Hello, I recently bought runebound and started playing it with my friends we then ran into a problem a little way though the game, we had no adventure tokesn on the bourd that we could either goto or win at resulting in being unable to draw cards from the adventure deck to refresh the other adventure tokes on to the star bursts.

Does anyone know that the actual ruleing would be for when you run out of tokens on the bourd to adventure to?

Every time you draw an event card with the starburst icon on it, you're supposed to replenish tokens on the board.

How do you replenish the tokens on bourd under any of the following instances:-

A: No tokens on bourd to be able to draw an event that replenishes.

B: You land on last token and no sunburst event is drawn just straight into a challenge

C: All the current remaining tokens have undefeted monsters on that cant be beaten

These 3 instances are each of the things that my 6 player group faced quite quickly when playing but for some reason the rule book or errata does not stae what happens if any of these happen.

Majeh_XIII said:

All three of these cases are symptoms of not replenishing tokens when you're supposed to. In my experience, events that call for tokens to be replenished are drawn far too frequently for you to get anywhere near the last token on the board, which rules out case A and case B rather quickly.

As for case C, there can only ever be a maximum of 6 undefeated encounters on the board at one time. The number of green tokens on the map alone should be more than enough to prevent the case where "all remaining tokens" are covered by undefeated encounters.

In all my years of playing this game I have never encountered any of these situations, and there have even been games where we forgot to replenish tokens once or twice when we should have. I strongly suspect that if you focus on remembering to replenish tokens as you're supposed to, you'll find that none of these things will be a concern any more.

Steve-O said:

Steve, I don't know if you had the chance to play Runebound with 6 players. When you play with 3-4 the chance of being stuck like in cases A or B is impossible; with 5-6 is still remote but I frequently saw people wander a lot of turns doing anything, because their Heroes had no appropriate jewels nearby and weren't strong enought to face greater Challenges. Board jewel will vanish really quick with lots of Heroes around.

Still, I think that a situation were nobody could draw an Event that replenishes jewels is possible only when the players aren't playing aggressively, with the purpose of winning the game. In Runebound 3-players there's always a leading Hero, followerd by a potential challenger and another unfortunate person having a bad time with his/her Hero, usually unable to reverse the fate of his game. With 6 players, you have the above mentioned characters multiplied by two; with 4-5 you have combinations. If there's a leading Hero, there will always be at least one of those:

A. A Hero that draws an Event that replenishes sunburst jewels

B. A Hero that levels up and can face greater challenges, getting closer to victory conditions and finally resulting as the winner

I admit that Runebound with 5-6 can be painful because of the downtime between turns (wait 15-30 minutes before playing again) but it has also the drawback of board jewel depletion. But I cannot believe that there won't be at least one Hero that can move towards the game's conclusion, while most players have nothing to do except waiting for replenishment or attempting suicidal challenges.

The game can be stuck and drag to the utmost boredom for most players, but one will always be the winner. If the others don't progress, they won't deprive the leader of the most valuable jewels (Blue & Red Challenges) and he will win without challengers, unless he deliberately WAITS for others, spending his money on gear that won't help him. With a lot of people around, this process won't be very exciting and many players will complain. I think they're right and the biggest lack in the Runebound manual is a big recommendation not to play with 5-6 people, because at least 2 of them are condemned to be inactive most of the time. Runebound is not Talisman, you won't win if you start really bad.

Hmmm… I've always thought the box saying "2-6 Players" was a little misleading. I have only played with 5 players max., and only one time.

I do remember a game where for a while some gems remained depleted for multiple turns. No one was ready, willing, and/or able to hit the next deck. Until that happened, the possibility of gem replenishment (through an event) was zero. Yet there weren't enough gems to go around in order for someone to bump up enough to take the risk. It also turned into a game of multiple knockouts, but that included some other influences.

Aside from Steve's suggesting to pay more careful attention to replenishment triggers, I think it is possible in some cases to get stuck in this state. Interesting quandary, and another good reason not to play with too many players… or to have a supplemental mechanic for replenishing gems if you do.