I have seen many posts regarding a new expansión for Runewars. They are mostly great wish lists with some very good ideas. I want to start a discussion to contribute in making an expansión easier for FFG. I play Runewars with the Banner of war expansión, so please whenever I write Runewars consider both.

1) A common issue I see is a claim of adding new races. Dwarves (good alignment) and Orcs (Evil Alignment). In the manual of runewars we can clearly see that these should be the selected races. There is an issue here when talking about gameplay. It would be necessary to print new faction sheets , why? because one of the objectives of the faction sheets is to define the winner in case there is a tie in runes and influence. The faction with the most printed influence would be the winner. There cannot be two factions with the same printed influence. The solution is easy, have the elves start with only 5 influence (or 6 influence and 1 tactic card), then have the humans or dwarves with 4 influence an1 tactic card (or 5 influence and 2 tactic cards) etc. So adding two new races is totally posible in gameplay terms. Remember to include 2 extra units for dwarves and orcs for compatibility with banner of wars (or as someone suggested in a post make a booster pack).

2) The second issue is the number of players (different from number of factions). I have seen some discussion here. Some people claim that you should be able to play 6 players and other state that Runewars is perfect for 4 players. I agree with this second statement. Runewars is an amazing game that is perfectly balanced for a 4 players game.There are season cards, with bets for winning runes. With six players in the table the runes would be divided among more players making the game slower. Also with bigger maps, héroes might be incapacitated from accomplishing their missions if they are on the other side of the world. This would further make more difficult to obtain runes and rewards (the would also Split among more players) since héroes are one of the effective ways to obtain runes. I have played runewars of 6 players (combining two runewars games and its really slow). Summarizing, keep 4 players.

Jus adding 2 new races in this way could be more tan enough for me to buy the expansión, now I will go in detail into some nice extras that could help the game to be less predictable and more fun to play.

3) New héroes, Runewars and banner of wars have many héroes. You also have dungeonquest héroes available and the promotional 4. It would be nice to add some new héroes to the expansión since this helps making the game more unpredictable.

4) New map titles with quest cards: For veteran players that play a lot, It would be a nice addition to include some new map titles. There is a spare dragon in the box (In Runewars you can never start a game with 4 dragons in the map, there is 1 in 4a, 1 in 5c and 1 in 8c) so you could use this dragon. There are also 2 spare hell hounds (1 in 2c, 1 in 6b, 2 in 8a and 2 in 11b) so you could have two hexagons with 1 hellhounds or 1 hexagon with 2. There is also 1 spare sorcerer that would not be a challenge but could anyway be in a hexagon (2 in 3a, 3 in 4b and 2 in 8b). There are 2 spare razor wings (there are 2 in 1a, 2 in 5b and 2 in 9a) so you could easily add an hexagon with 2 razorwings. We already have 4 giants and more beastmans tan those that come in the box. Summarizing, since we have enough spare neutrals (1 Dragon, 2 hellhounds, 2 razor wings and 1 sorcerer) We could easily add from 2 to 4 map titles with their respective quest cards. This would help making the game more unpredictable.

5 New neutrals: This is not necessary, since we have just discussed that the game contains enough neutral units for adding map titles, but it would be nice to add som neutrals from the FFG world (like nagas, bane spiders, deep elfs, shades, ferrox, trolls, goles or demons). Including 4 hexagon demons with 5 new map titles using the other neutrals should do it, also including just a single new neutral unit would be great. Summarizing, it is not necessary but would be fun.

6 New lost city token: For players that enjoy using the rise of the free cities variant like myself, the lost city has a problem. Other tan the extra food it provides is a normal city, its not powerfull enough to make players battle among it for its domain. I would change this allowing it to recruit a neutral hexagon (or maybe 2) moving the rune to the quest cards space and allowing it to give 4 tactic cards or 4 influence making it an amazing city to discover and fight for.

7) New order card: Number 9. It would require to re print card 8 to hacve as suppremacy bonus to switch tokkens and repair damaged strongholds. What would card 9 do? Discard 1 of your dragon runes (not exploration or the ones present in cities) to obtain power. You could get tactic cards as provided by your resources, influence as provided by you resources (or both combined) or a recruit from 1, 2 or 3 of your resources. Sincé runes are a powerful artifact that cannot be used but to win, it would be cool to be able to use them a s a way to obtain power. Some nice combos could be made /like conquering a far away territory with a real rune only to later discard it and obtain power. It would also be cool to have a player play a victory card only to see afterwars everyone else burning their runes to make it more diifficult for him to win. I think it could work and would be fun but need to be tested.

