Post originally by Gargoyle at 2004-07-07 15:08:21
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Once again, an excellent review. Props for cranking these up every week.

Anyways, there are couple things I'd like to mention about Runebound, both of which have come up quite regularly in discussions on Boardgamegeek.

First, it seems that the game is really meant to be played with 2-4 players. It was advertised as such for a long time and 5-6 players seem to have been a late addition. As you said, the downtime tends to become too long for 5-6 players and I've also noticed that there might be balance-issues as well. The encounters run out before the characters are necessarily ready to defeat the red challenges. So I'd recommend playing only with 2-4 players.

Second, the rules of Runebound are incredibly flexible, so it is really easy to add your own adventures, characters, rule variants and ideas. Thus you can also balance the difficulty the way you want it to be (this bears a mention as some have complained about the easiness of the basic adventure). One thing I'd personally like to recommend as a very good house rule is giving the heroes (or allies, if they are attacking) 1 exhaustion if they fail during a combat phase where the opponent would do 0 damage. This makes the game bit more challenging and gives a nice additional function for the exhaustion.

Anyways... Runebound is a very entertaining game and if FFG keeps up the quality in the upcoming expansions (which I am already waiting really, really eagerly), it's bound to be a classic. Strongly recommended.

//Gargoyle