[OxBlood]

Ah okay, another word to devoured by my language processing thingy in my brain *devoures*.

So which one you wanna know about? Both my pics up there seem to have dissappeared, I´ll just talk about both. Not that they´ve arrived yet but I read the manuals online, so I know what awaits me.

Dungeon Lords:

Basically it´s a themed worker-placement-game with a slight puzzle-feel to it.

You build up your dungeon over the couse of a year (you dig tunnels, earn gold, buy traps and monsters, place rooms, hire kobolds (is that written with a K in english? Hm.) and so forth. Every round, more and more heroes amass in town and when they´re brave enough (meaning when there´s 3 of them), they try to invade your dungeon and now it´s up to you to defend it with the stuff you set up before.

An interesting little detail is the...I don´t know what Vlaada named it in english...let´s just call it the evil-o-meter, since that´s exactly what it is, it tracks how evil your Dungeon Lord is. You can gain evilness by stealing food from the villagers (can happen if you come in second or third when it comes to gathering food) or stuff like that and if you get TOO evil...THE PALADIN APPROACHES!
That´s right, some goody-two-shoes sits around in his tent all year and once someone becomes evil enough he gets up and leads the other heroes against you. He´s basically a whole party of adventurers all by himself, he can cast spells, disarm traps, heal other adventurers...but if you can beat him, he scores you a lot of points and there´s only 2 of them in the game.

Apart from that you also have to deal with Dungeon-Taxes (the whole game has this Demon-Apprentice-feel to it and the Ministry of...Dungeons collects taxes from you while you are evaluated as a Dungeon Lord) and the payday for your Monsters. Feed and pay them, or they leave and talk badly about you (which makes you more evil).


The whole thing sounds like a lot of fun to me and I´m really excited to give that thing a spin once it arrives. Also worth mentioning is the absolutely awesome rulebook which does a really good job at explaining everything to you AND teaching you how to teach others with a battle-tutorial and some kind of quiz for different situations in the game. Really well done.



The second game, I´ll talk about is Runewars which my american companions on this board should know a lot more about than me, since it´s not out here in germany (so I´m just buying your version, HAR!)

How did FF-Games put it..."It´s an empire-building-game". I´d say thats about right. You take on the role of one of four races and struggle to expand and build your forces with the goal of conquering the dragon-runes. To do that you need ressources, troops, allies, tactics and so forth.
The game uses a modified modular-turn-mechanic. Every Round (represented by a season of the year), you get to play order-cards and if you played the order card with the lowest number this year, you get a special bonus (this makes it interesting to play orders in a specific...erm...order to reap the benefits of those bonusses but restricts you from using higher orders early...IF you want those bonusses).

So basically it´s building, conquering, defending of terrain (hexagon shaped, I love those) complete with plastic mountains that restrict movement and seas that can be crossed in winter (neat little detail).

In addition to that, you also have a Hero that can travel across the board and do quests for items or even dragon runes, but that mechanic is a lot simpler than it´s big Runebound-Cousin of course.

There´s a nice promotional video on youtube about Runewars if you´re interested in the game.


Well, that´s all that comes to my mind right now.