Hi there,

I discovered Runebound and it's a great game. It's good that the fantasy board game genre has returned after it faced a rapid decline in the 90s

Does anybody know whether FFG plans to sell the Runebound Character cards from Dungeonquest seperately in the future? (Maybe even as a character expansion pack with the 4 promo cards?)

Cheers

Shelfwear said:

I don't know whether they plan to release Characters as expansion packs, it would be a nice idea now that there are several Heroes that are not available to every Runebounder (6 Descent Well of Darkness/Drakon Characters; 4 promo Characters which were sold/distributed in limited copies and, of course, the Dungeonquest characters).

I hope they will do something like a "Runebound Ultimate expansion kit", with components that apply to base set (above mentioned Heroes and some cards expanding the original trama/Item deck) and expansions for big boxes as well.

I'm guessing they won't. Considering the released Nara the Fang with her RB card in Sea of Blood and have yet to make her available separately for people who don't want to buy a Descent expansion just to get one RB hero and card. My guess is these 6 heroes won't be sold apart from DQ, unless FFG decides to recycle them into an RB or Decent expansion. Frankly, the fact that their RB and Descent hero cards are included here makes me suspect they won't do that.

If all you want is the cards and don't care about the plastic hero figs, I'm sure the hero cards will be available as scans on BGG soon enough, if they aren't already.

Steve-O said:

Yes, you have a point. But who knows maybe they change their minds/policy in the future as all that scattered add-ons over various different games might become too tedious for the non-completist minded players who just want the most of one game... No scans on BGG yet but they will appear sooner or later. Though I'm not very fond of scan/print out/self-made stuff anymore - I have left that times behind me

I'll check DQ if its a game I'd like to buy for its own sake.

Update: found 3 of the DQ Characters on BGG

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/770102/runebound-second-edition

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/763068/runebound-second-edition

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/749746/runebound-second-edition

Shelfwear said:

Maybe. They certainly seem to be moving away from the "recycle heroes into each other game using similar-themed expansions" model. That's probably because they now have 4 games set in the Runiverse instead of the 2 they had this time last year. I guess we'll have to wait and see where the dust settles on the idea of cross-game heroes.

So far we've seen two approaches from FFG:

1. Recycle heroes into each game, as above. Worked fine when it was just Runebound and Descent, but now with Runewars and DQ on the field, it seems a bit much to handle int he same old way. I'm sure FFG knows that and it's probably why they've been changing things up lately.

2. Release hero cards for all games in the core/expansion box that the heroes are first introduced in. Sounds good in theory, but has two major drawbacks: First, customers may get pissed about "needing" to buy a different product just to get new heroes in their favourite game, and second if they ever release a fifth game, there will be a complete vacuum of old heroes the fans will want cards for and not have.

I can see three other approaches that may or may not work (I'm no business expert):

3. Release digital images of hero cards for those heroes which are not available in Game X here on the website. Increases traffic to the site, makes the fans feel loved since they're getting "web extras" for free, might even encourage a few people to buy the other product for the plastic figs. Drawbacks would include complaints about no way to get the fig to match the card other than buying an unrelated product. Also some people aren't so hot on printing stuff out themselves, which I can certainly understand.

4. Start releasing "hero pack" expansions that have one to four (whatever works best cost-wise) heroes and associated hero cards and tokens for all the games. Possibly also offer individual hero cards and/or release them on the web (per #3) to cover future games whose cards are not included in these packs. The major drawback with this model is what to do with heroes in box expansions/games. You don't really want to release the same heroes in these packs as come in an expansion because then people might get fussy about buying "two of the same figure just to get a hero card for Game X." Also, if these things got too popular there might be a flood of new heroes, and too many new heroes would inevitably start breaking things in the associated games as designers struggle to come up with "new abilities" for them all. This model sounds good on the surface but it could lead to heroes being released too quickly to keep up with other content for each game (tiles, monsters, etc)

5. Ignore the problem and let the fans make kitbashed cards of the missing heroes for each game. This is obvioulsy the easiest route from FFG's perspective, and to its credit there's no shortage of enthusiasm for homebrew heroes among the fans, so maybe this is the best route after all. I've already seen projects to fill in all the missing heroes from Runebound and Runewars current up to Mists of Zanaga. Descent is the one game that has them all (except Zanaga) anyway, so most of the homebrews there are original characters.