Runebound at the Monkey Den

The Monkeys are generally an RPG group, but on occasion, we break out a board game. Last night, for instance. Only three of us could show up, and since that's not enough for a Pathfinder Society scenario, we broke out Runebound for the first time.

Runbound is quite likely my favorite board game -- but until last night, I'd only ever played it solo (using the "threat level" variant). I find it to be an exceptional solitaire experience, and I've played it literally a couple dozen times. I'd always wanted to play it multi-player, but I was a little worried how the experience would translate. It turns out, I found it very different with a couple of other guys at the table. And, to be honest, I think Runebound may actually work better as a solo game than multi-player, even though it wasn't specifically designed to be played solitaire. The sense of the building narrative is what I like so much about the game, and that specific facet of play is seriously undermined with other players.

I'm sure my opinion there is tinged by the fact that I got whomped. I was playing Ronan -- as usual, I zero-in on the ranger-archetype character. And (again) as usual, I got off to an extremely slow start with him. Meanwhile Red Scorpion (Joe B., in his first ever game) and Varikas (Joe F., who had played a few times before) were zipping around the board and making mincemeat of yellow and blue encounters while I was still plugging away on greens. What the hell even is mincemeat, anyway? And why do I always start slow with Ronan?

Anyway, despite the fact that we were playing pretty briskly (especially since it was our first time as a group), the hour was getting late so we decided that the first player to defeat any red encounter would be declared the Winner and Lord Sovereign of All He Could Survey. That ended up being Varikas, so, hooray or whatever for Joe F.

The game seemed to go over pretty well. I'm hoping it hits the table at the Den again soon.