I rolled out Runewars last night to my Friday gaming group. It took about 15-20 min to setup the board (4 players), and another 15-20 to explain the game. I explained the game, but delayed explaining combat until we had one (which was mine on the first turn luckily) so as to avoid information overload, which happened for peoepl a bit anyway.

Overall the group loved the game. Everybody agreed that they were looking forawrd to playing again. Here's the one knock one player had. He did not like the fate deck resolution mechanic. He thought that having to look through the Fate deck for every potential diplomacy check and potentially for quests as well was cumbersome and time consuming. I told him that I did not mind that, and a quick scan for how many of the 4 super successes had been used was not too bad in my opinion. His bigger criticism was with how the fate deck worked for combat and duel resolution. With the fate deck constantly changing, it was very difficult to get a handle on how likely victory or defeat were both in hero duels and in combats that did not invlove overwhelming force. he agrued that you could not get even a basic idea of the odds of success without somehow knowing the distribution of the symbols on each of the 4 shape quadrants, and then take into account whnt had been discarded. He would have preferred dice-based resolution like in Descent, where each base shape had their own dice with the pips being: blank, damage icon(s), rout(s), and special ability orb. He liked basically every otehr aspect of the game, but really was not a fan of the Fate mechanics and felt like he threw heroes and units into battle basically crossing his fingers and not having a clue how it would work out. Everybody else had no problem with the Fate deck, and enjoyed the tidy way it resolved everything in the game.

We all agreed that each of the races had a unique feel to them, and that each race was not "pigeon holed" into one mode of winning the game. The evles can gain the upper hand militarily and the demon-people can play an influence game if desired.

We all really enjoyed the narrative aspect to the agme's events. When the human army was very strong and about to clash with the undead (who won the game), the undead hero snuck into the human home territory, and used her reward to summon 8 undead units behind the lines. The humans had to redirect their forces to fight the threat from within, as the thinned front lines were smashed by the undead onslaught. We could totally see the movie/book scene(s) where the undead rise from the farms and graveyards back in the home villages. The army is in chaos and marshalls forces to fight this threat from within, while the undead pour into the underprotected human strongholds and beat the mighty empire back through their sinister treachery!

All aspects of the game played an important role in the game. The hero phase dished out a dragon rune to the elves, after they played a series of tactics cards to: gain a mutually beneficial alliance with the humans with each recieving 4 influence, then placing a stronghold in an uncontrolled territrory containing a hero, and finally in a controlled territory (the new stronghold) that contains an enemty hero used a tactics card to spend 4 influence for that hero to join the elven team. That hero had a timmorean shard (and was now in a friendly stronghold lol).

Diplomacy saw both a dragon join the elves and a giant join the undead forces.

Military clearly pplayed a part, but not was not the sole or overwhelming force ion the game.

The season cards were awesome and totally changed the game turn to turn. After the second Spring's Long Winter, every Spring every player was saying "oh no, please don't draw the second long winter!"

Well, I have to go, but I have to say that Runewars may well be my favorite game of all time!

Enjoy!

Nice session report. Good to hear more about the game. My copy should be in on Tuesday.

Nice report ! How long was the game?

The game was long. Our group tends to play games longer than the suggested playing time - we have a lot of woeple who think about their options a lot :+) Also, this was the first time playing for three of the four, and two of them had not read the rules at all.

That said, we started at about 7 PM and called the game after the summer of the 5th year. It was about 1:30 AM (6.5 hours). It turned out that the undead player was gaining his 6th rune in the autumn turn (he only needed the autumn turn's tactics card to turn in his objective and gain his last rune, all others were well protected), so we called him the obvious victor :+)

We agreed that it was not a 2.5 hour game, but probably doable in about 4 hours when we all really knew the rules and the strategies though.

Asylur said:

Our first game was in the 7 hour range, but I feel pretty confident experienced players would be about 1 hour per player. So, 4 hours for 4 players.

I have to give the thought to allow people to look through the discards an "A" for effort, but this really slows down things to the extent that we have house ruled it out. We played seven games of this this weekend from two to four players, and more often than not we burned the deck down by the end of the summer season without the autumn reshuffle. With all that going on, allowing people to search the deck is just too out of hand. If you don't look at the discards you still have the randomness of the dice, with a nearer to perfect distribution of results. Overall we really liked the fate cards, but we just house ruled out that particular rule, as it turned an hour to hour and a half game, into a two to three hour game, without (in our opinion) materially adding to the game play.

Four of us played our first game today, reading the rules and learning as we went along. I have to say I really loved it. As a previous poster said, this game plays like a movie or a good fantasy epic novel. As it turned out, we only got through two years, and that took us about two hours. I can see that it will go much faster as we learn the rules. Biggest problem was that two of our group don't like long games and while they enjoyed Runewars, it was too long fro them. The other two of us love long involved games, so this really fit the bill for us. I had questions about Fate deck combat resolution when it was first announced, but it worked very well in practice and prevented the game from bogging down in battles. It made all the other aspects of the game, the hero quests, the economic aspects, and so on stand out as well. By the time we ended, there was no clear winner but we could see patterns developing. One hero had died, killed when she attempted to duel another player's hero. Two home areas were well defended by natural barriers of water and mountain, creating definite lines of approach that could be defended. People were staking out their strategies. Had we finished, I think it would have been a very exciting game. I look forward to playing again, though it may end up being just two player for awhile.

