Runemasters.

Runemasters is a cooperative tower defense board game for up to four players, with a solo mode, that is really, really hard to beat. I’m pretty impressed by the design, even though I honestly have no idea what a winning strategy would be. (I only played this one solo, and no, I haven’t beaten it.)

In Runemasters, players are “guardians” trying to defend a tower against incoming hordes of monsters. The players win if at least one guardian is still alive and the tower is still standing when the monster deck reaches the Dawn card, which is randomly shuffled into the bottom three cards during setup. The monsters attack via four paths, each with its own color, and only one guardian can guard each pathway. Each monster has two to four spaces on it representing “weak points,” and once players have filled those via attacks, the monster is vanquished. Don’t worry, more are coming behind it. The game goes back and forth between player turns and monster attacks until either the players win or they all die.

On a turn, the active player rolls four dice and then uses each one for an action of their choice. Red, green, yellow, or blue symbols allow the player to move to the matching pathway, or to put an injury token on the matching weak point of a monster in the path they’re guarding. Purple symbols let the player move to any pathway, or to deal an injury to a purple weak point. When a player moves their guardian to an occupied pathway entrance, they swap places with that guardian, which is a good way to get another player out of trouble. The white symbol lets a player use their special ability, which can include healing any guardian of one hit point, moving a monster to another pathway, or putting a shield on any guardian to protect them from attacks for one round. Discarding two matching dice allows a player to place a blockade on their pathway for one round, as it’s destroyed by the next monster attack. A player may discard any die entirely to charge up their superpower, which is active when fully charged (level 4) and then may be recharged and used one more time before it is done for the entire game.

Players start the game with 4 health points and 4 mana points. The health points are the things you need to not die. Dying is very easy, as it turns out; livin’s the hard part. Mana is more useful, and easier to get, as it’s the reward for beating every monster type except dragons. You can spend one mana to reroll as many dice as you like one time. If a monster is at the nearest space in a pathway (space 1 – pathways have 5 spaces and new monsters spawn in space 3) and your mana is full, you can spend all 4 mana points to destroy the monster immediately.

After each player’s turn, all monsters move one space towards the tower, if able – only one monster can occupy a space. A monster in space 1 then attacks the guardian guarding that pathway, dealing 1 damage. If there’s no guardian, the damage hits the tower, which has 4 or 6 health points depending on the player count. To spare you a little math, I’ll spell this out: In a four-player game, monsters will attack four times between your actual turns. This is a very efficient way to kill a guardian, since you only have four health points, so if there’s a monster in space 1 and someone doesn’t move you out of the way, you’re dead before your turn will come back around again – and that’s even assuming you have 4 health points left, which, let’s face it, you don’t.

There are different monster types with some different attributes to contribute a little more chaos to the game. Archers can attack from any space as long as there isn’t a monster in front of them. Warriors can’t be killed by rerolled dice. Wizards can’t be killed by the four-mana trick. Dragons’ weak points don’t have colored icons on them; you kill a dragon with three matching dice, or with the four-mana trick, after which you get 1 mana and 1 health point. There’s also a small Event deck that combines some good and bad rules tweaks to each round, and that allows you to calibrate the difficulty a little bit.

Since I soloed this game and recently did the same with Gloomhaven: Buttons and Bugs, I couldn’t avoid a comparison, and this game is far superior. It’s so much less fiddly to learn or play, even with some issues in the rule book (possibly a translation issue, although I found at least two errors around icons that were reversed in the rules). It’s also harder to beat, which I suppose will ultimately have a ceiling, but I was happy to keep banging my head against the tower wall for a while. It’s not my favorite genre or theme, but if you like tower-defense games, or want a good small-box cooperative experience, Runemasters is pretty solid.