Runebound is a game with
several
reviews in the old RPG.net database. It’s a game with the
rules online so you can read about it before you purchase it. It has numerous supplements that can switch up the core quests, expansions that provide new lands, and is on its second edition.
It’s a game, full in the standards of Fantasy Flight, comes with an overabundance of high quality pieces. These include the terrain marked dice, the plastic figures to represent your character. These appear about true 25mm, or perhaps just slightly smaller. The detail isn’t up to the best of the old Ral Partha minis but these are some nice figures.
Boardgamegeek has some great pictures of the figures painted up, showing that despite the small size, they still paint up well.
The cards boast high quality art representing items, allies, and enemies. The back of the cards make them easy to distinguish and keep separate. The cards are full of information but are not busy and are relatively easy to read. The tokens come in different sizes and shapes to represent blood (wounds) and gold among other bits. . In addition to high quality pieces, there are some interesting bits of writing there too. You can see some fantasy potential for your RPGs in the Dragon Wars mentioned on the cards, you can see a religion in the deity Kellos who has several worshippers on the ally cards.
The container side of the board comes with four pockets. Two of these are designed to hold the cards. The third to hold the miniatures and dice. The fourth and largest is to hold all the tokens. Now I don’t have a problem just slopping them down into the container but it is roomy enough for those who want to zip lock the tokens into different bags for the wounds, gold, and other pieces.
The board game itself is fairly large and has a great hex based map done on it. The instructions are oversized and while only twelve pages long, contain a depth of information that a read should hit more than once. I had to read a few times when trying to figure out how to heal and being struck by fact that it’s during the market phase I can do it. Yeah, makes sense, go to the city and heal. Had a headdesk moment there.
The common issue some have with it, is that while it’s a great game for people who are enjoying each other’s company and don’t need to interact with one another on the board as well as in real life, when it’s another player’s turn, there’s not a lot to do. I can understand how that would bother some people. There is a bit of a suspension of disbelief if you’ve got a long wait in between turns. However, I’ve got about a thousand of so miniature that need painting so I’ve always got something to do. You can cheer or leer at the other players, but it’s not a gaming interaction like you’d get in something like Torches and Pitchforks where you can make the game harder or easier for the player. Sure, you could suffer Hero Attack! or could be using the optional rules to make the game shorter (or longer!) by changing the amount of experience needed to augment your hero. Heck, you could even use the old Doom Track for a potentially quicker end game. One thing though, it’s also a solo game that thanks to Mr. Skeletor.
It’s a relatively simple idea and for those like me who don’t want to hunt down the Threat Track , well, I’ve already provided a link. Note that when I did it, I couldn’t print the picture from my image viewer so saved it as background and then printed it from there.
In enjoying Runebound as a solo game, much is the same. The threat track isn't hard to use and it's something that makes the game have a real potential of ending with more than a knock out.
To me, this makes the game a double duty game. When I’m laid out with gout, like I have been recently, it’s a nice thing to just be able to put some music on, unfold the four flaps of the board game, take the five minutes or so for set up, break out the threat track and get playing.
Review Summary