S: Well, hello gentle readers. My name is Sam Waters, and Mr Rose has been mad enough to enlist my opinion on the variety of weird and wonderful games he has in his collection, and a few in my own which he happens to like. Chief amongst which is the one we’re starting with today- Rune Age!

P: It is a nice game. And I’m not mad. If I was mad, I wouldn’t be running a games site would I?

S: You have a point.

P: So! Rune Age. Rune Age is a deckbuilder from those guys over at Fantasy Flight games, built in the RuneBound universe. You know, that game that costs £70 and is massive.

S: But fear not. Despite it technically taking place in the same universe, there’s no need to play, have played, or know anything about said universe in order to get a lot of enjoyment out of Rune Age. Which is good, because that’s exactly the state we were in when we found the game.

P: Deckbuilders, in case you were unaware, are games that follow the Dominion style of design. You start off with a deck of (usually) complete and utter crap, and buy more cards to make yourself better, stronger, and all the other things Daft Punk sang about.

S: For those of you who may be slightly more informed and wondering if this is one of those many, many games that have tried to emulate the success of Dominion and have achieved only, um, “limited” success, have patience. Rune Age is a deckbuilding game, but I’d say it’s not really the core focus of the experience.

P: Well, it is. Sort of. You’re still buying cards to make your deck better, still shuffling and trying to do amazing combos and stuff with them. But this is a different kettle of fish. Because this decides to make it interesting. With events. And factions. And cities.

S: To explain in more detail, the core game (there’s an expansion due in the next few weeks, but we haven’t been able to lay our hands on it yet) has four factions. Our local group tends to abbreviate them as Humans, Undead, Chaos, and Elves, which isn’t technically accurate but works well enough for those of us who aren’t RuneBound aficionados.

P: The factions play pretty much as you expect – Undead take millions of the their cards from their discard pile. Again and again. Screw you Sam.

S: Hey, Liz is worse than me what it comes to that. I’ve been preferring Chaos a lot lately.

P: Chaos spend their time trying to kill their own men to make them stronger. Ridiculously so. They basically have an army of suicide attackers. The Elf lot micromanage their cities and influence to give them an unbelievable level of buying power. And the Humans decide to draw their deck every turn. And if you didn’t draw your deck every turn, you did it wrong.

What’s nice is that each are fundamentally different. If you’re playing Humans, you don’t care much for the things in the middle, you just want an efficient deck of men that mean you can keep drawing more and more. If you’re playing Elves, you make damn sure that you buy the middle before anyone else even has the chance to. The Undead just want things to use again and again. And the Chaos…they…they?

S: Chaos require you to use your head. You need plenty of units who want to die for the cause, and plenty of units which are happy to kill them. Too many or too few of either, and you’re in deep trouble.

P: Granted, the game makes it much easier to stick to those strategies. The factions have their own unique barracks, units that only they can buy, and each unit has its own abilities which influence the combat. So the Humans have soldiers who add their deck to their hand. The Chaos lot have those units who die and those units who kill, and so on.

S: There are two types of currency in this game. There is Gold, which is used to purchase units from your barracks, and there is Influence which is used to purchase more Gold, pay for unit effects, and to acquire “neutral” units which are open to any player- but more on those later. Each player’s starting deck contains five Gold, but Influence must be earned through battle and conquest.

P: Primarily, you’re taking influence in the form of cities. Each faction has some outposts that only they can take, but the big hitters are the neutral cities in the centre that you can take at the beginning. Or, if you were too slow (or more likely, you weren’t playing the elves), you can “borrow” them using “diplomatic negotiations”. Read: Take them by force.

S: Ah, but things are not quite as simple as that. You see, once a player takes a City, they’re allowed to send units to defend it (as any fair and just ruler would do).

P: So, why did you do it?

S: Pragmatism, you dolt. Anyway, the point is that if you want another player’s City and the precious precious Influence it provides, you’re going to have to fight them for it. Combat in Rune Age takes two forms, called either “battles” if you’re just fighting monsters, or “sieges” if you’re fighting another player. With battles, it’s simple- play the units you want to use from your hand one at a time, and if the strength of your units beats that of your enemy, you win. With Sieges, players alternate playing cards one a time until final total strength is determined, at which point the bigger army gets or keeps the City.

P: But even that isn’t simple. There’s a nice die that decides to screw with you when battlling when you really don’t want it to. Because of course, an army of footmen against a ridiculously large dragon aren’t going to do well. So you get to roll a die, and it’ll tell you how many men are dead and gone from your glorious cause. I hate that die.

S: But have no fear! Units destroyed in battle can come back…for a price. You see, once a unit is destroyed, it’s not returned to the discard pile after combat like it would be normally. Instead it goes back to a player’s barracks, where it can be repurchased and used over and over again. You’ll never see poor Steve the Footman again once he’s been eaten by the ridiculously large Blue-Eyes, but you can get another one who’s just as good.

P: Well. He’s just not the same.

S: See, this is why you play Undead. Then you can bring Steve back to fight again and again!

P: “But!”, I hear you cry “How do you actually win this game?”. Well, I actually don’t know. I never do. But Sam does!