My groups have played twice. I hate the card resolution garbage, I'm tempted to calculate the odds on the cards and map them to dice, that's how much it displeases me.

We also wanted more players and more factions, six would have been nice. Maybe, you know, for just variety's sake. I hope for an early expansion. Our gaming group is six to eight people so depending on the night is how much it sucks to be left out.

Aside from that the game is excellent. We loved that neutrals could be recruited or attacked. We loved that you could turn a bad game around by good planning and a little luck of seasonal cards. It only took us 3and a half hours to finish the first time we played, with 4 people. and 3 hours the next time, even though it was new people in the second game (though we saw the first game and 2 of us read the rules very carefully before getting together for the game). Did I mention that seasonal cards are amazing, wonderful and awesome; best idea in the set. It is a great set of rules, and I hope a lot of the new stuff we see in this game makes it to the next version of TI (without the card resolution and with the many factions)

Taki said:

When you determine the dice sizes and pip distribution for each of the categories, please post them. One of my gamers hated the cards and wanted dice instead as well. Though this changes the game (the cards have ever-changing odds), the fixed odds of dice make battle seem more understandable to him.

Asylur said:

Wow, that's some strong praise! I can't wait for my group to get together so we can give this a try!

I just had a thought. (time to duck).

I was thinking about one of my groups player's criticism of the card mechanics along with someone else’s similar comments, and the other comment about counting cards every time (and house ruling that out). I was looking for blank dice (and found them) online, but was realizing the probabilities are hard to map from 30 cards onto d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, or d20. You have to make approximations.

What if, instead, you simply did not HAVE a discard pile. After any use of Fate cards, you just reshuffle the fate deck. Then every draw is statistically as likely (at the start of the duel/diplomacy/whatever), there is no possibility of counting cards, but you don’t have to disrupt the given odds in the game. You could eevn map out the statistics of each symbol and the likelyhood of each result so people can plan. A grid or even a card layout with each % in the field of each symbol would be easy enough to make.

Granted this perturbs the "constantly changing odds" mechanic of the game, but for those who do not like that, this may be a simple solution.

Personally, I'll probably make a houserule: 'reshuffle after every action involving Fate Cards (battle/diplo/quest)' . And tell everybody the odds, just like you suggested. Seems a lot easier than keeping track of the odds/constantly looking at the Fate deck.

Asylur said:

Will do

I've had a chance to play a game through year four. After our game all 4 of us enjoyed the game, and look forward to another try.

Fate Deck thoughts:

I like the concept of the fate deck and there are mechanics in the season cards to force the deck to be reshuffled early. So I'd be hesitent to make a house ruling on this until I had quite a few more play-throughs.

I also like the idea that you CAN look through the discard pile as it reduces the 'pure luck' factor that dice bring to the equation. Not that I don't like dice in a game, I love 'em, but it is nice to see a design that tries something new.

As for slowing down the game because of being able to look through the discard pile, try this for a 'house rule':

Make 3 discard piles for the fate deck sorted by the 3 destiny symbols. Now it's just a glance to see how big the 3 piles are. If you see the 'gold' destiny discard pile is getting tall, you know there aren't many 'good' results left.

Just be sure to shuffle thoroughly when you shuffle the discard deck(s) back into the fate deck.

My wife suggested this also, but it only helps for quest/diplomacy Fate Deck draws, and the bigger complaint I heard was not the randomness in teh diplomacy/questing, but rather the inability to have even braod strokes ideas about combat. After 10 cards are discarded, the math is cupre hard to calculate for all 4 shapes for a battle. I can see it both ways, but for those frustrated by the battle resolution it's a simple alternative.

Asylur said:

Fair enough. I think the wording of the fate deck rule implies that reviewing the discard pile is really just intended to give you a ball part feeling for quest and diplomacy.

When it comes to combat, I'd just view the fate deck as a random die roll and not try to work out what my odds currently are given the current state of the deck. If your play group is doing THAT then I see how it could be clunky and I think I'd consider a house rule that only allows deck review for diplomacy/quest.

i.e. I'm not sure you need to peer THAT hard into the math matrix to do well in the game.

If your play group insists, another simple house rule might be a 20-30 second timer that you run when people review the discard deck. There is card counting and then there is card counting...

so if I own Descent and Runebound, is there enough of a difference to justify the $100 for this game too?

Plem45, Runewars is embedded into the world of Descent, Terrinoth. Apart from that, Runewars is nothing like Descent.

Runewars is a ground control / empire building game, whereas Descent is a RP-dungeon-crawling game.

@ topic : Thanks for sharing your experiences, Asylur. I still have to wait for my copy to arrive this Friday (Germany...).
The game will fill my table on Saturday, I swear !

Well, the look through the discard bit really depends alot on your players. Its not a big deal in my gaming group, as we just accept that things are random and go from there. We don't mind folks looking through, but its understood that you don't slow down the pace of the game for everyone to dig through the card stack. It's better to play through two games in 5 hours than to only finish one because someone had to min/max for that 15% increase in efficiency.

So far, we only seem to look through the decks for quests/diplomacy, not combat. It’s not house ruled or anything, but it’s a lot easier than trying to add things up and memorise charts for every fight.