
Mechanics: The board is static (unlike a lot of other modular contemporary fantasy-themed games), but the "challenges" that appear on the board are random: green, yellow, blue or red for four gradients of "threat level," drawn from a shuffled deck for each pile when you run across a corresponding encounter token on a pre-set location on the board. Once you've dealt with a threat token, it adds to your experience; when you have a certain amount of experience (which flexes according to the number of players) you "level up."
Combat with threats on the board runs through three phases: ranged, melee, and magic; you attack in one category and defend in the other two.
Man, it's hard to write about uncommon board games without turning into a big drone rehash of the rulebook, isn't it?
Cutting to the chase: as somebody who keeps his old D&D "dork half" close to the surface, I enjoyed the hell out of Runebound both times I played it, despite a "runaway winner" issue that led to the same guy just dominating the game both times we played. There's an interesting blend of strategy (keep picking off the increasingly rare easy challenges and level up slow and safe, or risk a tougher challenge and the loss of allies, items and gold to leap forward); light accounting (gold, which you use to buy (random) things in the various towns on the board, but that you run the risk of losing if you lose an encounter; and the challenges themselves, which are finite so you tend to jostle with other players to snag the easier ones), and time (the game recommends a "doom track" that brings the Dragon Lord to you after a set number of encounters, so you can't just run around dithering to gain levels forever).
It can be problematic, especially if you have a run of bad luck that leads to you losing literally everything and staggering around the board weeping while the other players smash the hell out of every challenge you could could possibly handle. But if you're playing with fun people, who don't mind quaffing beer and roaring "GORGAX HAS SLAIN THE GNOME WIZARD! HARRR!" and such, it's a hoot. |
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