Normally i dont bother to post on forums (as my subsequent post count would denote) but i felt i had to express my opinions and gratitude.

If you would indulge me, i will try to make this as short as possible.

I have been a long time gamer, both computer and board for a long time but i felt the board game-ness in my life had waned a lot, due to i think time and not having the people around to play with. One of my mates said "you know man, i miss talisman, would love to play that again." So then it started. I heard about a new version of talisman, then discovered this whole "talisman Vs. runebound" debate...... runebound? what the hell is runebound i thought.

Im sure you can figure out what happened next. I bought it. Got my mates around and played it with no expectations. Then we played it again. Then again.

When i used to play board games a while back, they were mostly games workshop games, and though im not knocking them (2nd edition of bloodbowl is one of my all time favourite games if only there were the people with the same enthusiasm as me to play with) but most GW games seemed just not polished enough, that extra mile you know?

IMO this does not seem the case with FFG. I think the element that surprised me the most with runebound was while being simplistic in essence, was not the case in actuality.

Theres me thinking "hmm only 12 characters? with one skill each.... not much diversity there," but how surprised i was! And again there was more than a handful of moments where all of us where "stratigising" our next moves, or our first couple of turns in combat. This game has not only delivered what i want from a game, but beyond my expectations.

Is there a flaw IMO? I suppose the number of encounters. This is something i am going to rectify soon by buying the card expansions because after 3 games between us we encountered all the cards i think (not including treasure cards). But really thats not an issue.

So to be a shameless sychophant, i would like to say thankyou FFG for producing a quality game, but also thankyou for keeping my gaming nights alive!

I really missed getting a bunch of my mates around, a few beers and nibbles, the taunting of each other, the mocking when someone fails, but also the cheers when someone succeeds.

Appologies for my long post, but as i stated at the beginning, i had to get this off my chest .

Definatly thinking of purchasing more games..... arkham definatly looks interesting with its co-op element and decent looks just down right epic, but maybe too overwhelming? Seems it has a lot going on with the expansion that makes the game a campaign (sorry cant remember the name). I have and enjoyed warhammer quest, but again, to me it lacked polish and balance.

Thats enough from me!

Laters

Kellus said:

Hear, hear! RB is indeed a great game for widespread adventure.

Kellus said:

Arkham is loads of fun. If your friends enjoyed cheering and jeering each other in Runebound, I think they'll find the same kind of group dynamic in Arkham, too. If any of you are familiar with HP Lovercraft's work, it'll add yet another dimension to the fun (no pun intended. =P)

Descent is indeed an epic experience. Highly tactical, which it sounds like you guys would enjoy, too. If the advanced campaigns sound daunting, it's okay. They're certainly not required to fully enjoy the game. In fact, based on what you've said here it sounds like you guys are more into the "play it for the night and then forget it" style rather than the "continuing adventure over several play sessions" style. If that's the case, the base game and the so-called "vanilla" expansions give you a host of dungeons that are really intended to be one-shot play sessions each. It'll make for a long but exciting night. =)

Another, somewhat lighter option for dungeon crawling madness is the upcoming DungeonQuest remake. It will also be set in the Terrinoth universe (like Descent and Runebound) and, as an added bonus, it has been announced that the game will include Descent, Runebound and Runewars cards for the heroes that come inside, so you could take those new heroes and introduce them to your Runebound sessions as well!

Hi there mate.

Yea i think arkham will be the next purchase after a few x-pacs for RB. Still undecided about decent but will definatly check out dungeonquest.

Thanks for the info man.

Laters

I'm not sure how familiar you are with the whole internet boardgame scene, but you should check out the website: boardgamegeek.com.

It has listing for pretty much every boardgame ever made, and contains lots of reviews, session reports, pictures of components, etc. The Runebound page also contains a lot of fan made variant rules, new characters, adventure variants, threat track variants, etc. You can check it out here:

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/21523/runebound-second-edition

As one of the larger Runebound posters, I have created such things as: Cities of Adventure.

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/filepage/24306/cities-of-adventure-pdf

Cities of Adventure: Rise of the Dragonlords ( a harder variant with story elements more closely related to the main adventure)

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/filepage/44379/cities-of-adventure-rise-of-the-dragonlords

The Maure Castle Adventure Variant

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/filepage/55861/maure-castle-runebound-adventure-variant

And new hero characters from the cover art

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/422408/new-runebound-heroes_from-the-cover-art

There are many, many other variants as well.

Enjoy!

Judd

Wow there are some nice characters there judd, it seems you read my mind as that was going to be one of the questions i was going to ask . I will definatly use some of them.

