Anybody found a way to balance runes for rune wars scenario?

Imho Tact and diplomacy rune (+3 total strength during a battle or siege) is way overpowered vs other runes and player lucky enought to get that rune wins almost always.

Other runes are not bad if you are not noob. But Speed and stealth and death and decay rune are rly bad, no mather how you play they just cant beat other runes even if you are pro.

Any house rules for hot fixing runes like:

Tact and diplomacy -> +2 total str instead of 3

Wrath and vengeance -> you can use it when attacking other players home realm but you must destroy 2 cards from hand to activate

Pain and sacrifice -> deal 1 dmg to home realm, reveal top 2 cards. Draw 1 to your hand and discard OR DESTROY other.

Wealth and industry -> when you spend a gold card OR INFLUENCE (from stronghold card) exhaust this card to temporarily increase gold or influence value by 1. That gold card or stronghold card is destroyed at the end of spend gold/influence action

Death and decay -> same effect but you can destroy more than one card to deal more than one dmg to home realm

Speed and stealth -> can be activated when other players attack your home realm but you must successfully defend it to use its effect. And it should deal 2 dmg to enemy players home realm

For now on... We play this scenario without runes. Its much peaceful game then

I do agree that some of the runes are a bit overpowered, but it all depends on the group you're playing with. For example, in my group, when someone starts pulling ahead, everyone pretty much gangs up on them, which totally mitigates the powers of the runes. We don't really play that scenario much anymore though, there just isn't enough strategy involved compared to some of the other scenarios. One important you can do is check the faq every now and then to see if they adjusted any of the cards for balance.

Wealth and Industry, as it stands, is already the most powerful rune in the deck. Only making it weaker could help. Nothing like destroying those irritating gold cards from your deck at the same time as purchasing super cool expensive dude at the same time!

Tact and Diplomacy is almost as broken, but recall it only works when fighting at cities, and not at home realms. No, it's major benefit is the ability to snipe high cost cities from the central play area for low strength, and then keep them without much trouble. Yay for quick 3 gold or, worse, quick dragons!

I think the rest of the cards are decently balanced against each other. It's really only those two. Recall that any change that 'forces' a player to destroy cards out of his own hand is basically a free way to cut the chafe. This game is about removing cards from your own deck as much as about buying new cards into it. Optimization is the name of the game.

Tact and Diplomacy is almost as broken, but recall it only works when fighting at cities, and not at home realms. No, it's major benefit is the ability to snipe high cost cities from the central play area for low strength, and then keep them without much trouble.

You are right about the rest, but I am not certain about the Tact and Diplomacy Rune. The way it is written, alongside with the text of other cards, I assume that "During a battle or siege against a city" means that it can be triggered only when you siege the city, and not when you defend it. Otherwise they write it like this: "When you participate in a battle or siege of a city...".

As for the Death and Decay - I think it is alright, you can start from turn 1, if you wish, to attack home realm with a 1-cost unit, pass and deal 1 damage, alongisde destroying cards you do not want. 5 turns - 5 damage against the strongest player, filtering those coins and basically changing your 5 1-gold coins to higher value gold. The downside is that you are basically losing 2 cards per turn to run this and your oponent gets to cycle his cards... It sure has it's uses, especially for races with more card fetch.

My concern is Wrath and Vengeance - defending the Home Realm is a primary task, and to utilize this card you have to spare a card in your hand, taking the 33% chance that your oponent will roll no skulls. Seems too random to me. An idea you can try - modify the ability like this: "...and destroy one card from your hand, if any, to...". This way you can dump your units to the battlefield to minimize the incoming damage if your luck is bad while still destroying any obsolete gold/ tactics that slow your deck down. Use this carefully though, as in addition to minimizing the early aggression, now it will be awesome in the endgame as well.

Finally, Speed and Stealth. I have no idea what to do with that. The thing that troubles me is that 4 of the 6 cards are features you can choose to use. However, Wrath and Vengeance requires someone else to do something so you can use it, and Speed and Stealth gives you the bonus AFTER you fulfill a condition - so basically it is not a rune, but a quest. Therefore it is good to think of house rules that makes them activate by the players choice to increase their potency. My idea for Speed and Stealth is this: "Whenever you defend successfully in a siege, deal 1 damage to the attacking player's Home Realm. Do not exhaust this card when you use it." Thus we keep the spirit of the card, being a counterattack, and now it is actually good - makes the opponents think twice whether they should attack you.

Here is the place to admit that I still haven't played Runewars scenario, besides testing it alone. However, some of the effects on the runes are quite obviously weak as you too have observed. When I manage to gather my gaming group and play several times I will share my observations.

Tact and Diplomacy is almost as broken, but recall it only works when fighting at cities, and not at home realms. No, it's major benefit is the ability to snipe high cost cities from the central play area for low strength, and then keep them without much trouble.

You are right about the rest, but I am not certain about the Tact and Diplomacy Rune. The way it is written, alongside with the text of other cards, I assume that "During a battle or siege against a city" means that it can be triggered only when you siege the city, and not when you defend it. Otherwise they write it like this: "When you participate in a battle or siege of a city...".

I sent this in as a rules question. Here's the response.

In response to your question:

In response to your question:

Rule Question:

For the Runewars scenario, the Dragon Rune card Tact and Diplomacy says that you get +3 strength "during a battle or siege against a city." Does this work on attack and defense, or does it only work when you are initiating the siege?

Since “Tact and Diplomacy” doesn't specify whether you must be the attacker or the defender, it can be used in both cases.

Thanks for playing!

James Kniffen

Game Designer

Fantasy Flight Games

Thanks for sharing, Budgernaut! In this case, the 3 bonus strength seems too much, and if we add it to an auto-defense bonus of +2, your opponent will have to play units for 6 strength unopposed to capture a city... provided that you have just a cheap unit and a card destroyer in hand, that means that you are almost certain to defend succesfully with a 3 unit cards disadvantage in most cases. This seems a bit too much... Anyway, still trying to playtest it with more people, so don't take my words as set in stone.

Still with Tact and Diplomacy in play, Speed and Stealth just feels absurdly weak. Without repeating myself too much, I stand by the idea that if every card is balanced by itself, and these two are obviously not even close in power. Yes, you can attack another player to deal damage to him (provided that the TaD player hasn't already collected all of the cities, which is entirely plausible) but still later on you will have to face the +3 strength weilding siege monster. He will always have more cities, and even if you evade them, still gain all influence-based cards. My point is Speed and Stealth is too situational and there might be games that it won't do anything for you.

For now I am planning on reducing the bonus to +2 strength, or +2,5 (allowing to surpass tie conditions) to see how it will work. Still don't know what to do with Speed and Stealth though.

Once again, thank you for your help, Budgernaut! Rune Age is an amazing game that could reach even tournament heights with a second expansion, if there is one. And I sure hope that there is! Happy playing everyone