Boardgamey goodness
Copied and enhanced from a post in another thread, so more can enjoy:
Runebound was sitting by my front door when I got home tonight, so I cracked it and played through a couple of solo games. It reminds me of Magic Realm, but without the mind-crippling ruleset. Basically, you traipse around the countryside in search of adventures, which are conveniently color-coded by risk/reward, and then you draw an encounter from the appropriate deck.
The base game is basically a storyline about a necromancer trying to raise the sleeping/dead Dragonlords of the land. You have to get yourself up to a high enough level that you think you can either (a) kill any three Dragonlords (the highest-end encounters, randomly scattered around the outskirts of the board), or (b) luck into finding and killing the bad-ass king dragon, who is mixed in with the others. The first one to do either of these wins the game
There's an optional rule which I highly recommend which puts a timer on the game. If the timer mechanism fills up, the dragons get released and come after you. Again, defeat three or the king to win, but with no rest phases in between and if you die, game over. This mechanism makes the game work well solitaire, which is what I just finished up with.
There are major events and non-combat encounters mixed in, plus a wandering monster optional rule to keep people from just hanging around. During my game, there was a major flood that affected river travel and a dragon incursion that blew up an entire town.
Lastly, while the game comes with the one scenario, they have a pile of add-in card packs which can do anything from just throwing in new loot and critters to entire storyline substitutions which pull out the dragon storyline completely and put in something entirely different (including the PvP one I picked up where each player goes around recruiting an army in preparation for a big showdown at the end).
So far, big thumbs up, though it mostly looks like multiplayer solitaire (with the exception of that PvP addon).
Runebound was sitting by my front door when I got home tonight, so I cracked it and played through a couple of solo games. It reminds me of Magic Realm, but without the mind-crippling ruleset. Basically, you traipse around the countryside in search of adventures, which are conveniently color-coded by risk/reward, and then you draw an encounter from the appropriate deck.
The base game is basically a storyline about a necromancer trying to raise the sleeping/dead Dragonlords of the land. You have to get yourself up to a high enough level that you think you can either (a) kill any three Dragonlords (the highest-end encounters, randomly scattered around the outskirts of the board), or (b) luck into finding and killing the bad-ass king dragon, who is mixed in with the others. The first one to do either of these wins the game
There's an optional rule which I highly recommend which puts a timer on the game. If the timer mechanism fills up, the dragons get released and come after you. Again, defeat three or the king to win, but with no rest phases in between and if you die, game over. This mechanism makes the game work well solitaire, which is what I just finished up with.
There are major events and non-combat encounters mixed in, plus a wandering monster optional rule to keep people from just hanging around. During my game, there was a major flood that affected river travel and a dragon incursion that blew up an entire town.
Lastly, while the game comes with the one scenario, they have a pile of add-in card packs which can do anything from just throwing in new loot and critters to entire storyline substitutions which pull out the dragon storyline completely and put in something entirely different (including the PvP one I picked up where each player goes around recruiting an army in preparation for a big showdown at the end).
So far, big thumbs up, though it mostly looks like multiplayer solitaire (with the exception of that PvP addon).