Runebound & Descent. Any good?

[Beckett]

So, World of Warcraft board game is worth checking out?

Regarding Descent, do any of the expansions let you go beyond the five player limit?

I've never read much on the WoW board game, but what I've heard hasn't been encouraging.

For the Descent player limit (and the five players means 1 overlord and four heroes), there's no official increase. The only change in monster stats between 2,3, or 4 heroes is that each additional hero increases the health of monsters by one. On the official boards, people have posted about playing with 5 or 6 heroes and upping both health and armor by 1 for each additional. Beyond that, I think the game would start to break down; you'd need to spawn more monsters or something to compensate.

 

[MerricB]

Runebound is multiplayer solitare. It is ok, but not particularly good IMO. Game time is 1 hour per player, and you should never play it with more than 3 players. The game gets significantly better the expansions, but I dislike intensely how there isn't much player interaction.

Felon: "The entertainment value is based less on strategy and more on luck of the draw. The problem there is, once you've played the latter type of game a few times, you learn all the cards and nothing comes as much of a surprise. Do Descent and Runebound fall into that same trap?"

Runebound *definitely* falls into this trap. As I said, it's really solitare: you versus the game. OTOH, you can buy a lot of small, cheap expansions to change the story of the game.

Descent has player interaction, which I like. There are two drawbacks: it's adversarial D&D, thus DM vs players, and balance really can suffer as a result. The final encounter normally proceeds with the DM/Overlord getting no actions at all... early in the game, it's weighted towards the Overlord. The second is that it's a lot like a D&D dungeoncrawl... why not play D&D? Still an enjoyable game.

Campaign rules are coming in an expansion, btw.

For Felon: Problem with this is it uses Scenarios (effectively prepackaged adventures), so you'll run out of surprises there. OTOH, given the way the Overlord role works, there's a lot of surprises from that, so a single scenario will be played very differently each time.

World of Warcraft: The Boardgame is best played with 6 players, and is a long game: 3-5 hours. I rather like it, but it can have serious issues with player downtime, and player interaction is limited. OTOH, you play in teams, and with 6 players, you really start paying attention to where the other team is so you can avoid them (or gang up on their weak member with a Bounty on his head...)

For Felon: Three overlords that do different things in the base game that you have to kill; the event cards make each game different, and I think there's a fair amount of strategy.

Talisman is about to be reprinted, and is fun, but yes, it's all about the cards.

World of Warcraft: The Adventure Game has been announced. No-one knows much about it.

Cheers!

 

[Philotomy Jurament]

Talisman, Descent, Hero Quest, Runebound, and even Dungeon! all fall into the same category, for me. That is, they're kinda cool, and I *want* to like them. I even enjoy them for very short periods of time. But when it comes right down to it, I start to get frustrated because they're so much like D&D without actually being D&D. I'd rather just play D&D.

My current favorite board games are Fury of Dracula, Arkham Horror, Bonaparte at Marengo, and War of the Ring. I also enjoy Lord of the Rings (w/F&F expansion), and I've been reading the rules for Flying Colors, which sounds really cool. I have trouble finding players for war games, though (yes, I know about Vassal, etc., but I dislike play-by-computer; I like the face-to-face social and tactile experience of a board game).

 

[GlassJaw]

Descent is wicked fun. I played an "official" event at GenCon and it was a blast - one of the best games I played at GC.

I'm also a HUGE fan of the Doom board game. Similar mechanics as Descent but even more lethal, especially since ammo resource management is a b*tch.

 

[thedungeondelver]

Actually, the Overlord has several Power cards he can play which enhance the powers of all monsters. As the heroes find the silver and gold treasures, they become very tough, but, aside from the first few quests (which are designed to favor the players), in my experience the heroes have been in danger right up to the end.

I've never tried Runebound, but I'm a big fan of Descent. My reviews of the game and expansions can be found here:

Descent
Well of Darkness
Altar of Despair

Really! That's pretty cool sounding; I did not know they could do that. I was relying on 2nd hand information vis-a-vis monsters and their respective power levels.

Thanks for that info.

 

[Felon]

Thank you all. Merric, your approach was particularly helpful.

 

[MerricB]

No problem, Felon. Glad I could help!

I've been playing a lot of boardgames recently - this weekend was 8 hours of RPGing, and 13 hours of boardgaming. I've written a bit about the boardgames in my livejournal - http://merricb.livejournal.com/

I think there are some excellent, excellent boardgames out there, but not all that many that are really great with a fantasy/adventuring theme.

Cheers!

 

[MerricB]

Talisman, Descent, Hero Quest, Runebound, and even Dungeon! all fall into the same category, for me. That is, they're kinda cool, and I *want* to like them. I even enjoy them for very short periods of time. But when it comes right down to it, I start to get frustrated because they're so much like D&D without actually being D&D. I'd rather just play D&D.

Indeed.

My current favorite board games are Fury of Dracula, Arkham Horror, Bonaparte at Marengo, and War of the Ring.

Heh. I've not played Bonaparte, but I played a game of War of the Ring on Friday afternoon... I should have gone for the Free Peoples Military Victory. Instead, I managed to really muck up and draw an Eye hunt tile for 9 corruption when Frodo was in Mordor. Stupid, stupid, stupid!

Fury of Dracula is a very stylish game, though I've not played it enough to really rate it properly.

I love Arkham Horror as a solo game, and find it ok multiplayer - takes a little too long for my real liking multiplayer, and there's too much downtime.

Cheers!

 

[Stormborn]

We HATED Descent. The forced adversarial DM style of play and the game's play time (for the first try at least) were just irritating. In our experiance, with 3 players and 1 overlord, the overlord actually had to pull his punches a little to keep from wiping out the players early.

They are not the same but we have much prefered:

Arkam Horror and its expanisions, although they do take a long time to play
Shadows over Camelot
A Game of Thrones boardgame
Dork Tower board game

We also did not like the Order of the Stick game, mainly because it seemed to be missing some of the rules.

 

[Justin D. Jacobson]

I'll second Merric's words. Runebound is a pretty solid game all around. The biggest catch for it is the lack of player interaction; however, this can be mitigated with a variant where the player to the right rolls for the acting player's adversary instead of using static numbers. (I believe this is an official variant, but I can't recall right now where I saw it.) It generally makes the game a lot more fun. I will also add that the Island of Dread expansion is excellent. I've heard good things about the Midnight expansion as well. In general, the number and variety of the expansions for Runebound keep it very fresh.