8) More exploration tokens: not many and not new, just adding 2 new teleporters would be really fun, making the game more interesting. Making it not so easy to just wait in a corner and win while the other players fight for nothing.

9) I see no need of: New tactic cards, reward cards, general cards, season cards, titles, fate cards, objective cards, they work fine.

So sumarizing this huge post, just adding to new races would be a great addition to the game. This would require new faction sheets. Keep it 4 players (you could make later an expansión pack for 6 players with different season cards, that for example make the 2 highest bidding players to obtain a dragon rune and also start with 3 quest cards instead of 2). Just the races would be enough, but also making new héroes, map titles, neutral units, los city token for rise of the free cities variant, order card 9, 2 new teleports would add a lot of flavor to this brilliant game that as you can probably tell by now is my favorite.

You are all invited to discuss any of these points or make new ones. What i inted is really to help the producers of this great game to make this new expansión posible.

I agree with all these ideas, except that orcs and dwarves should both be neutral factions.

Orcs are not inherently evil or savage in the Terrinoth setting. There are some savage orcs, but there are also civilized orcs. There's a reason all the orc heroes in the basic Runewars set were neutral alignment.

Likewise, while dwarves could certainly be seen as a good and noble race, they are also very reclusive (to the point where some players have noticed the distinct minority of dwarven heroes.) Their indifference and isolation from the rest of the races in the setting makes them better candidates for neutrality.

Two neutral factions, that sounds really cool. In Gameplay terms this would mean that the expansión would have to include 11 neutral objective cards.(8 for the runewars first set and 3 for the banners of war).

There are also some issues with héroes, Adding up runewars and banner of wars we have 7 good héroes, 6 neutral ones and 7 evil ones). If we consider Dungeon quest ones we get 2 more of each alignment. Finally, you get only the same number of héroes from each alignment if we add up the promotional 4 (1 good, 2 neutrals and 1 evil). This would mean that the number of héroes is only balanced if you have runewars, banner of wars and the promotional 4. So if you don't have all of these you would have to leave the same number of héroes from each alignment (good, evil and neutral) in the héroes deck. So the expansion would have to include rules that ensure that the same number of héroes are in each deck. There is also an issue when playing the season card "revealing their true nature" (there are 2 in the game). The issue is that neutrals would only pay 1 influence since they don't have opposite alignment (unless it is stated that for this card paying effects dwarves pay 1 influence for good and neutrals and 2 for evil and orcs pay 1 influence for neutrals and evil and 2 for good). If not ruled is a slight advantage for neutrals since they can comfortably play with héroes from any faction. Other cards affecting héroes like coerción wouldn't matter since they are well written if we include neutral factions.

It could work well to differentiate even more goood from evil faction sheets (since as we talked earlier, elves would have to start with 6 influence and 1 tactic card, then would come humans with 5 Inf. and 2 tct, Dwarves with 4 inf. and 3 tact, Orcs with 3 inf. and 4 tact. Undeads with 2 inf. and 5 tacts. and finally Uthuk with 1 inf. and 6 tact.).

To summarize I think you are absolutely right, they should be neutral and some considerations would have to be made, since they would be heavily hero oriented factions if not ruled (which can also be fun and balanced with the unit options of these factions).

Best regards and lets keep the discussion, I am sure we can continue to make some good contributions for making the expansión dream come true!!!

At first I didn't like the new order card, but the more I reread it, the more I started to see the point of it. One of the reactions I get from people when I teach them this game is that I tell them they need to get 6 dragon runes to win and they ask,

"What do dragon runes do?"

"They are really powerful artifacts and whoever controls 6 will have enough power to dominate Terrinoth!"

"Cool! So ... what do they do?"

"Nothing. They're basically just victory points."

"Oh."

See, in the lore, dragon runes can do amazing things. It was a shard of Timorran that granted Waiqar living-death. So it would be neat to be able to get a game effect from controlling them. That's why I think it would be neat to try the new order card.

However, I'm not sure how well it will really work. With the 7-year timer on the game, I know I would hope that others would discard their runes allowing me to be the victor. So I wonder how many people would be able to sacrifice victory for more power. In your example where you conquer a rune in enemy territory, that makes sense. You probably wouldn't be able to hold onto it anyway so you might as well get something for it. And being such a high-initiative order, the dragon rune may get taken back before you can use the order.

