The best adventure board game in comparison to Mage Knight, Talisman, Relic, Runebound 2. Ed, WoW - Adventure Board Game, WoW - The board game, Return of the heroes

+ You can customize and optimize your hero as you wish

+ Token system is so much better than the dice combat before: Very tactical, very optimizable and full of tough choices

+ During your turn you have a lot of decisions to make how to play your actions the best way -> You feel free to do anything

+ time pressure of the board and racing aspect according to the other players is very well implemented

+ hero progression feels that you have achieved something: More tokens + more chosen skills = more possibilities, more combat choices

+ better balanced: Everybody can win the game. Nobody falls behind that much like in 2nd Edition

+/- direct player interaction is not really there or is not really worth it

- downtime is very high when you are not involved in combat

- game takes very long

- I would not play it with four players again

Summary:

A great designed adventure game. A huge improvement over the 2nd edition because of the much and many more meaningful choices to make in the game. Do you want to save the trophies the learn the better skill or do you want to learn the 2nd best skill to have it? Maybe the next time you exert you have to discard one of the good skills on your hand...

The whole combat system feels so fresh and innovative. It is very involved, but you have so many great choices to make: Boost your damage, flip your tokens, recast tokens of the enemy, exert to boost your powers....fantastic.

Big credits to the designers: The have made a fantastic job for this edition. The whole feeling is the same: Level up, get better items, slay the evil bad buy. But, man, it is so much better designed, and that much deeper according to your choices.

Thank God, FFG did not create a casual edition with this 3rd installment of Runebound. It stays a gamers` game with a fresh design. And that is a huge achievement for me.