Designed by: Zemilio
Rune is a simple-rules, tough-decisions game for two, where you play cards onto the table creating a growing landscape of runes in three different colours: red, blue and green.
The components are a deck of rune cards, and three are dealt to each player. Players also have three rune master tokens, who will define your score. A single card is placed face-up on the table and play begins.
On your turn you must play a rune card. This is done one of two ways: either matching the runes you cover up, or matching the runes on your card to the ones they’re adjacent to; meaning that as the landscape grows, so do the collected runes of a particular colour. Having played a card, you then either replenish your hand to three cards or place a rune master. The rune masters can be placed on any ‘unoccupied’ set of runes of the same colour – any orthogonally-adjacent runes of the same colour are considered part of the same set.
Your goal is to have your rune masters on the biggest possible collections, but there are two catches. One is that the common blue runes only score 1point per rune in the set. The least common red runes score 3points and the green runes score 2points. The other catch is that every time you play a rune master, your hand size shrinks: with only one rune master left, you only hold a single card.
As soon as one player places their last rune master, the other gets a final turn – a last chance to score! – and points are tallied to decide the winner.
Not really offering anything new or interesting enough for me to want to recommend it. It's just ok. For the size I'd far rather play Circle the Wagons, which packs a lot more game into an even smaller package.
Yes, you can and probably should play in a dynamic denying-chances fashion, seeing where your opponent is expanding their sets and trying to hem them in.
Low to high, depending on who's playing and how long you intend to spend figuring out your multitudinous options...
The rules are super-simple, but as already mentioned, the game can be a brain-burner
There's no huge variety in how the game plays, but the deck is randomised and the game is, if not breezy, brief.
2-2
Players
8+
Years
5-15
Mins
Sam says
Whilst I respect the strength of the design in how weighty the decisions feel compared to the very light rules, I just didn't find Rune hugely fun, as most turns felt like the same process of orienting the cards in various directions in your mind until you found something that felt like it worked. With no real opportunity to plan ahead, there was a slightly plodding feel to proceedings, and the undeniable cleverness to the game seemed to me best admired from a distance. It's just a deck of cards though, and the play-time isn't onerous, so a good portable one for those times when your brain needs a scratch, perhaps.