So onto my next question...

Had a few games now and purchased most of the card decks (not including the character decks) and still having great fun. There is one thing though that for me personally, slightly ruins the game. Seems there's a bell curve in challenge scaling in the players favour... err let me explain better.

Start out on green, all good and you slowly build up get one or two low cost items etc. Go up1-2 levels then start out on yellow, then it seems you only have to encounter half the ammount of yellows than you did the greens before you can go after the blues, then again only like 3 blues and with the gold and xp accumulated you can start going after the dragonlords. Just you spend a while going after green encounters and get to encounter far less of the other colours.

Not a complaint per se, just wondering if its like that for all or you... Oh yea the other thing is gold. Does it get irrelevent towards the end game? Seems we all have so much gold by the time we get on blues we can afford anything, item restrictions aside.

So if this is the case for both scaling and gold, are there any house rules/variants you guys use to combat these?

The one i use at the mo, though not perfect is scaling xp. With 2 players costs 3xp to go up the first level, then 4xp for the next level and so on. I find doing this it gets you on to yellows slightly earlier, and you spend longer on the yellow/blue, just evening out the playfield so-to-speak. The only idea i can come up with to combat the gold issue is costing more to heal at higher levels (2G when you have like 3 experience counters). Havent tried it but im not that confident it would work well.

Anyway, your thoughts please kind sirs.

Laters

I agree that you spend more time early in the game going for greens than you spend on the other colors. I am intrigued by your idea to scale Exp needed to level up early. That should get you through greens a bit faster. Definitely going to playtest that a few times.

You will find that a few challenge deck expansions will add plenty of variety to those green and yellow challenges.

I introduced RB to my brother this weekend. We played a few rounds of vanilla, added Drakes, Shadows, Traps, and Bandits to mix it up a bit and played Avatars to switch up the endgame. all in all a fun time. glad you had a good experience with the game.

Yeah I agree FFG is an amazing company that makes great games. My group of gamer friends spend most saturdays playing Arkham, Talisman, and very soon Runebound.

Let me get it out of the way Arkham Horror is amazing. Talk about cheering for your friends. IMO the challenges in Arkham are so freaking tough at times that when you beat one it's the best feeling in the world. Pretty much the game is designed to kill you many many...many times. So yeah beating challenges and whatnot is amazing.

Talisman is the game that started it all for me. A friend of mine brought over the original game (the one that costs hundreds of dollars now) and the original Dungeon XP and Timescape XP. After one play I was hooked and it's still good with the new editions.

So this upcoming weekend I will be bringing RB to my group. My fiance freaking loves the game, I'm still on the fence about it but she just surprised me today by telling me that our local comic book shop has all of these wonderful board games and then some so she bought The Scepter of Kyros and we are going to play it tonight. I'm very excited.

So all in all these are great games and I'm glad to hear that you and your mates are enjoying these games as much as we do. And once again I just have to mention Arkham Horror...i don't know why it's hit me so hard but it's absolutely one of the best board games i've played in a long time.

Yea cory, arkham is the next one on my list, heard great things about it. The two main qualities that attract me is everyone is working together, and apparently its very hard to beat.

To miles:

It works rather well IMO, not to blow my own trumpet. But to be completely honest, the scaling xp idea just came from any role-playing game. To get from level 1-2, you need to kill lets say 5 encounters. Level 5-6 requires you to kill the same ammount of encounters, just tougher, higher level ones, but yea simple but effective.

So what about the gold, anyone else having the experience that theres too much of it later on in the game? Maybe you're meant to have loads.

But yea all in all having a blast with it. Talisman was the catalyst for sure, but RB is all i wanted talisman to be and then some.

Laters

Kellus said:

It is great, and it is hard to beat. Co-op games sort of need to be hard to beat in order to stay fun, I find. Once you can beat the game every time it stops being exciting because there's no challenge. Fortunately, Arkham has plenty of expansions to bump it up a notch once you've mastered the base game. It's a deviously effective business model, and I love it.

I also refuse to read all the cards outside of game play, so even after having owned the game for years, there's still "new" stuff to surprise me when we play =)

As far as your XP scaling idea, it is a good one. You aren't the first person to suggest the idea and it seems to work well for all those who've tried it. The one I use isn't player dependent, it just scales by your character level. The first token costs 1 XP, the second costs 2, etc. Caps at 5 XP per level. I think it works well.

For gold, I don't see the need to change it personally. High level heroes will be rolling in the cash.

