by Leaf Ninja
[Revised Edition]Let's get the basics out of the way.
Runewars is a Fantasy-themed 4X game where civilizations seek the acquisition of legendary artifacts called Dragon Runes.
The presentation is absolutely stellar.
Here's a link to the BGG Runewars Image Directory:
http://boardgamegeek.com/images/boardgame/59294/runewars
Modular board changes drastically each game. Minis, minis, minis ... minis. The game is "fiddly" (lots of bits, cards, pieces, moving things around) but I personally find this enjoyable. The components are very high quality and you actively play a part in something of a developing epic fantasy narrative.The gameplay is awesome
Click this for a pretty good rules summary, courtesy of user Khula:
http://files.geekdo.com/geekfile_download.php?filetype=appli...
Click this to read the entire rulebook:
http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/ffg_content/runewars/minis...
It's a mixed bag of interlocking themes and elements (hoarding resources, seasonal events, building and developing and harvesting from the land over game years, heroes venturing out on quests and supporting armies in battle, elven armies clashing against the undead, etcetcetcetc) which I like for the developing fantasy narrative aspect of the game There are four races with unique units that have their own abilities and specialties in combat. there are multiple, perfectly viable ways to achieve the victory conditions. Random elements are shamelessly, unapologetically included in the game mechanics (and yes, that's a star).Now to the good stuff.
It is important to clarify that the rest of this review is founded on a series of personal, awkward gaming milestones. These milestones led to a series of awkward events which in turn led to the awkward acquisition of this game - a story which I will not detail here. It's not great or entertaining or anything. It's just awkward.
So let's summarize.
1) I'm discovering, somewhat reluctantly, that I like Ameritrash games better than Euro games now.
The story was quite different when I first emerged as a boardgamer in the midst of sprouting his first gaming chest hairs. Coming from Monopoly and Risk, and after flirting with friends' copies of Catan, I ended up purchasing a copy of Age of Empires III.
Now, Age of Empires III is very much a Euro - and a good one at that. The board is huge, there are numerous meaningful plastic pieces that aren't just arbitrarily colored cubes, and the silver and gold coins, while also plastic, still somehow produce a pleasant, metallic-sounding jingle when handled with a relaxed fist. Oh, and there were these badass little brown plastic ships. I painted the sails white. It was great.
And, well, it was a Euro. The only random elements of the game were drawing resource tiles and drawing discovery cards. Heck, I might even be wrong (the game's buried somewhere in my parents' house a few cities away, so I can't verify right now). I don't think drawing discovery cards was truly random. BUT ANYWAY, it was a Euro, through and through. And I LOVED it. No more buying the blue spots only to have nobody ever land on them! No more tiny Ukrainian armies somehow fending off repeated brutal assaults on both sides from Europe and Asia! No more asswipe thieves stealing all my crap every other turn! All major elements of the game were known and could be planned over the long term, where particularly clever plays in specific instances constituted, validly, the only real "catch-up mechanic" against players who made less mistakes in setting up their little "euro engines." Euros, I figured, are the skill gamer's heaven.
Which, actually, transitions to the next point quite nicely.
2) I tend to win skill-based games more often than I lose them (outside my main gaming group, which is me and my brothers) and sometimes it's awkward.
Please believe me when I say I'm not a jerk or even all that smug when it comes to winning. And on the rarer occasion I lose, I don't get sore or pissy about it. (In fact I get excited when I lose, because I get the chance to learn why.) When you're the type who wins games mostly, you can't be smug when you win and you can't be butthurt when you lose, or you lose playmates very, very quickly.
Players closer to 50/50 win ratios (or less) CAN afford to be smug when they win. They MAY throw tiny tantrums when they lose. They'll still be invited to games. People will still play with them because it's still possible to win against them and winning in general is more fun than losing, even when the loser whines sometimes. Me? Not as much. I win kind of a lot, and when you win a lot, you MUST keep a good attitude whether you win or lose, or people stop playing with you. People have to LIKE playing against you despite knowing it's more likely they'll lose against you. Otherwise they'll just never play.
3) We stop playing all the Euro games we get.
By "we" I refer to my aforementioned main gaming group: my brothers (there's 4 of us and I'm the oldest).
Now, we like each other. We get along very well. And we're all very smart. And since we're all slowly becoming adults and our brains are reaching those adult stages where there are far less instances of drastic short-term cognitive developments, the win ratios are admittedly starting to even out. (This is also true, sadly, for our favorite 1v1 videogame Super Smash Brothers, from the N64 version to Melee to, now, Project M 3.0. Ah, well, I enjoyed the win advantage while it lasted, which was one point five decades.)
