Rune Age - Review

Rune Age - the next in a line of non-ccg, psuedo deck building games from Fantasy Flight Games.  We got the opportunity to demo it at GenCon.








The set-up is simple, pick one of the 4 races - Elves, Human, Beastmen, Undead to play, collect some coins, collect some troops, buy/win a stronghold, take over a neutral city or two and defeat the BBG/other player/or whatever other *win* condition exists - there are 4 preset games in the core box.

There are effectively 2 resources, coin and influence - neither is particularly large in the core set, but I suspect it will inflate like all games.

The dynamics of each race is unique but opposed by one of the other races.  The Undead pulls many of their troops from the discard pile while the Humans pull a lot of their power from the active deck.  The Beastmen get tougher when they have taken a little damage while the Elves seem to drop like flies, but pop right back up the next round.



Once you are ready to take on a "boss" level mob, you get to roll a die and hopefully you get a null, otherwise you lose  1-2 units and probably lose the fight.  It's simple, elegant in a way and irritating as all hell to be that close but fail.

The game we played was a demo that took about 2 hours and we didn't actually complete the game, but were getting very close.  I suspect once the rules are known and understood, a game can be completed in close to an hour.  I liked the game and I look forward to playing it again, but I'm hoping that we aren't seeing a situation where the market is being flooded with these types of games.

A big thanks to Matt Slowiak for overseeing our game and answering our inane (to him) questions.