I recently purchased this game and I am really looking forward to trying it out. There is, however, one thing that I do not really care for, and that is games with unnatural endings. Such as this games seems to have. Why does the game has to end after "only" six years? Why not just play until one player has aquired enough runes in order to win? Is there a story behind the six-year limit? 

Personally, I like it when games drag out for loooong times. That's why I like TI (without meaning to copmpare these games). If the six-year limit is put there in order to make the game shorter, why not put it in as an alternative rule for people that like shorter games instead?

And finally, what do you other Runewars-gamers do? Do you play until one player has enough runes in order to actually win the war, or do you end the game aftyer six years without a true winner?

 Never mind. I just remembered that I has posted the same question on BGG :p

I don't know if there was any thematic reason.  I think it was just so that the official way was to have a hard cutoff, which can be nice if you are trying to squeeze a game in a certain timeframe.  Practically speaking, though, with just the base game 8 years is about the limit since that's all the season cards there are.  With the expansion you could do up to 11.  (I suppose you could just shuffle them and start over if you wanted, though).

Also, with the hard stop after 6 years, there still is a true winner - there are never any ties in the game, since the tiebreaker procedures guarantee that someone will be victorious.

That all being said, in the games I've played it's fairly uncommon for the game to end after 6 years.  Far more often someone gets the 6 runes before then, usually in year 3 or 4 (depending on the number of players, size of the map, and frequency of new runes appearing).

The six year time limit is an entirely arbitrary ending point, as far as I can tell.  This game has some obvious connections to TI3 mechanically, but with several revisions designed to shorten the play time and simplify mechanics, the six-year limit being one of them.

For those who don't want to play a single game for upwards of six hours, hard turn limits like this help to ensure games don't run too long.  If play time isn't a concern for you, however, removing the limit and just reshuffling season cards until someone wins by runes held is a perfectly reasonable house rule.  I don't think it will break anything.

Steve-O said:

Nor I, especially since I think most games will end well before then anyway :)