Hey, so I'm confused and can't find it in the rule book - playing a standard game, when you run out of season cards, does the game end or do you reshuffle the seasons and keep going?

Also it says in the "epic" rules variation that it makes a longer more intense game, but says to end the game after you run out of seasons. How would this make the game longer than the basic version? And does that imply that the basic version runs shorter somehow (6 runes vs 7 runes in the epic, true, but still the 8 turn limit)

If you are playing a "normal" game, you only play a maximum of 6 years. If you get to the end of Winter of year 6, the game ends, and whoever has the most runes at that time, wins; there should be 2 of each season card unused at that point.

If you are playing "epic" rules, you play for 8 years. This means that at a maximum, you will use every season card exactly - there will be none left over, but you won't "run out". The game will end after Winter of Year 8.

However, it should be noted that in my experience, going to the full 6 or 8 years is relatively rare - usually someone will have 6 Dragon Runes prior to that point.

Really? Ok cool, dang I didn't see that anywhere in the rule book. You would think it would be in the Seasons section... maybe it is I guess. Sounds like a fairly short game in that case.

For what it's worth, it's on page 30 of the rules under "winning the game", 2nd paragraph (where it says that if no player has won by the end of Winter of the 6th year).

I agree, though, it probably wouldn't have hurt to have it more prominently stated somewhere.

For my games, I actually build a season "deck". Instead of 4 decks (one for each season), I stagger them into one deck so that from the top it will be spring, summer, fall, winter, spring, summer, etc.

In doing this, I build 6 years worth of season cards, and put the other 8 cards back in the box. (Unless I'm playing Epic, then I use all 8 years worth).

sigmazero13 said:

That's a cool idea. Saves table space, too, always good. I'll have to try that next time I play.

And yeah, I agree 6 years doesn't sound like very much, but I have yet to see a game even get that far. Most of our games are won by winter of the third or fourth year, it seems. (We have yet to dig into the "DS tokens" - I forget the real name - or the epic variant. We've just been playing basic bones.)

Steve-O said:

That and you never have to try and remember what season is next (sometimes if there's a lot going on in a season, it can be easy to have to do a double-check of "oh yeah, that was summer - not that it's hard, it's just "easier" with one deck)

Steve-O said:

Most of the games I've had go to the full 6 years have been 2-player games, as sometimes those can be very brutal with neither player really coming out ahead. A lot of it depends on the Objective cards dealt and the exact seasons, though, because even with 2, the vast majority of my games have ended in year 3 or 4.

If you do use the Exploration Tokens, though, one thing we've discovered is that the Dragon Throne tokens can make the game go even FASTER; we've had a few end in Year 2 because of them. What we're starting to do is remove 1 of the Dragon Throne tokens from the pool (which means there's only one available, if it shows up at all). We've also considered playing to +1 rune when using the Exploration tokens in 3-4 player games, so that the Dragon Throne can be useful, but not in such a way to end the game too early.