But this seems kind of harsh because in essence, you're removing everyone's victory points from the game. It seems to me like this new order will drive the game toward more battles than before. Some may think that's a good thing, but I usually play the influence game.

One final thought. While I would like to see runes have special abilities, I think that is represented somewhat with the hero items like Runeplate (or whatever it's called). So maybe the dragon runes don't really need to do anything.

It is a very good point. Being rune tokens just georgraphically located victory points it could be a downturn to have them be discarded. After Reading your post I Thought that maybe instead of discarding you could reveal up to 3 real rune tokens (not exploration tokens nor city ones) to receive the following benefits (1 rune token: influence provided by your resources or tactic cards provided by your resources or 1 recriut from 1 of your resources), if you discard two you could make a combination or with 3 get all of them (or alternately with 2 recruit from 2 resources and with 3 from 3 of your resources)

The fun part is that revealing real runes will draw attention to them, which coul make some interesting turns of events in gameplay. (there are cards that allow to discard a rune token of your choice, ouch!)

It also nullifies the problem of removing victory points that could benefit any player.

This is turning out to be a very good brain storming!!!

Having 6 factions they could also implement team play mechanics. Alliances between factions with same alignment would do really great I think. Neutrals (orcs and dwarfs) would be allowed to ally with either good or evil factions. Maybe new unit type - ambassador so you could only make an alliance by using this unit. And you have to protect it to keep aliance valid.

Maybe some bonus cards that you receive when you make an aliance with someone and keep it while your ambassador is still alive. Different factions could have different aliance bonuses to trade.

Having 6 factions they could also implement team play mechanics. Alliances between factions with same alignment would do really great I think. Neutrals (orcs and dwarfs) would be allowed to ally with either good or evil factions. Maybe new unit type - ambassador so you could only make an alliance by using this unit. And you have to protect it to keep aliance valid.

Maybe some bonus cards that you receive when you make an aliance with someone and keep it while your ambassador is still alive. Different factions could have different aliance bonuses to trade.

The Ambassador is a neat idea. I wonder if it would be easier to have Ambassador Tokens that you would place under a hero like the Commander Tokens, rather than have a new unit type be the Ambassador.

The ambassador tokens are even better! So you could delegate ambassador's authority to one of your heroes, making him even more valuable. The only question here - how does it compile with lore? Because a lot of heroes are not the same rase as you pick. How can elfs have a non elvish ambassador?

That's a good point. I don't have an answer to that at the moment.

What i'd like is a simple faction expansion. Add the **** Dwarves already! I want to play the dwarves, my favorite fantasy race. Maybe a single or dual faction army box would be just perfect. Even if they're getting the brown color for the minis i'll still play them!

No need for new stuff really, the game is perfect that way. Just enough stuff before it becomes too clunky. Rules are great and with the revised edition everything runs smooth now.

I'm lucky to have the coffin box edition with the 3D mountains, **** they look nice. This is hands down one of the best looking game out there.

So my wish is: a Faction box including one or two new races to the game for more variety. And while they are at it, why not include a nwe set of cards with new printing to fit the Banners of War additions like Developement cards for instance. IIRC 2 or 3 Order Cards we're affected by the expansion and having the correct text on those would be great.

I would love to see a second Runewars expansion like a lot of people here, and I think a lot of the ideas in this thread (and elsewhere) sound like fun. When I introduced my friends to Runewars- they asked that exact question about dragon runes- they're rare, powerful artifacts that just look pretty? To me, the endgame is the payoff- controlling the dragon runes lets you control Terrinoth- intermediate effects are inconsequential.

However, I've caught myself wondering about the practicality of FFG releasing a new Runewars expansion based on their general rule of making every expansion playable with just the base game. Either they deviate from that pattern, or this new expansion would have to come with multiple components (2 extra units, development cards, capitals, commander tokens, and garrison cards.) Of course, these components could just be included in some kind of expansion conversion kit, but who wants that?

I also REALLY love this game. All things mentionned are worth considering for a new expansion.

I would like to also remind the need to print new Home Realms Tiles for the new races (who could start with different resources than the other factions).

It could be nice to play with new races being on the ''neutral'' side if the rules are ajusted correctly in every aspects as already mentionned on here. But it will sure bring a bit of confusion with having already neutral units in the play (in terms of rule book writing). I think it would be just as nice and much simpler to stick with the current rules and add the new factions as Evil or Good. They already have a lot to think about by just adding two new factions as the NEED to be COMPLETE to accomodate the Banners of War expansion.

