What is it about sacred temples that make them such juicy targets for roving monsters and villains? That’s a question you… won’t have time to answer in Runemasters, a new cooperative game by Funforge. I’ve been on a real hot streak reviewing great new board games like Chandigarh and Botanicus, and now the good folks at Flat River Group sent me the slim-but-tricky Runemasters to check out, so follow along for my Runemasters Review!
What Is Runemasters, And How Do You Play?
Designed by Antoine Prono with illustrations by Paul Mafayon, Théo Guillot, and Adrien Martinez, Runemasters is a cooperative tower defense game for 1 - 4 players, where players take on the role of guardians protecting a temple from hordes of enemies. Each of the four guardians has a different distinct special ability and ultimate power, which you’ll need to use against the incoming threat.
And believe me, that threat will, indeed, be incoming! One of the things I find most interesting about Runemasters is that it is, quite simply put, extremely punishing. I feel like many cooperative games, over the past five years or so, have softened their difficulty levels. This makes sense when so many of them are more narratively driven, inviting users to explore a world and story.
But sometimes you just want to bash your head against a wall in a coop game that’ll leave your gaming group in shambles, like Pandemic or Spirit Island. Runemasters, I’m happy to report, is a return to that classic form.
In the game, you’ll flip over cards depicting monsters and place them on a colored track that matches their card color. Each turn, they’ll move one space closer to the temple, and automatically deal damage to any hero blocking their path. If no hero’s on the path, they’ll damage the temple. If all your heroes die, or the temple takes too much damage, you lose!
To defeat these monsters, you’ll roll custom six-sided dice. The dice allow you to deal a point of damage to the first enemy in your track if one of their “weak points” matches a symbol you rolled. Or you can use those symbols to power up your ultimate power, perform a special ability, or swap spaces with another guardian.
Defeat most of the monsters in the stack of monster cards, and you’ll reveal the Dawn card - if you survive with at least one hero still on the board, you win!
The Pleasure Of Difficulty In Runemasters
Maybe I’m a chronically bad dice roller (FACT), but it was such a challenge to get the right symbols at the right time. There are many clever, interlocking mechanics in this little game that add to your strategic options - you can spend the dice you roll to build a wall, or expend mana points to re-roll dice - but I was still left struggling again and again.
But I want to be clear: this is not a bad thing! Cooperative games in this style have lead to some of the most fun, joyfully anguishing moments in my gaming career, and when we finally did beat the game after multiple tries, we were left feeling utterly triumphant. I really enjoy the way the game doesn’t overload you with options, while still managing to give you a few key tools in your hero’s toolkit.
The one major downside with Runemasters, however, is also intrinsically tied to the difficulty and design of the game - and that’s player elimination (Boo! Hiss!). In this game, if your hero is killed - that’s it, you’re done! One of the heroes can resurrect other characters twice in the game, but A. that takes a lot of work to build up the magic power to do so and B. if that hero dies, there’s no resurrection happening.
I would like to see a mechanic where you come back after you die, but suffer some sort of penalty. Even if the penalty imposed made the game equally as hard as losing a character, at least that player wouldn’t have to sit around and wait for everyone else to finish the game. In most cooperative games, if your character dies the entire game is a loss (that’s how they do it in the gloriously chunky Cthulhu: Death May Die, which is of course an entirely differently scoped game, but I just played it so it’s fresh in my mind).
The flip side to this, which solves the problem of player death, is that this game can just as easily be played solo mode. You don’t need to make any adjustments, and if one of your characters dies, you’ve still got plenty of game to go!
The Artwork And Components Of Runemasters
The illustrators Paul Mafayon, Théo Guillot, and Adrien Martinez have truly outdone themselves with the quirky, angular designs on all of these cards. The heroes look extremely stylized and have a lot of kinetic movement to them, the monsters are all great renderings of classic dungeon threats, and there’s overall a clean, unfussy look to the game.
The components are sturdy cardboard, with all heroes coming as cardboard standees and all villains represented by cards. This isn’t really a game where you need detailed miniatures, and it keeps the price nice and slim at around $30 at most retailers.
Runemasters Review - Final Thoughts
If you’re looking for a game that’s going to challenge your gaming group, and love a little slash and dash dice-chucking, you won’t find much better out right now than Runemasters. But be warned, player elimination means that you may be sitting by the wayside while your friends are still in the temple trying to defeat a blue dragon! With superior artwork, clean game design, and a high degree of difficulty, Runemasters is a must-try to brave adventurers out there.
The copy of Runemasters used in the creation of this review was provided by Flat River Games. All images courtesy of the author.
Review Summary
Giaco Furino joined the TechRaptor team as a Staff Writer in 2019 after searching for a dedicated place to write and talk about Tabletop Games. In 2020, he… More about Giaco
