Runewars

Customer Reviews

Great Fantasy game Review by Sean

Price
Value
Quality

Although it comes at a fairly high price, you get a lot of stuff with this game. Runewars is a fantasy war game where each player is striving to be the first faction to gain 6 Dragon Runes. Each player starts with 2 and more appear on the modular map each turn. You can capture your opponents Runes by conquering the areas that they control or use your heroes to go on quests to find new Runes. Each game is quite different as the map is made differently each time and there are 4 distinct factions - Elves, Human, Undead, and Demons (Uthuk Y'llan) each with their own different units to use in battle. The factions have different strengths and weaknesses that provide different opportunities and obstacles for them. Eg. The Elves are fast but they tend to be a bit weaker lacking any really large units.
Each faction must also contend with the neutral units found on the map. They can attempt to ally with them or simply attack them. There are also secret objectives that will allow players to obtain Runes as well.
One way that Runewars is really great is through the clever use of order cards. Each turn is divided into the 4 seasons and each player plays one order per season. The possible orders are things like Conquer, Recruit, Fortify and Harvest Resources, they can be played in any order but the players get a bonus if they are played in a specific order. So, on occasion you might really need to recruit before you attack, but in so doing you would have to forfeit your bonus. This leads to hard choices for the players and there is never enough turns to do everything that you might want to do. It makes for a tense game as the orders are revealed simultaneously during each season and then played out.

Overall this is one of my favourite games. There are many ways to win and players can form tentative alliances to benefit each other, but these ultimately fail as only faction can be the first to claim 6 Runes. (Posted on 1/30/11)