I strongly recommend
against Runebound. I've played it a few times, and each time it was a game of solitare. There's no significant player interaction, if you are playing 4+ players you sit for ages waiting for your turn to come up, and there's no real "come from behind" factor. Most of the reviews I've seen on bgg recommend 2-3 players, possibly 4.
Descent, on the other hand, is a blast. There's a couple of balance problems (the end boss is generally too weak), but this depends a lot on which scenario you play. The dungeon tiles are also the right scale for D&D, so you get double use out of them.
Sorry to derail the thread for the moment but I have been wondering what the difference between Runebound 1st and Runebound 2nd editions are? I have the first edition and think it is pretty awsome. However I don't have any of the expansions because I didn't know how big a difference there were between the two editions (and most of the expansion products are for the 2nd edition).
Runebound 1st edition used a d20 for resolution; Runebound 2nd edition uses 2d10 for resolution. That's the major difference, although there are others. From my discussions with someone that has 1e, the 2e version is much, much better - the d20 is just too random. There's still the luck factor, but you can plan your battles much better. (Losing a battle in Runebound generally means you're going to lose the game, as you have to give up your most powerful item and all your gold... getting them back isn't going to happen easily).
Just a couple of thoughts on other fantasy-style board games:
The
World of Warcraft board game is actually really good. (It's another "big box" game from FFG). It's a game that wants 5-6 players, though - it's significantly less interesting with fewer. You need to use the Deadly PVP variant, but that hasn't been a problem for us. A 6-player game took us a little over 3 hours. Like
Runebound, there are downtime issues, but, strangely enough, they're allieviated in 6 player because you spend your opponents' turn planning your team's next turn.
Talisman (1st & 2nd edition) remains for me what Runebound was striving for but failed to achieve. It has two great points over the later effort: Speed and Player Interaction. (Avoid the 3rd edition like the plague; it was nerfed into boringness). One problem Runebound has (as does WoW, actually) is that combat is you roll dice against the monster. In Talisman, both you and the monster roll dice, so the other players can actually do something during your turn... not that it takes that long. Most turns take a minute; in Runebound, they can take 5 minutes.
Cheers!
