noone has considered yet that an expansion for 5-6 players need the same amount of areas as the basic game. why that ?

imagine a quadrant and place the 4 homerealms at the 4 corners. to place 2 more homerealms with the same distances means to build another quadrant of the same size benath the first one. same with a circle. to enlarge a circle with 4 spots in same distances on it to a cicle with 6 spots needs the double masses.

but only 50% of the areas can have resources, because its for 2 more players not for 8. so the other 50% must be swamps, highlands, lakes, etc without resources. i am curious if ffg considers this. i doubt it. maybe they never make an expansion of runewars.

magicrealm said:

You make some interesting points here. They could, of course, include a smaller number of tiles (say half as many, so 7-8) and simply change the rules for placement of starting locations to allow things to be a bit tighter. It would be interesting to see how that would change the gameplay. I suppose if they were allowed to be any closer than 3 spaces, then at least the Fast units would be able to launch sudden strikes at enemy homeland, but considering how many people complain about lack of combat, I'm not sure that would be a bad thing. It would make gathering runes by attacking an enemy homeland a more viable strategy, but it would also give the elves - in particular - a much stronger advantage, since their Flying Fast pegasi will be unhindered even with mountains and such in the way.

They could also add a rule about placing extra neutral units in between close homelands (regardless of units printed on the hex) to at least prevent first-turn attacks. There's usually enough leftovers to go around. Later in the game it would still be a threat, though.

The idea of hexes that provide no resources is also interesting. They'd still have tactical value for holding a rune, of course, so it'd be interesting to see how that idea plays out.

However, as much as I would love to see a Runewars expansion, the recent news of a "new Terrinoth game designed by Corey" for Realms 2011 is somewhat off-putting. I'm assuming "new game" doesn't mean "expansion to existing game" which in turn means that Corey probably hasn't been working on an expansion to RW for the last year or so if he's been working on some new game instead. Doesn't mean an expansion is impossible, but it pushes back the hopeful estimates of a release date at the very least.

I'm thinking now that we may have to rely on the fan community to see anything more for Runewars. Not that the fan community has been disappointing in that regard. Between Sigma's hero cards for most of the other heroes and the Dunwarr Dwarves race on BGG, I think we'll manage just fine. =)

One thing they may do that would keep costs down is add new races, but leave the player limit to 4 so that they don't have to add other main board parts, just starting tile, minis, order and reference cards.