Rapidly approaching the midpoint of its target, The Playful Gnome’s board game Runicah is well on its way to success.
Runicah is a game of 30-second alliances in a chaotic Norse setting, it’s currently up with a —humble— £9’000 target over on Kickstarter.
The game sees players attempting to gather runes to appease the gods through completing a variety of challenges and quests; but, the risks are high and many of the quests can’t be won alone.
Each of the players recieves a handful of loot at the start of each turn, each item has a value relevant to… well, how useful it would be in a challenge situation. Players then take turn to trigger a quest, each one having it’s own challenge value as well as a quantity of runes deemed reward, and a cost for failure.
A high challenge will probably be impossible for a single player, but that’s absolutely fine because the entire premise of the game is based around player interaction. Players offer offer our their own services and equipment while haggling over who gets which cut of the goods, undercutting each other or offering favours as payment. Trading stages, and a ‘wings of change’ condition card are then deployed before the next character players.
It all makes for a fairly fast paced game, especially considering that all it takes to win is to form one of several combinations of runs (The same rune in four of five of the colours, or 4 different runs of the same colour) although there’s a clever balance employed in that the more players there are the easier quests will be bested, but the more time will be spent carefully gambling with trades due to the distribution of runes.
Playtime is listed as between 20-40 minutes, which ties in well to the example playthrough which two of the developers had using Tabletopia (below).
Kickstarter offerings are interesting with a print and play version of the game offered out at just £3 and the base game offered at £17. This get really interesting when you get to £27 however as you then receive the game’s runes as non-card components in a bag — presumably these will be like small Mahjong tiles.
Finally, fulfilment is expected in around 13 months.
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