I played Descent and Runebound about 20 times each.
My experience with Runebound is that it's less interactive than Talisman. We parallel process all players turns to speed up the game. That's not much fun, as the whole purpose of getting together to play games with your friends is interactivity.
We bought all the expansions, but only a few of them are easy enough to use to warrant including in play. Most require A: changing the normal rules of play, which are not super-easy to begin with, and B: going through the decks and removing specific cards. The regular game has hundreds of cards and sorting through them to find specific ones just for setup isn't worth it, we feel.
The expansion that grants you a whole new board is not, Talisman-like, an addition to the regular board, it overlays the regular board, acting as an alternate game. As old Talisman vets, this disappointed us. We expected new boards as new options in the normal game, not a replacement for the normal game.
It can be fun, but we haven't played it in a long time because of the solitaire element to it.
Descent can be a lot of fun, but the setup- time is prohibitive. No matter how much enthusiasm we might have to play, it's always diminished once we remember how long it takes to set up.
Furthermore, the scenarios are not remotely balanced. It's very easy for one scenario to have a TPK 5 minutes in, and another one be a total cake walk all the way to the end. The characters can pick characters that swing this wildly in either direction.
We played it a lot, but once we learned how random the results were, we put it away.
