Session Summary - 4th April 2007

Yet again, just Dave D, Mike, Steve H and myself; along with Ben and Matthew. I understand from Mike that there are some uncollected T-shirts; these will be paraded on TV in due course. Anyway, with only Ben and Matthew along I decided not to play AD&D; instead we played Runebound (2nd ed.) This is a boardgame of exploring a fantasy land; aiming to gain experience and allies to take on the big baddie (the Dragonlord) or to collect three Dragon Runes (equally as tough a challenge). The game in some ways is similar to Talisman, however in Runebound there are a lot more decisions you can make and you have more control over how you achieve your goals. For example, you may see an Ally you'd particularly like (because they complement your characters abilities.) The Ally is in Town x and costs y gold to hire. So you know to head for that town and how much gold you need to get from encounters. Movement is by rolling a set of unique dice showing terrain symbols and moving into the allowed terrain. Thus, mountains are harder to move through (because there is only 1 mountain symbol on each dice). The encounters are graded from Green (easiest) to Red (hardest , and how you win). But it's your decision when you change from Green encounters to going after the Yellow (the next hardest). Back to the Ally example. Need quick gold? Then go and beat up a few greens (be warned, they're not all pushovers!)
The game started fairly leisurely (as Matt was new to the game (in fact, is new to these sort of games overall)). Ben fell foul of an Assassin encounter early on and took it really personally. He finally killed them on the fifth attempt! (Like Talisman, you don't die as such but you lose stuff and start again from the nearest town. You keep the same character however, and whatever it was that done you in sticks around, fully healed, available for anyone to take on. Ben was insisting we left it alone). I had to run away from my first encounter, fortunately my Special Ability was to automatically escape from combat. This meant I could scout out the opposition and run off if I thought they were too tough; so I went for some early Yellows.
As the game progressed, Matt and Ben got more into planning their moves ahead ('to get to that encounter I need two hills and a swamp so if I don't get them then I'll head for the Town' etc.). We didn't finish the game so when time was up we scored off earned experience points.
Dave 16
Ben 12
Matt 12
Ben and Matt decided that Ben was second as he had more money than Matt did.
Overall, give it a go. Talisman wasn't a bad game overall (but did have some bad points). Runebound is better and a worthy successor.

Dave D taking over here. On the piece of paper Dave gave me he lists the scores as follows, the order's the same but the scores slightly different:

Runebound 150 mins
Player	Posn.	Points
Dave C	1	17
Ben	2=	14
Matthew (2)	2=	14

Over on the other table, we had:

On the Underground 90 mins
Player	Posn.	Points
Dave D	1	62
Mike	2	56
Steve H	3	46

This game seems to go in 2 ways, either they are very close, or very spread out, this one tending toward the latter, I can't think of much else to say since although I love the game, I can't think of anything prompting a massive narrative.

Industrial Waste 60 mins
Player	Posn.	Points
Dave D	1	63
Mike	2	51
Steve H	3	43

Steve strayed from his usual all out green strategy and started by innovating his workforce requirement, I think this was more due to the unusually high availability of hiring and firing cards. I don't think he plans to try this again. Although I don't hold that the only way to play is to get your waste production down as quickly as possible, generally preferring to lean toward the raw materials track, I do think that the workforce requirement is probably the lesser of the three.

Until Wednesday