What I Played Today: July 5

World of Warcraft: The Board Game, (Runebound)

What’s the point of having a table if I don’t use it, I said to myself, and set up a game of the one game that had been haunting my dreams for at least a couple of months now, World of Warcraft: The Board Game. I don’t think I was ever this excited about playing the original, if only I didn’t have to keep changing the rules in order to make the game work.

My table doesn’t exactly have all the space I need to set up a full game of this with the Burning Crusade board and everything, but I managed close enough, and made it through about ten turns, getting my heroes to level 4 and in the Outlands beating the everloving crap out of Fungal Giants. We had a small bit of trouble fighting Morgraine (the dungeons are the best part of the expansion, if only there were more than seven of them), but I’m poised to have my Shaman and my Paladin go and drop the pants off Kelthas or whatever his name is. I wish this game didn’t take so long (there’s a lot of paperwork, especially when you’re playing solo), because the combat mechanics and the vast number of different play styles granted by all the powers and items are really fun.

I also didn’t officially play Runebound, thus the parentheticals, but I read pretty much every rulebook for the game, because apparently they just realized another expansion for it, and I remember when I last played it thinking that it really wasn’t that impressive. Or was it? It was so long ago that I forgot, so I dug it up and took a look at the rulebook, which is OLD SCHOOL; 8 point font, 6 pages, no pretty and pointless splash images. It seems competent enough, a lot of rolling dice to succeed any challenge, which is pretty swingy. But all the expansions (there are 5 (!) big box expansions and 24 (!!!) little box ones) seem to add a lot of options to the game as a whole. I should play it again to see if they might be worth the effort. Amazing for a game that’s only five years old. Carcassonne’s expansions seem rational comparatively.