Where's the Love for Runewars?

By Salem, in Runewars

I can tell you I love Runewars and I am still just playing the base set but thinking strongly of getting the expasion. I'm not sure I would want to play 5 or 6 players but it would be nice to have a couple more factions to choose from when setting up. As it is now my oldest always goes for the Demon lords, and my youngest always goes for the elves. And while I definitly enjoy the undead it would be nice to have the option of some dwarves or orcs in there.

Well, following you ... I bought it and... what a hell of a game :P .

there is no way for another runewars Expansion. simple because they use character models from runebound 2nd Edition.

what may come in far future is a second Edition. probably everything in mini, more mini mini, but big big Price !

i love runewars and it is A SHAME FOR FFG they never made dwarfs and orcs.

and i tell you : the same will happen with battle lore. i dont give a penny for an elven set, not a thought about dwarves and orcs.

FFG IS NOT GAMES WARSHOP ! They never get their professionality to make things round. they startt things and give it up soon like little Kids.

YES THATS WHAT YOU ARE FFG LITTLE KIDS ! NO IDEA ABOUT PRODUCT MANAGEMENT !!!

People dont buy your products BECAUSE they are not even half of what they should be. and because nobody buys your half products, the full products never come.

if you dont have the Money and the TOUGHNESS to produce the full product, dont start 50 half products in the year !

I need a new expansion to Runewars please ! Its my favorite fantasy war board game !!!

I don't think Runewars did particularly well for FFG, their lack of support is likely due to the lack of income it produced. They tried to save it with a 2nd edition, hoping to streamline some issues with the design but I think the game suffers from a couple of problems that really don't hold up particularly well in 2015 and really 2nd edition was such a marginal adjustment it really didn't do much to improve the game.

The dice-less combat thing really hasn't worked out for any of their games for starters. Starcraft, Civilization and Runewars all had it and all have fallen out of favor. I think Civilization was the worse offender and personally I didn't mind it that much in Runewars. The modern adaptation of card driven combat in Forbidden Stars worked a hell of a lot better.

You also had that really awkward map setup. You had the same problem with Starcraft, it just created unbalanced maps. Even if you try to create a "pre-set" map there was just no way to create one that had any semblance of fairness.

The real killer though is the race balance. The Elves are so horribly terrible. I must have played this game a dozen times and no one ever came even in the vicinity of close to winning with the Elves. They just get pounded on mercilessly. Every time we played you just heard all the players silently praying "please not the Elves, please not the Elves". Your night was pretty much ruined if you got stuck with them.

I personally didn't hate the game but its one of the very few games from FFG (Starcraft included) that was culled from my collection. There are far better fantasy war games than Runewars. Conquest of Nerath and Cathulu Wars come to mind. I'm really not surprised its not getting much in the way of support. They really should have ceased the opportunity with 2nd edition to fix the game. I love the concept, here's hoping there is a 3rd edition and they put Eric Lang on the job!

I think I have to disagree with a good number of those points. While it's true the card combat wasn't liked by some, it works great; it's fast, easy, and simple. Those who wanted dice just want it because of the whole "buckets of dice" mentality, not because the system was flawed.

As for race balance, while I agree in the original the Elves were weaker in 2p games, I found in 3p and 4p games they worked just fine, and were always competitive. With the change to the Sorceress in the Revised Edition, the Elves, even in 2p, have become quite strong - that ability is now very potent and gives the Elves a very solid Circle unit. With the expansion, their development card to give them resources when they conquer territory is also nice. Overall, I strongly disagree that race balance was a killer at all - the races have always felt very fairly balanced to me, and the player skill has been the factor in determining the winner in pretty much every game I've played.

I haven't played Conquest of Nerath, but from what I've read about it, it doesn't look nearly as enjoyable to me. But until I get a chance to try it, I can't really say for sure (and I'm not sure when that will be, as I have no real reason to buy another Fantasy empire building game).

I should note that there is no "second edition" - I think they very deliberately called it a "Revised Edition" because the changes made were pretty subtle overall - a few tweaks to a few points that helped improve the game, but nothing so drastic as a brand new edition.

Of course, all of this is a matter of opinion, but Runewars is still one of my top 3 all-time favorite games, really only rivaled by Twilight Imperium and the old Mage Knight tabletop game (and the latter is largely for nostalgia, as I haven't played it in awhile).

Just my take. I think part of the reason this doesn't get more expansions is it doesn't NEED them. I thought the base game was great as-is; I played several dozen games (mostly 2 player) and never grew tired of it. The only reason I haven't played it as often lately is because with life responsibilities, and with the increased size of my game collection, I just don't have as much time to commit (and my main gaming partner I had with it lives farther away now). However, my kids are starting to get old enough that maybe I can teach them :)

Recently we have just re-discovered the game adopting some variants and it was a blast for me and my partner.

Basically we have started to use the tournaments rules (3 years, 4 points for rune, 2 point for territory and 1 point for reward) while creating small maps (only three group of tiles plus the starting territories) and we are really enjoying it. :)

In the past, the long playing time has often prevented us to play the game, now we can easily finish a game in 90-120 minutes. ;)

I really hope ffg will reprint the expansion because now I am re-considering to buy it !! :P

Edited by Gendalm

They won't make another expansion unless dragon runes are introduced in one of the new Star Wars movies.

My partner is really enjoying the "short" variant of Runewars and she has decided to buy me the Banners of War expansion (lucky man !! :P ).

Hopefully FFG will change only the rules (and not the component) in the reprint version.

Runewars uses the old Runebound hero models. This makes it very unlikely for further expansion, even if there are no hero models in.

We have been waiting for the orc und dwarf expansion for so long that nobody keep that hope any longer.

A second edition with large models is not impossible, all models would come from Battlelore2 and Descent2. But i dont think this will come in the near future.