Runebound is one of my favourite games, and I have been reading and posting in the forums for several years now. During this time, I have seen various arguments about strategy (or lack thereof), about whether the game is broken, about whether it is even worth getting, about why people seem to heavily house-rule it and if the sheer number of fan-variants is not an indication of the fact that the game is faulty to begin with.
This has led me to write this overview. And I will begin by saying what Runebound is not: it is not a strategy game like Puerto Rico, but it is also not a dice fest (you roll more dice in Arkham Horror or Descent), the highest number of dice you will ever roll at any point in time is 5, and those are movement dice.
It is an RPG-fantasy-based boardgame with character development, but not with character creation. It can be played by 1-6 players quite well. Depending on the number of players, their age, their interest (PvP yes or no) however, the rules may have to be adapted. The rule book provided by Fantasy Flight Games helps with this matter: it makes suggestions as to how to speed up games or slow them down, how to make more challenges available to players and how to do cooperative and PvP gaming. This proves one thing: Runebound is a very adaptable, open platform that anyone can tweak, improve on or change, depending on what they want to get out of the experience of playing it.
Brief overview over the mechanics:
Runebound is a character-levelling game in a fantasy setting. Each player randomly draws a character at the beginning of the game. There are fighter and magic-user classes. Checks are made using two d10. There are three stats plus fatigue and life. All these five can be increased when the character levels up. In addition, artefacts, weapons and armour as well as events, challenge cards etc. can modify the basic stats in a positive or negative way. Each character can have up to two allies.
Movement on the board is done by rolling up to 5 movement dice which terrain symbols. A maximum of 5 steps can be taken in each movement phase, depending on whether the relevant terrain symbols have been rolled. Artefacts and events can modify movement.
Experience is gained through resolving challenges, which usually involve fighting an enemy. Players usually receive experience counters and “money” rewards when solving a challenge. The money can be used to heal damage, buy artefacts, weapons and armour or hire allies.
Fights are played out in 4 phases:
Before combat
Ranged
Melee
Magic
While the before-combat phase does not always take place, all other phases take place. A player attacks in one phase and has to defend in the two others unless an ally steps in on their behalf.
Artefacts, weapons, armour and allies usually become available during the market step in the cities. During a market step, a player adds one card from the market deck to the market stack of the city they are in. They can then search through that stack and shop for any cards they can afford. In addition, some events add cards to the stacks, allow players to search the deck and some challenge cards even turn into allies or weapons/artefacts or armour.
There is also a PvP-element to the game as well as the possibility of using certain cards to influence other people’s play (for example changing their movement dice etc.)
Brief information on strategy:
Although this is not a strategy game and chance plays a great part (dice rolling as well as drawing cards and random character selection), there are certain strategic elements to Runebound that need to be taken into account. The most important thing to note is that you need to adapt your strategy during the game.
Depending on your character’s stats, you need to decide in which areas you want to invest in first when levelling up. A magic user will therefore look to their ranged and melee stats because due to the phase-based approach, by the time the magic phase starts, a magic user could already have been taken out in phase one or two. Also, depending on the availability of weapons, artefacts, armour and allies, you may decide to concentrate on levelling up on certain stats rather than others. If a magic user manages to get a really powerful sword, they may decide to invest in melee over magic. On the other hand, the availability of a magical artefact may tip the balance for your fighter in favour of the magic phase.
Playing the game – some considerations:
The following are my own personal considerations that I have come up with myself or by looking at the forums and files on BBG to make Runebound an exciting personal experience for myself. They are not intended to explain how the game works or how people should play it.
There are several things that I do to adapt the base game:
a) Buy additional cards to get additional challenges as well as items and allies.
b) Add player variants (Midnight Doom track, Cities of Adventures by Judd Jensen, adapted slightly).
c) I add flavour-based changes to the mechanics to enhance the fantasy-based experience.
As described above, item and ally cards become available when a player performs a market step in a city. Depending on the number of players, this may mean that there will only be very few cards available (at the start only 7 cards are laid out). In addition, the costs for the available items and allies can be too much to buy at the outset. This can lead to a huge dilemma because money is made through solving challenges, which can be very bad for your health or even deadly if you go into them on your own and more or less “naked”. So, you battle the challenges with no weapons and allies (worst case scenario) and earn very little money for these and then have to spend all your money on healing and as only very few cards get revealed and the doom track is ticking away, you may be quite soon on the road to failure. In addition, with so few market steps, all the cool cards that I have added to the decks are hardly ever revealed. Thirdly, I don’t like the idea of randomness in this area. Here, I prefer flavour and logic. I go to a city, and then I have to rely on chance whether I can buy a weapon or armour, an artefact or an ally? I’d much rather prefer a choice. So, I have split the deck into 3: one deck for my allies, one for artefacts (to indulge the magic user in me) and weapons and armour. When I perform my market step, I can decide if I go to hang out at the inn where all the allies hang out, or whether I go and seek out the local armoury or visit the old hag who sells all the magic stuff. This ties in nicely with the Cities of Adventures variant, which introduces a die-roll on entering the city and (completely in keeping with the locale) offers different events that can happen to the character.
I also lay out 3 cards each in each city (not missing out Tamalir) at the very beginning and my character can have a market step at the very beginning. I do not outfit my character with anything nor do they get more than 3 gold.
I adhere religiously to the Doom track. When my time’s up, my time’s up because evil has spread so far that the end game is launched, ready or not. I play a different knock out system. I play semi-soft. I keep my experience counters (why would I lose my experience?) but I lose everything else. The reasoning is, I’m unconscious and get robbed, my allies view me as a useless leader and flee. However, I get found and put into the Halls of Healing in the nearest city and wake up fully mentally and physically restored. I do not get a market step but do a Doom check straight away.
This is my way of playing Runebound, and perhaps it gives you some ideas about the game.
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