The Components

Sands of Al-Kalim comes with:

• 1 game board overlay
• 56 adventure challenge cards
• 23 ally cards
• 6 hero cards
• 25 legendary cards
• 1 sandstorm marker
• 6 quest tiles
• 3 lost city tiles
• 20 survival gear counters
• 6 hero figures
• 1 rulebook

Overlay: The overlay is a smaller board that fits on top of your classic Runebound board, covering the old map, but not all the card spaces along the sides. It has new terrains and new cities, and is more attractively drawn than the original Runebound map, but is otherwise what you'd expect.

The new terrain is a nice change, but it causes some problems in figuring out which die result connects to what territory. In particular our players had troubles matching the mountain symbol to canyons and the swamp symbol to barrens. This would probably go away after a couple of games since the original Runebound symbols are pretty generally iconic.

Some of our players also didn't like having a board overlay rather than a new board. Doubtless it saves a bit of money, but on the other hand we had to adjust the board a half-dozen times during play as it got pushed one way or another, which is slightly sub-par for a game that already has lots of fiddly pieces.

Cards: The 56 adventure challenge (encounter) cards are brand new cards in red, blue, green, and yellow which depict the new adventures of this land; similarly the ally cards replace the old allies. In both cases these cards have very distinctive backs so that you can't mix them up with the originals, and they add a lot of nice thematic color to the game. The new hero cards are less distinctive for the setting, and can be easily mixed with your heroes from other Runebound sets.

One flaw in the otherwise good graphical design that tends to underlie Runebound is in the fact that the sunbursts which tell you when to replenish adventure counters (and do some other things) appear on regular challenges (rather than events as was the case in the original Runebound). For some reason they stand out less in this new configuration; we missed at least a couple as a result.

The legendary cards are entirely new. There are 25 total, divided into 5 types--legendary allies, legendary artifacts, legendary locations, legendary mounts, and legendary runes. They're all double-sided (which makes randomizing them tricky), with requirements shown on one side and rewards on the other. It's quite easy to tell the different sorts of legendary cards apart, and they're another colorful, well-designed card type for the game.

Cardboard Bits: Three types of cardboard bits generally match the quality of the cardboard bits in the original game. There are: one sandstorm, which is a massive 7-hex tile which moves about the board; three cities which can move around; and 20 square survival gear tiles.

The fourth cardboard bit in the game, the quest tiles, are somewhat odd pieces which basically depict an arrangement for your hero cards and legendary cards. I suppose they might keep things organized, but they didn't seem particularly useful.

Plastic Figures: 6 more gray plastic figures, depicting the new adventurers.

Rulebook: An 8-page full-color rulebook that does a good job of explaining all the new rules. The back page is an excellent reference for a lot of the new stuff, but I wish it were depicted more iconically, and somewhere more accessible to all the players.

Overall Sands of Al-Kalim has great quality components, as with the original Runbeound game. Other than concerns with the symbology differences between the dice and the board, everything is also quite easy to use, with good iconography, and I think the whole is more beautiful than the original game was. In addition, this supplement adds superb and colorful theming, some of which I've already mentioned, and some of which I'll talk about when discussing the new gameplay. My only real concern is that the contents of the box are a bit scant for the price, which is always somewhat of a problem with supplements. However with all the other advantages--particularly the theming--I've still let the supplement eke in a "5" out of "5" for Style.

The Gameplay

Sands of Al-Kalim is essentially a Runebound scenario that makes some changes to the core game:

New Heroes, Challenges, and Allies: These cards all work essentially the same as they did in the original.

Heroes. You can use any heroes, either these new 6 or any from other Runebound games you have.

Challenges. The original encounter cards are replaced with these 4 new decks, allowing for totally different encounters appropriate for the region. There are no events in these Challenge decks, since the "story" (as it were) is now told through the legendary cards.

Allies. Again, this deck replaces the allies in the original--which actually is slightly awkward as the original allies are mixed into the market deck. Here if you draw an original ally, you discard it, and you instead play one from the Al-Kalim ally deck. Again, the allies are colorful and appropriate for the region.

Board: The board works much like the original. The terrains are different, but you use dice in the same way to move around it, with old symbols substituting for new terrain, as already noted. The biggest change is that there are only five cities on the board: the remaining three are "lost cities" which randomly appear and disappear from the board.

Each lost city also has a special effect: the City of Faith heals; the City of Dreams gives you your choice among 5 draws from the market deck; and the City of Clouds delivers you where you want to go when you're done. These all add some nice variety and interest to the game.

Survival Gear: New in this game is "gear", which are items that you can buy in any city for a cost of one gold. There are two limitations: you can only buy each item once per turn, and if all the counters for an item are gone, you can't buy them. The three types of gear are: camels, which allow you to move into a space without a die; adventuring kit, which gives you a +3 to a skill test after it's been rolled; and water skin, which omits your fatigue loss from travelling in the desert (as noted shortly).