So the point I'm coming from is that within this gaming group, win ratios have never been that much of a problem. They accepted over the years that I just have a natural advantage in most games simply due to being at least 4 years older than them, and we basically always have fun playing with each other. Now, the win ratios between all of us are starting to even out. And this is great because we actually accelerate each others' individual skill developments in games because of this. It's the same deal when we play Super Smash Brothers. The only players who stand a chance against us outside our group are top-bracket tournament players at the regional level or higher. If an opponent plays SLIGHTLY more casual then we basically annihilate them. And this is just because we have this always-available pool of similarly-skilled gamers within our own gaming group. The more you play and learn the nuances needed to overcome instances of rough equality to emerge as the winner in a single game, and the more the other player figures out ways to counter in subsequent games, the better you both become at the game over repeated plays. We can do this nearly 24/7 during weekends.
So, euros.
While we tend to enjoy the slick, precise mechanics of all the top euros we've played over the years, we always end up kind of awkwardly not playing them anymore after a couple weeks or months or so. It happened to Agricola, it happened to Puerto Rico, and I'm reasonably sure it's happening, as I type, to Eclipse.
Now consider the games we still play after months and months or even years: Mage Wars, Summoner Wars, Netrunner, Battlelore 1e and now 2e, Descent 2e. And now after two weeks of consistent play, I suspect the same will be true of Runewars. (You can just tell with these things.)
So now it's weird, because we're all HIGHLY competitive and enjoy soundly skill-beating the snot out of each other, but in terms of boardgames we actually continue playing, we're beginning to prefer these games with significantly more random elements. I suspect the following:
- We prefer games that don't sacrifice thematic execution for slick, "balanced" mechanics.
- Games that prioritize "balanced mechanics" but "allow small instances of randomness or variation" become ALL ABOUT those small instances of randomness or variation.
For examples outside of Runewars, see:
Super Smash Brothers, Melee:
You want to win at very high, near equal skill levels? Pick Fox or Falco. No, sorry, while Ganondorf may be your favorite Nintendo villain of all time, he's just not a viable pick against them.
(If you have the time or if you're interested, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DIBQ5hJuOg featuring Fox vs. Ganondorf in a tournament setting. These are top-tier players, like actually top-of-the-top.)
(And before anyone yells at me for being a Smash Bros. tier whore, I actually main Link - universally low tier between all Smash Bros. games - against... everybody I play.)
Eclipse
The missiles popped out, and you're not focusing on a military victory so you don't need the tech? WAIT, hold on. First of all, why aren't you focusing on a military victory? (In which case you would get the missiles.) And even if you stick to your guns on this weird non-military strategy, what if the player who IS focusing on winning via military gets the tech after you spend your first action discovering? (In which case you better get the missiles anyway so the player who would reap the benefit most effectively doesn't get them).
(My tone in this example is mostly rhetorical. I do realize in Eclipse that it's perfectly possible to win against a military-focused player who was somehow allowed to obtain missile tech.)
To clarify,
We end up playing at high skill levels quite early in boardgames, and the skill gap between us is small. Maybe even... tiny. Hence, random elements in these supposed "euros" become totally amplified in terms of defining the winning player. Since we're all so close to each other in terms of skill, and because this skill level is very high, inherent random game elements (grabbing certain buildings or developing certain combinations first in Puerto Rico due to player position when certain resources come out, or refer again to the above examples) that give significant advantages to players who happen to be in optimal positions to obtain or exploit these elements when they arise ... become magnified in importance over the game as a whole after repeated plays. The game becomes less of a "simulation" determined by skill, and devolves into a gamier meta-game of "being in the best position so/when 'this' happens at some random crucial point." At high, very equal skill levels where random mechanics play larger roles in determining winning players, games boasting "5% random mechanics, 95% skill" become games about "gaming" that 5%, because that 5% is often so crucial in securing a solid advantage over the course of the game. We no longer play the game as a whole because we're so focused on such a small aspect of it.
Back to Runewars.
Runewars, as a COMPLETELY unapologetic in-your-face Ameritrash game in the 4X genre, succeeds immensely for us for the following reasons:
Thematic execution is brilliant and is not sacrificed for gamey balance mechanics.
Despite and because of the strong and completely unapologetic inclusion of luck, skill and effective decision making at all points of gameplay still play major parts in determining game outcome. This effectively means that we're playing the whole game at all points of the session.
