Cardboard Combat: Runewars

The board, on my side

 Been on a board gaming roll these past few weeks. It all started when one of my buds bought A Game of Thrones (which I also wrote about) which we never got enough of.

The past weekend, another buddy of ours, BadBeef, invited us for some more board gaming. We originally planned for it as a sleep-over but due to some circumstances, we only have a day for it. Only 2 (me and my best bud) of us made it to Beef's place but heck 3 dude's the minimum for any large scale board game.

'Beef: "I come for your pepperoni!"

So there we were at 'Beef's place which was just perfect for a small gathering of gaming nuts. Good thing his wifey doesn't mind and we get to see their new baby girl which was like a mini version of 'Beef himself. Upon sitting on their den's table, we were presented with a number of games to try out including Star Craft BG, War for Westeros BG, Puerto Rico etc but 'beef proposed we play Runewars as apparently it was the 'easiest' to set up and play at that time.

Or so we thought.

Homer doing 'masterful moves'

The Runewars box was brought up and first thing that I said was 'Sh*t! That's a huge one!'. The box was about 2 feet across,a foot wide as it is tall but then again it was all too over packaged. I cracked the box open and saw that all the hexes (the board was divided into them), figures, cards and other components could've fit into half of the box. We took out all the components and first that thrilled me into playing it was the rich game art for the hexes, cards and the player's tracking board. The came the figures. Not bad for a board game I might say. Not exactly like Warhammer or anything like that but still commendable. And it came with a lot of variety too with around 4 types of units unique for each race and 7 types for neutrals. So for aesthetics, Runewars is a wninner.

We agreed to set-up the board and learn the rules on-the-fly. Basically, each of the players get to choose their race which is basically analouges of humans, undead, chaos and elves. Since we're only a trio at that time, we left out playing the elves. Set-up was followed by laying down the hexes thereby forming the game map, dividing the player trackers (handiest tool in the game) cards, figures and other what-nots. After that, it's time for some football!

Plastic Carnage!

Runewars plays like a souped-up version of A Game of Thrones and other modern American war game with a few DoTA elements thrown into it. The objective is to take control of 7 'Dragon Runes' scattered along the land (sounds familiar?). Players build armies, control heroes (ala'-DoTA) and seek the Dragon Runes before the game ends in about 8 turns (or 'years') or until a player gets 7 Dragon Runes. Peril in the form of neutral creatures and challenges are scattered along the land, make for deeper and much more interesting game play.

We got to finish the game in 7 hours, with an hour to learn the basics of the game, 'Beef's community meeting and a spaghetti dinner factored in between. 'Beef won in the 9th turn with him collecting 7 Dragon Runes in the end. It was a ton of fun and as expected of us n00bs, we got carried away by the combat system that we almost forgot the true objective of the game (which is, finding the runes). Hopefully, we'd get another guy (or gal, most welcome) to play and have it shorter to try out another game along the way.

Watch out for more of Cardboard Combat!

Smiles all the way. Right.