My wife and I were introduced to Runebound by some friends a couple years ago. I liked it, but my wife loved it with a voracious and unquenchable passion. Since then, we've collected all the box sets (except for Island of Dread and Midnight. Anybody selling for under $70?) and several card expansions as well, and have taught pretty much everyone we know how to play.

Early on, we had the notion of combining Runebound maps from the expansion together to create a huge board. There were, of course, some logicstical problems with this, and we didn't give it too much more thought. But recently, we had some ideas on how to make it work smoothly.

That's right: A 4-board, 12-player game of Runebound. We call it Runebound: Legends of Mennara.

Rather than try to have all 4 boards on one table, we decided to split the boards onto different tables, which allows room for each region to comfortably have its own special market stacks and unique challenge stacks. At maximum capacity, 3 players would start on each board. For most intents and purposes, this would work like 4 simultaneous, independent games of runebound. A 1 minute 30 second timer would keep everyone taking turns at the same time.

However, where the game gets interesting is the capability to visit other lands, and be visited by foriegners. The regions will be geographically "connected", and printed copies of the edges of the other maps would be affixed to any "border". To cross into another land, a player simply moves off the edge of the map, and ends their movement on the first tile of the new map (at which point, they'd pick up their stuff and move it to another table.)

When there are more players on one board than another, the less-populated board simply waits for the more populated board to get through one full round of player turns (this is where game-time could potentially dialate, best to budget a good 5 hours.)

Gameplay is pretty standard. Each expansion board plays by its own expansion rules, and players attempt to complete win conditions in each of the 4 regions.

Once a player "wins" in any one of the regions, they receive something called a "Legend Token" which is treated as a 0 cost item with the text:

“All challenges your hero attempts receive a +6 bonus to every attack roll and inflict +1 damage in every phase of combat. Your hero and allies receive a -6 penalty to any skill check he/she attempts. It costs +3 exp to level up your hero. All items and allies in market stacks cost +6 gold, and items are worth -6 when being sold (subtract before dividing in half and rounding down).”

Essentially, the Legend Token helps to offset any special advantages they might have gained from fighting and makes winning a second Legend Token reasonably difficult (difficult enough that the game isn't already as good as over).

Legend Tokens can be stolen from players in PvP combat. Legend Token disadvantages do not apply in PvP combat.

As soon as a player obtains 2 of these, they win the game.