I Aim to Misbehave A nice guy trying really hard not to be

Runebound

Yesterday I hooked up with Ruen, Ray and Marissa for a great if not a bit log game of Runebound. It’s an fantasy adventure type boardgame where each player plays the role of an adventurer. Each player’s goal is to vanquish monsters, take their gold, gain levels, buy weapons, armor, magic items and allies all in a quest to grow strong enough to defeat the even Runebound dragonlord. Encounters are broken up into different color coded difficulty ratings: green (easy), yellow (challenging), purple (difficult) and red (really really hard). Sometimes you’ll encounter a monster and other times it’s a trap. If you beat the encounter you usually get gold although sometimes you’ll get a special item or effect.

Each player character has their own strengths and weaknesses as well as special skills and a unique ability. It seemed that some abilities were more useful than others. For example, In combat Ruen could turn a wound into a fatigue marker which helped him in battle where as my character got a 1 gold discount when hiring allies. Ruen used his special ability almost every fight where as I used mine once.

The game we played went on for about 5 hours total (when you include us breaking for lunch) and we unfortunately still did not have a clear winner. Lesson learned from the experience: Hold off on creating house rules until you’ve played the game several times with several people. They had a house rule where if a monster defeated a character it would keep their items and gold. Not a big deal when it’s a low level fight and you don’t have much too loose. It’s a bigger deal when you’re fighting a red encounter and you loose everything you had meaning you’d have to start all over again to work up enough gear to challenge the red encounter again.

Even with the anticlimactic ending I’m giving Runebound two thumbs up. Seeing as it also has expansion packs (more cards) and expansion boards (overlays that fit over the base gameboard) I can see this game filling many a day (and night) with entertainment.