Steve-O said:

True i guess. The only reason i state is because once you have purchased 2-3 really decent items/allies, thats pretty much it, no need to spend gold anymore (unless you die of course). But i suppose thats half of the tactics, getting items that compliment your character well and theres no need to buy more.

Ah well just a thought.

Laters

The reason I wouldn't change the gold value reward on challenges is that the Red Challenges in Rise of the Dragon Lords provide no gold as a reward. You need to have saved up a bit of gold for the healing you'll need to do between Red Challenges. I agree that you may end up with excess gold, but all in all I've never seen it effect gameplay.

miles601 said:

Yea thats very true.

I guess its just im judging from a few games ive experienced. You guys havent experienced this and thats good enough reason for me .

Laters

Hey Kellus, I had fun reading your post, I to finally joined the world of Runebound, though I'd talked myself out of buying it about a dozen times before. I own and love Descent and it is what made me love the Terrinoth universe (or Runiverse as Steve-O puts it ). So I finally took the plunge and bought Runebound, my expectations for it were actually quite low intially.

Suffice to say I was pleasantly surprised. Not only did I enjoy the game, my WIFE did as well! And she's not normally a big "gamer" person so for her to like something so dripping with fantasy lore was very nice. Now the only problem is I'm probably going to be sucked into buying a bunch of expansions.....

As for Arkham Horror I own that game also, and I do like it quite a bit. The co-op element is fun, but there is one thing I wanted to state about the difficulty of the game. I see many people say that the game is hard, but frankly I have no idea where they are getting that from. I've played it 10 times since I've purchased it (once against every Ancient One, and a couple extra against two of the harder ones), I have only lost the game 1 time out of those ten. And that one loss was only my second game of it ever, and it came down to the wire with me nearly pulling it out in the end. Those ten games have been played with anywhere from 1-4 investigators and 1-3 people playing, and have been won through different victory conditions. Though I enjoyed the heck out of the game, I finally lost interest in it due to the fact that it wasn't really challenging me anymore.

Now then, having said that though, I've heard a LOT of people say that the expansions ramp up the difficulty significantly. So probably what I need to do is buy an expansion or two and integrate them into the game....but let's just say I've been trying to avoid opening that particular can of worms, lol. None the less it would seem that the games difficulty is easily adjusted upward with more expansions if it proves too easy.

As for Descent, it is as you put it an epic experience, one of my favorite games of all time. It's also fun since it incorporates the same lore of Terrinoth that Runebound does. Still I think Steve-O's suggestion of Dungeon Quest may be a really good one, same lore, bonus Runebound heroes, and a chance to laugh and have fun watching your friends story unfold. As an added bonus it sounds like it is a fairly short game, so you could play it when you have less time on your hands (though if you play Runebound a lot, limited time prolly isn't an issue), though as a disclaimer I've never played it or the original so it's all speculation.

Either Descent, DQ, and AH all sound like they'd be an awesome next games for you, I hope whatever you purchase is as enjoyable as Runebound as been for you.

Oh, and as a side note I've only played 3 or 4 games of RB so far, but I agree with the other posters in that excess gold at high levels isn't a problem.

I actually ran into a bit of a humorous issue with that in the last game I played with my wife. My character defeated 1 dragon lord, and I purchased his 3rd life token with my XP, foolishly failing to notice I'd spent all my gold (bought an expensive item right before this). Fighting my 2nd dragon lord I won, but was grievously injured, only like 2 hp from death. But with no gold I couldn't heal, and with my 3 life tokens I couldn't do anything but Red Adventures!

Too stubborn to sell any of my amazing items so I could heal I decided to press on. My next Red Adventure was Margath himself, and needless to say I didn't make it, lol. My wife ended up winning before I could recover. So to summarize, I say let those high level heroes get that gold, they'll need it!

Kellus,

I had much the same experience as you did (keeping the old game group alive), but with Arkham Horror and Talisman. I'm going to try Runebound with the guys in a week or so, but it's been a lot of fun with the family.

One more FFG game I'd recommend is Anima. I'm not an Anime fan so the game didn't really appeal to me, but a friend bought it and it plays like a faster, lighter version of Runebound.

Wow guys thankyou.

Ah yes kartigan i've been close to that but chose to sell an item instead. But the outcome was the same as i didnt have enough power to kill the next red card .

As for descent i am really interested in it. See i used to play (amd have great fun) with warhammer quest. Balancing and certain combat issues aside it was a fantastic game, basically the closest you can get running a D&D game on a board. When i said about time issues it wasn't mine, but my friends'. Though now they have been playing runebound, they are willing to spend more time gaming (AND SO THEY SHOULD!!).

