by maerlyn
Hi everyone,I fell in love with runewars when I saw it for the first time. It is the most beautiful boardgame I ve ever seen (we own the old version with the mountains sticking out of the board) and it has got some amazing fluff. Sadly the game seemed to be strikingly boring. The usuall FFA version seemed to be some kind of Settlers from Catan with everyone building up huge armies and only a few clashes between armies and a sudden and very anticlimactic end. The 2vs2 version felt like two 1vs1 games being played next to each other with the game ending because of one players capitulation, and the 1vs1 version suffered due to the incredible luck differences of the fatecards which work even worse than dice. Since if I draw a bad fatecard for my casters my opponent will more likely draw a good fate card for his.
So, here come the houserules:
The most important thing is to use the fatecards provided in the downloadsection (they arent online yet, but they should be soon, I ll post the link here as soon as they are).
Use one set of fatecards for every player. The overall chances for the results are the same as with the original fatecards, but I changed their distribution, with the 4 gold cards having the best results and the 18 red cards being the worsed with 2 miss chances most of the time.
This way, if you have bad luck during a battle or a diplomacy attempt you will have better luck the next time. And both players will have the same amount of good cards over the course of an entire game.
If you fight against neutral units your opponent draws the cards for the neutral units from his fatedeck. Draw cards in every battle for every unit even if all units have already been defeated.
Setup:
We feel like the races arent really balanced in 1vs1. With
elves < human < orcs < undead
(some of this might be up to debate, but since the bad heroes are generally stronger than the good ones this only strenghtens our point, and undead are still overpowered).
So we decided upon the following. Pick the races randomly. The stonger race builds up the entire board and decides upon the starting locations, the weaker race picks his starting place first.
Optional rule for Setup: if the board is too small (less than 12 squares) pick a 5th piece for setup.
Every player draws 2 command cards at the start and chooses one to keep, discard the other. This evens out the chances between the players and makes the first commander even more precious.
Tactic card changes:
Lost City cannot be played during the first turn (this card might still be over powered in a 1vs1 situation and maybe should be banned).
All tactic cards that give equal amounts of goodies to two players (like both of you returning one used order card from the table or get 1-4 influence) have a new text instead of the old one. The new text is:
Play during your turn. Draw two fatecards. Either discard those two cards to your fatecards discardpile or put them back on top of your fatecarddeck in any order.
(Useful before important battles or diplomacy attempts).
Heroes:
If you draw a Timmorian Shard you may discard it immediately and draw a new reward card instead.
Balance issues:
The Elvish upgrade card for Treeants also recudes the influence cost for the additional fatecard by 1 (down to 1).
Optional rule to balance the luck issue:
Every player may (once per season) pay 4 influence to the bank to discard the drawn season card and draw a new one instead. The other player may react with paying 5 influence to keep the current season card. In this case the former player still looses his 4 influence as well.
Winning:
The player who holds 5 dragon runes for one year wins the game (6 dragon runes if you play with the free cities).
There is no auto game end after 7 (or whatever) rounds of playing.
This is still a work in project. Any feedback is welcome!
have fun
Maerlyn