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game review: Runebound
This game (as you might infer from the name) is inspired by fantasy role-playing games. Each player runs one adventurer; each adventurer has statistics corresponding to missile combat, melee, and magical combat. (These stats are overloaded for skill checks, which occasionally come up.) Adventurers can hire allies and buy equipment, both of which improve their combat abilities. The game is played on a map with known locations of encounters of different strengths. On your turn, you role dice to determine where you can go and then (usually) try to land on an encounter of the desired strength. Winning fights lets you boost your statistics; encounters also usually bring in money, which can be spent (in the towns).
The map has a variety of terrain types, and the dice you roll tell you what kinds of terrain you can traverse that turn. So just because you're two spaces away from an encounter and you're rolling five dice, that doesn't automatically mean you'll get there. While I think this is a nifty variation on the boring "roll dice, count spaces" style of movement, it can get tedious as the easier-to-reach encounters get used up.
Combat proceeds in three rounds (missile, melee, magic); you can attack in only one of those three. Monsters might attack in two or three, and they'll do more damage as the difficulty level goes up. (You, however, generally do only one point per hit, unless you have magic items to help out.) This is where the allies come in; you can hire up to two allies, each of whom can also attack in one phase. (No overlaps, though.) Of course, if you're not careful they might die 'cause allies are usually squishier than you are.
Characters, allies, and monsters all have hit points. Monsters are all-or-nothing; you kill them or, if you run away, they reset to full health before the next fight. Characters and allies have to be healed, though, so you have to make occasional stops in the towns for that.
There is a nice variety in the characteristics of the various characters, allies, monsters, and magic items. The cards all have flavor text that is presumably part of some larger story (a la Magic: The Gathering); we ignored it.
The win condition is not "most experience" or hitting some other threshold; rather, the character who kills a particular dragon wins. The top tier of encounters has seven (or eight? I think seven) monsters, one of which is this leader-dragon. So you might stumble on it the first time you try that level, or you might have to go hunting for a while. (Naturally, the monsters in this tier are scattered around the edges of the board, maximizing distance.) There is a rule (which Dani and I missed when we played) that you can also win by killing three of that tier, which works better with fewer players. In general, I find this type of win condition a little unsatisfying, though this one isn't nearly bad as Titan (my poster child for most unsatisfying victory condition ever).
The game is generally quite enjoyable. I found that our game had a fairly long stretch that I considered tedious: balanced fights are exciting; travelling across the board is boring; winning trivial fights because they were the only ones available and hey, a little experience is better than none, is also boring. I had several fights where I looked at the monster card and said "I kill it" without rolling any dice. This might have been a pathology of the two-player game, though; I'd like to play a four-player game and see how that goes.
The game Dani played last week (with six players) took something over six hours, and he thought this was due to the number of players and perhaps the use of expansion sets. (I don't think this game needs expansion sets, at least not until you've played it a lot.) However, our two-player game also took six hours, though at hour four I think we both knew I was winning. I'd like this as a three- or four-hour game; I think six hours is too long -- though I'll play again and hope that six hours is an anomoly once you know the mechanics.
As with the crayon-style train games, there isn't much interaction between players. This is good in that you sink or swim pretty much on your own, which is a style of game I enjoy, but those who like a more aggressive style might not care for it. There are ways for players to interact, but if you're looking for a sizable dose of inter-player conflict, this isn't the game for you.
Play usually proceeds reasonably quickly; turns are short and there are a lot of them, as opposed to games where each player-turn might be ten minutes and you spend a lot of time waiting.
Physically, the game is put together fairly well. I did require a magnifying glass to read some of the cards, but just barely -- so that's probably fine for almost everyone else. The art on the board and cards did not interfere, for the most part, which is the main thing I ask of game art. (Oh, and some of it was quite pretty, which is a nice bonus.) Some of the encounter tokens were hard to see on the board if you placed them right-side-up (especially green), but there was no reason not to flip them over instead and that was much better. The dice, which used glyphs rather than numbers, were mainly easy to see; forests and mountains looked a little too similar. The board and various markers were heavy enough to stay put (and stay flat), which is something I used to take for granted but can't assume these days.
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