Hello, first time on and I have a question about Runebound. If this question has been answered before sorry to bother you all. I an 40 years old but never got the hang of chatrooms or forums. I am more hands on.This is part of the reason I love board games so much. Anyway. My friends and I really enjoy the Runebound game but I know we must be doing something wrong during gameplay. There are five of us, all in our 40s, and for the most part we are not that stupid. We got together on Saturday and gave ourselves the entire day to play a game of Runebound. Why the whole day. It takes us from 6 to 9 hours to play ONE game. We have played before. We only get to play maybe two or three times a year. Mostly because it takes us so long to play. The question is does everyone else have this problem? Nine hours to play!!! We must be doing something wrong. We understand the guidelines on the box are just an approximation of time, but nine hours. I left after the first 7 because my character was chrushed in the first two hours and I couuld never really recover. We were playing the SANDS expansion. I got killed at first level, then after completeing the first quest, traveled across the board, failed the second quest, looked at the time and five hours had gone buy. (?) I told myself it took me five hours to cross the board I am not going back. Ok now maybe I just had a bad game. No problem, I will most certainly play again but I left 7 hours in and my fellow players were just completeing there secong quest. Only one guy was on his third. I beleive that we nit pick the rules to much. Please someone give us a suggestion so we can go on to enjoy this game more than two or three times a year. Thanks DDT

Wow, 9 hours does sound pretty harsh. When our group plays we usually take about 4 hours to finish, but we also usually stop before we get into the red encounters (we mostly just wander around and have fun without really trying to "win.")

How well do you guys know the rules? If you only play a few times each year maybe you're spending an inordinate amount of time checking rules and stuff? Playing more frequently might help that, but you could also go looking for a quick reference cheat sheet (I imagine there are several to choose form over on Boardgamegeek.com)

Are you all the type of gamers who like to kill loads of green encounters while saving up for that sweet item in town before daring to try a yellow? The game doesn't really force you to progress to higher challenge levels, but doing so will dramatically increase your gold and XP income (assuming you survive. =P) That would speed up gameplay, if it is in fact a problem for you.

How much time do you each spend looking at your movement dice while deciding where to go? If you spend more than a minute thinking about that I would suggest letting the enxt player roll his movement while you deal with your encounter/shopping. You don't need the movement dice at that point and it gives the next player more time to make up his mind.

The Doom Track optional variant speeds things up quite a bit, but honestly i wouldn't recommend that to you just yet. Even experienced players seem to have trouble keeping up with the track, so it would probably end the game before you got started the way you describe things now.

That's a few ideas off the top of my head, depending on how you guys play they may or may not apply to you. I'm sure others will have more suggestions to help out. You say you guys aren't stupid, and I'm sure that's true. It might even be the problem, if you're spending too much time thinking about things.

You remember me my first couple of games. I had a similar experience: did really bad in the first part of the game, failed to get the others' pace and voluntarily abandoned after the first five hours. Game last about seven and my friends kept on playing anyway, until someone killed Margath thanks to overpowered Ghost Armour. I enjoyed watching Space Balls on DVD in the meantime.

For speeding up the game a little bit, I think Steve-O gave all the advices every Runebound player will give. I don't have very much to add except some personal considerations that will help you understand the problem you might have.

Maybe 5-6 players are too much for a Runebound game. Not only because of the length of the game as a whole, but because a single turn can last 3-5 minutes, especially if you're not that familiar with the game mechanics. You play once every 20 minutes and still you can draw the Challenge that can ruin all the plans you figured out during your waiting. And you can't recover. That's frustrating. I really must say I enjoyed Runebound only with 2-3 and sometimes with 4. 5-6 player games are overlong and 2 or 3 players simply can't do it; they're condemned to wait and get stuck at a certain point, when they're too weak to face high level Challenges but there are no more lesser jewel on the board.

You say you played with Sands of Al-Kalim. I don't know how it plays with more players, I've only played it solo a couple of times. But I noticed it stretched the game a little bit, because you have to complete 4 Legendary Quests, no matter if your Hero is proficient at combat. You need to have quite high values to succeed at all skill tests. I believe Sands it's the best Runebound experience, because Challenges are always good balanced and there's a great variety of new rules (harsh desert conditions, quests, Story die, sandstorm, lost cities, survival gear, new Allies).

Of course reducing the number of players is not a good solution, especially if you and your friends meet few times per year. I'm sure you do everything to be all together. I will stick to the "play it more" suggestion; try to make some games with fewer people but a little bit more often, if possible. I'm sure you'll see the improvement when you all 5 meet again. Try also to play always the same game; as soon as people get familiar with it, things will speed up consistently.

Sands has all the exhaustion issues when moving that make the game longer. I would stick with the basic game. We have never played with more than 3, but I can see issues with the players getting encounters because another player jumped the encounter. Doing all this extra moving for each players encounter will make the game longer. One suggestion, 2 encounter markers at each spot & house rule stating a player must fight an encounter in another hex before returning to a previous hex to stop a two turn grab in the same hex. Second, you should be using 3 points to do an upgrade, but you might want to make that 2 for a 5 player game. These are the only suggestions I can come up with that has not been mentioned.

I agree with all the posts here.
I usually play with 3 players and never more than 4.

Maybe try 'softer' deaths to help keep players from falling too far behind and to encourage them to try harder encounters sooner.
When you die you're suppose to lose all of your gold and your highest valued item. Maybe change that to lose only your gold, or half your gold. Or lose any one item, players choice. Make sure there is some penalty but no harm softening it.

We sometimes house rule it that gaining an experience marker cost one less XP. Faster game, but it does seem to take away some of the value of questing, that is it becomes too easy IMO.

There's also an FFG house rule about experience markers costing XP equal to your level. So when you start at level 1, you need to defeat only 1 green to gain a level and become level 2. Then at level 2 you need 2 XP to gain your 3rd experience marker and so on...
I've always wanted to try this... it would make leveling faster at the beginning but would greatly slow down later. I imagine it would speed up the early stages of the game and late in the game encourage player to start fighting tougher stuff since higher levels will not come quickly other wise.

Just some more thoughts...

Hey, I just wanted to thank everyone so far who answered the post and gave some ideas. All were quick and considerate. I will certainly pass on your advice to my buddies if they have not read it allready. Any more ideas please add on. Thanks again DDT

Holy crap, 9 hours for Runebound ? even I, big sluggy noob, don't take more than 3 hours for Runebound.

An advice ? I got one : don't ever try TI3