Players who are able to accept that luck can - and very often will - be a determining factor especially between players of roughly equal skill open up this avenue of game enjoyment: because the presence of luck returns focus to the game as a whole, the game no longer becomes about winning by slim, "skillful" margins based on some obscure yet secretly crucial mechanic, but instead about experiencing a compelling narrative. While attempting to actively win the game is still the main way to enjoy it, accepting the presence of luck allows players to experience games thematically. "Where should I best place my flat disc on this arbitrarily assigned action track so I can move my bits around in the most efficient way possible to hoard something called a "victory point" instead becomes "Ah, crap, I don't know HOW the demon-spawn got a bunch of giants to join their cause, but I better build strength fortifications on my stronghold. Did we harvest wood last season? Okay, yes, good. Hopefully the archers and pegasus knights manning the defenses can hold them off long enough for the barbarians to eventually give up and leave. They can't bang on our doors forever."
(Yes, I know I straw-manned that comparison, but come on, admit it: not by all that much.)
Purely despite the strong presence of luck, the game still successfully rewards players who develop solid strategies, execute clever tactics, and exercise sound decision making.
2-player games I've played with friends (outside my main gaming group, so, er, like actual friends) confirm that focusing on the skill-dependent aspects of the game rewards players more highly than focusing on the luck-dependent aspects of the game. In a recent 2p game, a friend I played against took a comment "yeah, tactics cards are overpowered. *Anecdote about how my brother screwed me in a season via ONE tactics card*" way too close to heart and HOARDED tactics cards in the game, paying significantly less attention to on-board positioning and hex control. During season 2, he SCREWED me with a single card, after I spent 3 influence to grab the Wizards Council title card. The tactics card he played allowed him to take the card from me FOR FREE, rendering all influence bids useless for me for the rest of the game (also, spending orders just to re-build influence to later re-take the same card would've been a less-than-optimal decision)
Rather, instead of focusing on gathering influence for bids, I focused on hex control and unit positioning, whereas his gleeful "take-that" moment with that single tactics card spurred him to focus harder on hoarding yet more tactics cards. I turned the game around in one turn when he took a city with 3 units, when I had a total of 8 units able to move on him next turn within a two-tile radius. Also, by limiting my ability to win influence bids, he secretly convinced me to instead use influence for neutral alliances. By then we'd both maneuvered various neutral retreats onto a single center hex (it had, like, two hellhounds and a giant and three beastmen on it. It was nuts), and I managed a successful diplomacy attempt using a single elven archer. BAM, one for one in the luck-play - he happened to have the right tactics card for just the right moment, and I got lucky with a diplomacy attempt at a crucial point in the game. But my better focus on the 4X genre fundamentals (area control, resource management, unit positioning), the gameplay elements related to skill, ended up being the game's main deciding factor.
(He still pulled off very complex tactics card combos in later turns as a result of hoarding so many of them, but it turns out that unless you have actual units on the board, they don't really do anything.)
I mean, so there you go. To enjoy Runewars, you need to go in knowing the following:
Luck can and often will decide a game between equally skilled players at the top level.
(Personally, I don't see why people complain about this. Would you rather just "tie" every time in exchange for zero luck-based elements? See: tic-tac-toe. Or would you rather increase the complexity of the game through the implementation of more arbitrary zero-luck mechanics that have very, very generic themes to them? See: Chess.)
Among equally skilled players who accept the presence of luck and its corresponding influence on who "wins," the game presents a compelling narrative and highly entertaining gameplay developments.
To summarize:
- Runewars is a fantastically presented game.
- It unapologetically features many luck-driven elements and that's awesome and fun and kind of funny to know that it just wrings every ounce of patience from avid power/control-gamers.
- Yet it still manages to necessitate and reward effective strategy development, clever tactics, and solid decision making.
- Those with overactive imaginations (I didn't get to do as much of that in this review. I go nuts in other reviews) will appreciate the narrative developments experienced through gameplay.
Put simply, I love Runewars. A lot. And it's cool if you can't get over the random elements. A few years ago I might have been in the exact same boat. But now it's a different story and the group I most enjoy playing with prioritizes different aspects of boardgame enjoyment than we did at some point in the sort-of-distant past. No biggie. Change comes with time, etc etc.
If you're new to Runewars, honestly just go try it out. Yes, strategy, tactics, and decision are the core gameplay elements inherent to the game, and the layers at which they can be executed are deep enough so that many different levels of "skill" exist among these mechanics. But also, yes, there are random elements and especially among groups composed of individuals sharing similar levels of skill, more appropriately groups of individuals playing at the very highest levels of skill, the random elements will often influence if not outright decide the game's outcome. Anyone who argues otherwise simply does not understand the game. But those who truly embrace it (because the randomness is so clearly designed to be there) will discover a Fantasy 4X experience hard to find anywhere else.