I am not entirely sure about the ''alliance'' idea as I often play this game as a 2 player game and we can play any factions against each other. If it occurs, it should only be for 4 player games.

I would enjoy more Season Cards! Also, I would like more tactical fate cards! The rest has already been mentionned (more heroes, more map tiles and conquest cards, different new neutral units!!)

I really like the ideas mentionned about the Lost City being more than what it is now. I think we might actually adopt a rule modification in our games for something like the possibility to get neutral hex (dragons or giants ) upon controlling this area. It should not be too easy, but if one could spawn those unit in the game it could be nice. Currently, if there aren't even one neutral dragon on the board at the beginning, there won't be any the whole play. I personnally think those dragons are the most nice looking figurines.

I certainly hope this could be of help and I hope to see a new expansion soon.

I wish we could start a kickstarter for FFG just to see how many of us are genuinely interested in a new addon (and Runebound V3)

While not an expansion, I do see that they're reprinting this game which seems like good news. I'd imagine if it wasn't selling well they wouldn't bother with a reprint. That leaves me with a sliver of hope for a future expansion.

While not an expansion, I do see that they're reprinting this game which seems like good news. I'd imagine if it wasn't selling well they wouldn't bother with a reprint. That leaves me with a sliver of hope for a future expansion.

I wish I knew how big the crowd of people who plays Runewars is (though maybe I don't want to know,) but I bet an expansion would put it on the radar of a lot more people- perhaps that's what they were trying to do with the revised edition- draw some attention to the game to test the waters (read: market) for an expansion.

All these ideas are good ideas. I wonder If we will ever see another expansion to this really awesome game.

Adding to the above: make playing with 6 player optional. Yes, it will take forever to finish a game, but so does Twilight Imperium and that's not stopping anyone. If you are going to add new races and print new templates anyway, then why not?

About new neutral units: add common fantasy infantry types of some kind. You can produce neutral units in cities. And I can imagine sorcerors living in cities. But why would a city produce hellhounds or bats? It would surely add to the flavor If you could produce basic levies of some kind.

And add some really nasty neutral guardian demon who will not rout or bow to diplomacy. Neutral units are too easy to defeat imho.

Lastly, I like the desolation and cryomancy tokens. Some lava tokens would be nice. Or benificial paradise tokens.

Neutral units are too easy to defeat imho.

I don't mind this - I don't think the intent was ever to have unallied neutrals be tough to defeat, but rather serve as minor nusainces and potential allies to your army.

Having a few "big bad" neutrals could possibly work, but the area they guard better be pretty rich; it has the potential to really screw a player over early on if they get stuck next to more than one of them.

Neutral units are too easy to defeat imho.

I don't mind this - I don't think the intent was ever to have unallied neutrals be tough to defeat, but rather serve as minor nusainces and potential allies to your army.

Having a few "big bad" neutrals could possibly work, but the area they guard better be pretty rich; it has the potential to really screw a player over early on if they get stuck next to more than one of them.

I think that's pretty well covered by the ore-rich hex with two giants. If you happen to be the Elves, starting near that hex can be great.

Sigma and I worked a lot on expansion stuff. I won't list it all, but here are some of the highlights:

- We argued that the Dwarves were not super influential and the Orcs were not horribly so. Thus, instead of the 0-5 and 5-0 Tactics/Influence, we thought it best to have the Dwarves be 3.5 (rounded down to start) and the Orcs would be 2.5 (rounded down to start). This also served the purpose of us making two custom factions that were 0-5 & 5-0 and were thematically so.

-We definitely thought they should be Neutral and obviously neutral objectives would be needed. We concluded that these factions had no "opposite alignment" and any wording of such would not apply to them.

-The Dwarves would start with 2 Food, 2 Wood, and 3 Ore and the home realm should have a double mountain on it.

-The Orcs would start with 4 Food, 1 Wood, and 2 Ore and the home realm should have a single water and single mountain on it.

-We added several new rules. One of them was the Entangle token, which when assigned to a unit, would prevent the unit from drawing Fate cards for the remainder of the battle. Additionally, the unit could not become routed until all other available units had been routed first and the unit could not be forced to retreat.

-We added two new attributes. One of them was Stalwart, which meant that the unit could not become routed or forced to retreat by an opponent during a battle.