The Sandstorm: Another new cardboard bit, the sandstorm is a 7-hex marker which shows where the storm is currently blowing. You can't move through the storm spaces (except with camels or by taking 1-space movement) and you can't interact with locations inside the storm. The storm moves whenever the challenge counters are refilled due to a starburst or when certain story effects are rolled (as noted shortly). The storm can always move in one of two directions, chosen by the active player.

Legendary Cards: The final new component in the game are the legendary cards, which form both the goals of this expansion and the spine of the "story".

Basically, you win by taking and accomplishing four different legendary goals, one each from four different categories. You have to spend a turn to get a goal (as noted shortly) and then you'll have to do something to accomplish it: usually going to one or more places and making one or more skill rolls.

The legendary cards are all thematic. For example one Legendary Artifact is the Lamp of the Djinni. After you've taken the card, to complete it you must go to Trader's Fort (a town) then travel from there to the Court of Wisdom (another town), succeeding at a Hide test of 11 each turn. When you succeed you get the Lamp, which can be used three times to give you a "wish" (allowing you to temporarily use the ability of another Legendary cards).

Changes to Movement: We now come to the changes in the original gameplay. For movement, you now have to decide whether to travel during the day or at night each turn. Each has benefits and deficits.

If you travel during the day you lose fatigue, and you may lose additional fatigue if you roll the "forest" symbol (now called "mirage").

Conversely if you travel at night you can get ambushed when you roll story dice (on which, more momentarily), and many monsters are more dangerous.

Changes to Adventures: The adventure step is where you usually decide to face a challenge or explore a market. Now you have four different choices: face an encounter, explore a bazaar (market), take a legendary quest, or roll the story die. If you're not doing anything else, you roll the story die.

Taking a Legendary Quest. To take a legendary quest you just choose one of the five categories and draw one. However, there's a limit marked by your "level": whenever you turn in experience, you keep one of the experience tokens as a marker if it's larger than the largest marker you'd previously turned in. Thus you'll have a "1", "2", "3" or "4" sitting around. That's the maximum number of legendary quests you can have (which effectively means that you must face 1 red encounter before you can get your fourth quest and win).

The Story Die. If you're not doing anything else you roll a story die. Then all the symbols rolled cause effects. They're generally good. You can get gold, fatigue, or life. A lost city can appear under you (or all the lost cities can disappear). The storm can move or rotate. On a dunes (plains) symbol, one of two things can happen: if it's day you replenish a single challenge marker on the board; if it's night you're instead ambushed by a challenge.

Winning the Game: The game ends when someone gains 4 legendary items.

Relationships to Other Games

Sands of Al-Kalim is a supplement to second edition Runebound. It's one of a few large-box expansions which each tend to include new maps and new challenges. The previous large boxes were The Island of Dread and Midnight

The Game Design

Sands of Al-Kalim says that it "does not include Encounter and Event cards that describe a set story. Rather, in this adventure you tell the story!" This is clearly the biggest change in this new supplement, and the result is of somewhat questionable success (at least according to the marketing copy).

Really, none of the Runebound games have done that good a job of telling stories. At best the story woven through the original Runebound game amounted to light theming. Here instead it amounts to heavy theming, with each person having a personal "story" rather than there being a global one. However this theming isn't the type of plot that you'd find in an actual roleplaying game--which has generally proven a very hard nut to crack for adventure games.

Beyond that, however, the new "personal" quests of Sands of Al-Kalim do notably change the game, largely in a beneficial way. Winning the game now involves trekking around to various places and interacting with the landscape in a way that the original Runebound really didn't allow. That's a fair amount more interesting than just beating up 3 monsters.

This introduces a new strategic quirk as well: do you push for "fourth" level (defeating a red quest) as fast as you can, or do you gather quests as you go, so that you can try and finish them incidentally while continuing your climb to power? Both strategies seemed valid from our initial play.

On the downside, however, I suspect that the personal quests lengthen the game. My general experience in Runebound has been that it runs about an hour a player, which is on the long side for me. In our game of Sands of Al-Kalim we played for four and a half hours before deciding that we couldn't finish it in a reasonable amount of time. I suspect it would have taken at least six hours to play through. Part of that was inexperience, but I also suspect part of it is the game itself.

The other elements of Sands of Al-Kalim were all colorful and fun, but didn't notably change the game. I thought the lost cities and the storm in particular were quite neat.

Generally I don't play a lot of Runebound due to the length, but if I did I'd be quite happy to have this supplement because it clearly adds variety to the game, really changing things up. Of course it also costs almost as much as the original game. In any case, I've given it an average "3" out of "5" for Substance.

Conclusion

Sands of Al-Kalim adds a lot of good variety to Runebound, which will extend the life of the, and allow you to play it in a very different venue.

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