Bought my copy of Thunderstone Advance: Towers of Ruin, and am overly impressed that finally a board game company besides FFG knows quality means quality business. Am eager to play Thunderstone but won't until either tomorrow (solo) or come this weekend.

More eager I am though to hear if FFG is going to compete with their competitor AEG's Thunderstone line with Rune Age. I have a copy of Rune Age too but I am awaiting FFG to release a strong expansion. Does anyone else care about Rune Age or Thunderstone? I will post underneath here and let people know how I feel about Thunderstone Advance in the near future (fyi, never played Thunderstone before: Towers of Ruin is my first and only copy and I only plan to purchase future releases of Advance).

I have runeage as well and would love to see an expansion.

As strong as this game is it needs one expansion ti take it to that level.

But the main reason i love it is the single player scenarios. I take it with me when i travel.

Rune age and Thunderstone are competitors, but it's hard to compare them because of how different they are. Rune age has everybody have their own deck/pile of cards to buy, and there are events that happen whether you want them to or not. Thunderstone everything is buyable by anybody, and you can go kill monsters at your leisure.

Right now, If I had to pick which one to play over another I'd pick Thunderstone just because of how many expansions there are. there's just so many options. Gameplay wise Runeage is my favorite, it's got great mechanics and I love the factions, and the upcoming Expansion will even it out with Thunderstone.

Rune Age has a more strategic layer flavor wise - this is a deckbuilding game about warfare and to a degree 'building'.
Thunderstone's flavor simulates 'Diablo II', heading from a village into catacombs.

It's hard to compare but yes until the addon is out, Rune Age's potential remains untapped.
In fact this is the sort of game that can use roughly 2-3 expansions to reach it's greatest height prior to risking 'overload'.

Thank you very much for the question and your decent answers! That's what I was wondering about too. For me, there is one question left:

Which game has more interaction between players?

If I understand you correct it seems that Thunderstone is in a way compareable to Dominion (which in my humble opinion has few to no interaction with other players) - can anybody help me with this?

Depends i guess.
Thunderstone is a bit more 'solo-ish' i suppose. You head into the dungeon and do your thing. Though some conflict is possible. Depends on how you tackle the game.

The same goes for Rune Age if you go for the all out war playstyle scenarios then it's highly agressive with much interaction.
If you go for the building scenario it's slightly less possibly.
And coop is even less so though that in turn has a lot of 'social interaction' where you might coordinate things together.

In the end though I'd say choose on the basis of the 'theme' in both cases:

one is a cardbased Diablo dungeoncrawler, the other is more a fantasy warfare game with great fantasy armies going for great wars or dealing with great threats.

Should you opt for Thunderstone opt for that new release 'Thunderstone Advance' and the future 'Advance' expansions not the older sets.