Saturday, September 21, 2013

A solo-playable game made in Brazil

Earlier this year I invested in a crowdfunded tabletop game project called "Runicards", made by brazilian game designer Rovalde Banchieri. This week I received the game, along with the deluxe game box. Over 440 cards, plus die cut counters, glass beads and two different boards!

For now the game is available only in Portuguese but I do hope that Rovalde's company fares well enough that they try distributing it in other countries. His team did handle the project very professionally.

Runicards can be played as a cooperative adventure for one or more players, which control heroes with various abilities, fighting random monsters until they reach the lair of the main villain. Action is card-driven, there are no dice rolls. After defeating monsters, heroes gain experience that may be traded for items, used to level up or even remove some negative effects from the game. The game also has an "Empire" competitive mode where players fight each other for resources and territory.

Today I played my first few solo matches and I did not even get close to the lair. Solo play with a single hero is really challenging. Now I have to try it in true cooperative play, as well as the "Empire" mode.

Well, this is all for now. Crowdfunding has been very helpful for independent game development, whether it is computer-based or tabletop. Hopefully this will be the start of a new tabletop scene around here.

1 comment:

Fitz-Badger said...

The components look quite good and the game sounds good, too, from your description. And it's interesting to me to see games coming out of places outside of North America and Europe. Broadening the gaming landscape can only be good for all gamers.