I want to offer a little background on my gaming habits for a point of reference on what I usually play. I have played TCG’s, I think close to forever, and I think I have played almost every major one to some degree. I transitioned at some point to wargaming for quite a few years. I played most Games Workshop stuff, Warmachine, some homebrew stuff, Clan Wars, Warzone…I think you get it, quite a bit of stuff has passed through my gaming table. I have lately moved into playing board games. Boy, I was surprised to find ow much thingshave changed from the old Avalon Hill games with cardboard chits and busy game boards from the 1980’2 and 90′s. While maybe these games were deep and driven to be strategic, they lacked to me and many of my next generation with lackluster visual enhancements and overly complex rules systems. So, bring on the next generation.

Of the games I have moved into lately I have a feeling that Runewars is going to be towards the top of my list for a decent amount of time. It has taken so many aspects of my past gaming and mushed them all together that it feels as if they were going after a game system that can gateway many gamer types into this new era of board gaming. It pulls wargaming, a little bit of random TCG type mechanics, and some of the best recent ideas from the modern board game era.

I have now played it twice, three if you count the solo session I usually try to get in to learn a game. While I might not have logged a lot of games the replayability appears high and I have not left either session feeling like anything was missing from the experience.

I will now move into what some of the actual details are for this gem.

First, it is interactive. To me that is very important. I want to be working against other players, most of the time, when I play a game. I enjoy the competition. There are four factions all pulled from the Runebound/Decent world that are trying to discover 6 dragonrunes that get scattered about the player set up map. The factions are basically Undead, Demons, Elves and the Humans. I have yet to play each faction so I am not going to be able to offer a whole lot of insight in much depth for strategy in playing them. I can tell you that the bad guys (undead and demons) seem to care more about the tactic cards and the elves and humans deal more with influence. This is at least where the factions begin the game in focus.

After the pretty long set up of all the cards, pieces and counters the game is on a turn clock, called years. The game will end after six years have elapsed. Do not fret though because just like in life each year has four seasons that are sub-phases to the turns. Each season has a random event that will happen then a static everytime event that occurs for each spring, summer, fall and winter.

With each season the players choose one of eight orders for the faction to carry out. This includes such things as gathering resources, building strongholds, recruiting more troops or attacking. Part of the cool stategy of this game is that you need to plan your full year because you can only perform each order once. There are other cool things that happen in the middle of all this, but I will leave some of that for a surprise when you get your own copy to play.

The battle resolution is decided in an initiative order based more or less from the weakest troops to the more powerful ones. The game does not use dice at all. The attacking is done with cards that are flipped over and reference the different base shapes of the units that are involved in battle. This is new and fun for me.

Next you have what I am told are some of the recognizeable characters from the other games from this universe. They are the heroes of the factions. They do not interact with the units on the board and work towards completing quests that you are dealt that require these heroes to get to a certain location. Once the hero is at the location most of the quests require a skill test to complete and gain a reward (treasure). Beware though because opposing heroes can duel your hero and try to either kill them or take their loots.

This is a very condensed nutshell of Runewars. The game really is about this is easy to play. There is a lot of stuff on the table while this game is going on and it looks a little daunting to jump into. But, believe me that I have taught players the basic mechanics of the game in about 30 minutes and they were pretty much playing on their own by the end of the first year. Just dig in and start playing this one if you enjoy a wargame that requires you to accumulate resources and get that real I am running a civilization type of game…this is for you.

I will continue to drag this game along with me on my Thursday visits to Gamerz in Greenwood. If you want to join in sometime shoot me a PM and I will make sure that you are included because the only downfall to this game is that it only accepts 4 players.

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