So this is why i am really tempted to get descent. Me and my mates used to play D&D a lot, but because of time restraints on the DM (me) i just can't keep up with it with work and all, so decent seems like a good replacement. Though i know this isnt the descent forum, i was wondering if you could enlighten me on a few factors.

First being travelling/shops. Warhammer had a system where you travelled back from the dungeon to get to the city. You had hazards on the way (random dice rolls) and places to visit when you got the city. Is this the same system with decent?

Secondly, i'm under the impression that basic descent are just "1 off" dungeons with no campaign mechanic. If so is there an expansion that allows for campaigning? And does it include keeping items/leveling up etc?

Lastly, what is the combat system like? Basic stat+dice roll = over armour? Or something a bit more complex?

Thankyou in advance for your comments

Laters

PS @shadowtag. I will have a looksee at anima, thanks .

It's true this isn't the Descent forum but I will try to answer your questions anyway .

In basic Descent there are "Glyphs of Transport" that are magical places your heroes will discover as they explore the dungeon. Glyphs must first be "activated" by a hero stepping on them, but they can then be used to travel back and forth to town with very little movement. While in town you may "shop" to buy and sell as many items, potions, or training as you wish. The only real restriction on this is you can't travel to and from town in the same turn, to prevent cheesy tactics by the heroes. So more to the point of your question, no in basic Descent there are no "encounters" as you put it to limit your trips to town, and all the "buildings" are in 1 location. The hard part is just reaching the glyphs in the dungeon to activate them.

And yes you are correct that basic Descent is just "1 off" dungeons with no campaign mechanic. There are some rudimentary rules on how to try to string them together, but honestly they are quite horrible and don't work well at all (I've yet to meet someone who thinks they are any good). As such individual scenarios should all be treated as just one-offs. The only concept of "leveling" up in basic Descent is that your character can buy extra skill cards and trait dice with his hard earned cash in town. The main customization of your character, comes from the items that you find or purchase.

There are however two "advanced campaign" expansions. These expansions are The Road to Legend and The Sea of Blood. They allow you to play with the same group of heroes over several sessions, and explore large numbers of different smaller dungeons. Your characters will get to go from zero to hero over the course of the campaign, and it will maintain a consistent stringing together of the different dungeons, which can be fun. There is also outdoor travel and therefore random "encounters" your heroes can have as they move from town to town or from dungeon to dungeon exploring the map.

Overall I think they really do an excellent job of allowing you the "epic" feel of your hero and the story progressing. In the advanced campaigns you will have a lot more opportunity to customize your character with the skills and items you want them to have, which can be really enjoyable. The overlord also earns lots of experience with which to purchase upgrades for himself, which allows him the same fun of customization that the heroes enjoy. One note is that the advanced campaigns do take a long time to play, but they are broken up over several sessions so it really isn't that bad if your group is enjoying it. Plus the sessions themselves can actually be shorter than normal Descent sessions since the dungeons are usually much smaller.

The advanced campaigns can be quite fun, but they are rather "advanced" just as their name suggests. Not necessarily in rule complexity, but just in that the overall strategies for both sides change quite a bit. As such I'd recommend that you play normal Descent for awhile before getting one of them. Also note that you only need 1 of the Advanced Campaign expansions to play it, and they aren't really compatible with each other. Having played both, I would recommend Road to Legend over Sea of Blood. Others may disagree with me, but I don't think Sea of Blood is very well made, and still needs a lot of things to be ironed out in a FAQ or Errata. Other groups really enjoy it though, so your mileage may vary.

The combat system is one of my favorite parts of Descent. It is more complex than just try to hit a target AC or something. Basically by rolling one set of dice you determine several things at once, whether the attacked hit or missed, it's range, it's damage (from which Armor of your enemy is subtracted to determine the wounds inflicted), and how many "surges" you rolled which you can then spend to activate special abilities. I really enjoy it the combat system a lot, I think it is very dynamic, while still being very easy to learn.

Hope that answers your questions! As a side note, you may want to poke around on the Descent forums a bit for more info, many people a lot more knowledgeable than myself hang out there and they should be able to help you. Also on one closing note I feel it only fair to warn you that Descent and its subsequent expansions do suffer from some amount of ambiguous rules writing. As a result there is a pretty decent sized FAQ for the game, and it is highly recommended that you read it before you play. It will save you from asking a lot of rules questions .

Thankyou for taking the time to answer my questions consicely mate.

I definatly like the sound of outdoor encounters!

But yea i'll save my ramblings for the descent forum cheers .

Laters