S: The answer’s a bit more complicated than you might think. Basically, how you win changes depending on which of the four scenarios you’re playing- Resurgence of the Dragonlords, Runewars, Cataclysm, and Monument- and each one gives a profoundly different experience. The upcoming expansion will add two more, which are just as diverse.

In Cataclysm, you’re working together (mostly) just to survive in a world that’s going to hell around you, whereas in Rune Wars it’s an all out war with your rivals, may the best man win, etcetera and so on and so forth. Monument allows for a minimum of other players screwing with your carefully laid plans as you race to build a religious artefact or weapon of mass destruction before your rivals, and Resurgence ends when you kill the really badass dragon who’s been giving you the evil eye all game. For the most part though, the path to victory is the same- build units, acquire more Gold and Influence to get bigger and better units, and win fights against your enemies (human or cardboard).

P: And what’s best about the different types of game modes, is that each is completely different. Resurgence has enough tension and fighting to keep you interested, while still focusing on getting that bloody Dragonlord killed. Monument becomes how much you can keep working on mining all the gold, whilst still maintaining enough of a fighting force to keep hold of your Cities. Rune Wars is all about taking the gloves off and last man standing that you know you sometimes crave. And Cataclysm…we don’t talk about our win record for Cataclysm.

S: Suffice it to say that Cataclysm is challenging enough not to get boring any time soon. *glares at Paddy*.

P: WE’VE BEATEN IT ONCE SAM.

S: Bah. Anyway, the other really great thing about all these different game modes is that Rune Age as a whole has a lot more staying power than plenty of other games. If you’re getting sick of having to fend off natural disasters bent on your destruction every move (and even we reach that point, despite being a bunch of gaming masochists), play Rune Wars for a while and kill your friends for being so useless. If the PVP aspect of the game gets too tiring, play Monument or Cataclysm for a while. This also means that unlike most games with player elimination, a weaker player won’t always be ruthlessly murdered and left twiddling their thumbs for half an hour while everyone else fights it out.

P: There’s a criticism of most deck builders, that they all exist to try and fix non-existent problems with Dominion. And it’s true – they’re all attempting to refine a pretty much perfect concept. But the thing is, Dominions a very introverted game. You don’t really care what anyone else is doing, except perhaps to make sure you’ve got more VP’s.

S: Multiplayer Solitare, in effect.

P: Rune Age completely changes that, you’re either working with those bloody Chaos who die every. Single. Time. *glares at Sam* Or you’re playing against them, obviously so. Fencing over a city, working out what they need and trying to stop them having the buying power to use it. If you want to play multiplayer Solitare then by all means, play Monument mode or Dominion. But this game is so much more than that.

S: It should be pointed out, however, that the game doesn’t really offer a lot for a solo enthusiast, or if you’ve only got two people. The only solo mode in the base game is Cataclysm, and I think anyone who manages to win at that one alone without cheating deserves a medal.

P: A very big medal.

S: Same goes for doing it with two or even three people. Monument with less than three is also rather dry, and Rune Wars with only two is going to end very quickly most of the time. If you want a couple of games done inside an hour, that might be fine for you, but if you really want to get into the teeth of what the game has to offer you’re best off with a full group of four.

P: I love this game. I really do. It’s got a co-op aspect which I always crave, and it’s the right level of hard that makes me pick up and go again and again. It’s got different modes for different people, and they’re all different. It’s got 4 races, and they’re all different. And there’s an expansion on the horizon as well, with 2 more races and 2 more game modes.

S: My feelings are similar. A few people have complained about some balance issues with the different playable factions, and I think that’s fair (although this depends very much on the scenario you’re playing. Chaos tend not to be much help in Cataclysm given there’s less fighting to be done). However, I don’t think the slight edge that say, Undead might have in PVP breaks the game or means there’s always a clear winner even if the players are of roughly equal skill-sets.

The major flaw in the game for me are that each faction has only four units to purchase from the barracks, plus three neutral ones- which have a tendency to be eaten up quickly at the start of the game by those lucky enough to purchase them. This means that the core experience can sometimes be a bit stale if you’ve played it a lot, as there’s certainly obvious strategies which each faction gravitates towards (Undead make lots of little guys, Humans draw cards and stack the deck, and so on) and are played in most games. The expansion will hopefully fix this as it adds 2 new units for each old race as well as the new ones mentioned before, but in terms of just the core set itself, there’s a bit of a lack of variety in the things you can purchase.

P: You know, I don’t care about that. They might end up stale, but they do what they need to do. The whole point of playing the Undead is to draw your discard pile. The whole point of playing Elves is to spend 10 influence even though you only have 3 in front of you. That’s the point, that’s what the cards were designed to do.

S: A fair point. But at the same time, it limits player creativity somewhat. If I really like playing Chaos, and there’s only one way to play Chaos well, then I either have to play in a way that handicaps myself or play a faction I don’t like as much if I want some variety. This is tied in with only having a limited number of units to choose from, and should go away as the game is naturally expanded more over time.

P: Overall, if you like your deck building games then there’s no reason why you shouldn’t love this. I certainly enjoy this over Dominion and Ascension.

S: I concur. It’s sufficiently different from other deckbuilders that try to ape Dominion to be worth looking into on its own merits, and it has far more player interaction than most deckbuilders do. If that’s the kind of game you like, then give Rune Age a shout.

All images from BoardGameGeek