WHOO! My Runebound is finally here...giant box for not that giant of a boardgame :D
After a quick practice-play with OxBlood-Human vs. OxBlood-Undead, Human won in the 5th year. I really like the rather low downtime. Wouldn´t expect that with a strategygame like this... Also, the whole mechanics are pretty nice as far as I can tell.
Building your empire and letting heroes search for treasure at the same time is a nice thing, especially since the whole hero-thing is rather straightforward and secondary. It also has way sturdier miniatures than Starcraft, no need to fix anything this time.
Finally, I like the many way you can gather dragon runes (gather 6 and you win). You can take your enemies runes, get some by questing with your heroes, influence the wizzards council to discover some, recieve one by completing your (random) secret objective... really really nice as far as I can see...and fucking expensive. I think I never payed that much for a board game before.
But then again the whole situation is pretty bizarre. A german person importing a board game, you don´t see that every day

I wonder if the whole thing will ever be released in german...would be nice since some of my friends can´t speak or read english if their life dependet on it...explaining the game to them sure will be fun.