Runebound - Game Review

Your hero, complete with magic, ranged, and melee stats, as well as a special ability, sets off to topple the dragon lord. Kill various baddies to level up, buy items, hire yourself a follower, and go dragon hunting.

Vital Stats

Players: 2-6
Time: 90-180 Minutes
Designers: Martin Wallace and Darrell Hardy
Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games

Components: 12 hero cards, 12 hero standees with 6 stands, 156 adventure and market cards, 270 chits and counters, 1 map board, 1 20-sided die, 5 movement dice. The custom terrain movement dice are unique to the game.

Each player is dealt a random hero, and receives 3 gold. Players place their heroes on the Tamalir town space, and the game begins.

On your turn, you roll 4 movement dice (or 5, if you are in a town). Each side of the dice has two or three terrain symbols, and you can remove any one die from your pool to move to an adjacent space with a matching terrain symbol. (For example, removing a die showing mountain/plains will allow you to move to an adjacent mountain or plains.) Towns match all terrain symbols.

Once you have finished moving by removing as many dice as you want, check your space for your adventure counter. If there is one, you draw an adventure card of the color matching your counter. You may reveal an event that puts new items into play, or effects future cards. You may be called upon to make a Skill Test, by rolling the d20, adding your stat in the relevant skill, and seeing if you can beat a target number. More likely, there will be combat.

Combat consists of three phases: Ranged, Melee, and Magic. You can only attack during one of these phases, and must defend during the other two unless you have an ally to make a secondary attack. Each phase works similarly to a skill test -- roll the d20, add your skill, compare it to the enemy's target number. If you succeed, the enemy takes damage equal to your damage stat for that type of attack. If you fail, you take damage equal to the opponent's relevant damage stat.

Defeat will lose you some money and adventure counters, sending you back to a nearby town. Victory will gain you money, possibly a special ability, and the defeated adventure counter. Once you gain a few adventure counters, you can turn them in for an experience counter that gives you a bonus to a stat.

If you stop in a town, you can spend gold to buy some equipment, or allies to fight for you. The red encounters are the toughest, and the first player to defeat three of them -- or the special DragonLord encounter, is the winner.

NOTE: This is only a brief summary, with many details omitted.

Good Stuff

Theme is nicely present in this game. All of the heroes, as well as many of the other cards have some sort of flavor text. The same characters are mentioned on multiple cards, and you move from fighting Vorakesh's minions to Lord Vorakesh himself, giving the game a bit more of a story sort of feel.

Good-looking artwork and components. The board is a colorful pastiche of various terrain, and the cards all have evocative illustrations on them. I played with the first edition, and I know that the second edition has even better components, but I was perfectly happy with the components of this game, from the thick cards to the well-illustrated characters.

Innovative movement mechanic. Most games of this type either have a set number of spaces you can move each turn, or have you roll a numbered die to determine how many spaces you can move. The terrain dice not only add a bit more interest to this phase of the game, but also make you pay more attention to the board's terrain in general.

Addictive adventure-game goodness. You kill the lowest levels of encounters to scrape together one experience stat bonus, and then enough money to pick up an ally or some equipment. Then you can tackle tougher encounters, for more rewards, and your character becomes more powerful still, until you can finally chase down the dragonlord encounters. It's a familiar formula, because it works.

Expansions available. For those who enjoy Runebound, there are a small infinity of available expansions to add a plethora of new adventures to the game.

Terrain sometimes looks the same. The mapboard, at least in the first edition, has a few spaces where it's not clear at first glance which type of terrain they might be. Even the terrain symbols on the dice sometimes look too similar. If you can't tell a forest from a hill on the map, and can't tell a forest from a mountain on your dice, the game may involve a lot of squinting and double-checking the rulebook.

Downtime with many players. This is a problem for most adventure games I've played, and Runebound is no exception. Playing with 6 people is a recipe for boredom as you have to wait a long time between your turns, with no real reason to remain at the table except in the rare cases where PvP combat occurs.

Some of the allies and items are decidedly better than others, and any player getting them early will certainly be off to an advantage. However, most of these have been rebalanced in the second edition.

Conclusion

Runebound may well be the standard for the adventure boardgame genre. It has everything a good adventure boardgame needs: Good theme, good artwork, and good advancement and loot-gaining. Runebound isn't perfect, but it's a solid adventure boardgame that makes a fine introduction to the genre. And if you happen to like it, there are a few expansions...