The description on the catalog page says "110 new cards." But through the previews we've discovered that there are terrain cards for the princess search and legendary item cards. There have to be decent numbers of both, which would mean that we may be looking at a total of perhaps 15 or 20 new encounters for each color level, presuming that the quest cards are included in the 110 count? That will mean running into the same encounters at least a couple times/game, which would be pretty lame for our group.

Now that FW is for sale, hopefully someone can report soon on the card count! I've just entered the whining/negotiating phase with my better half over the need to add this to my ample game collection, so it will be a while yet before I get my paws on this one.

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The Manual is up, and from a read it looks awesome.

The card breakdown:

6 Heroes

57 adventures (including Arsham)

18 Legends (Items and Allies to be discovered and not bought. They can be added to market decks and bought in other Runebound Games.)

29 Princess Clues (needed to locate the Princess.)

56 adventure cards. 17 Green cards and 19 Yellow among them and those definitely include event cards and might include encounter cards. There's no way that's enough challenges to keep the game interesting. We'll be cycling the green deck 3 or 4 times, even with the added burden of travel. That's very disappointing.

There aren't any encounter cards in the decks.

Should I be concerned that so little Runebound forum traffic translates to decrased interest in the game? I expected a flurry of responses to the Frozen Wastes release/rules posting news...pretty much no visible excitement here. Are we near the end of this game as far as new releases go? I hope not!

The number of challenges is very similar and certainly no less overall compared to Sands and Sands has a lot of replayability. Perhaps if you play with 4+ players you could burn through the decks and repeat encounters, but it seems to do well with 2-3 in my hands. I haven't checked IoD or Midnight, but I suspect it is similar. I would not be disappointed as we aren't being short-changed in comparison to other expansions.

I would have liked more challenge cards too, not only to stave off deck cycling per game, but also for more variation from one play to the next. Plus, this setting being one of my favorite types, I would have liked more.

But seems about fair as-is given what we get from other sets.

Jackwraith said:

It's a very similar mix to the Sands expansion.

As noted, the card quantity won't affect solo players, or likely 2-players. The card count isn't much different from the base game, actually. I don't think 3 players should be cycling the deck either, unless they take a while to level up from green and yellow.

Well, I'll certainly admit to a bit of hyperbole. We probably wouldn't cycle the Green deck 3 or 4 times, but my concern was not so much the cycling per se but what bitva mentioned: variety from one play to the next. If that is a similar amount to the Sands and Isle expansions, then maybe it will be OK. It just seems lower at first glance.