Holy Children, Wild Men

This September brings with it a new wave of Runebound expansion decks, forever changing our beloved game with the addition of new monsters to battle, new allies to meet, new treasure to find, and new stories to tell. But what, exactly, do you get in these decks? Do they really change the game that much? In a word, yes.

Both Champions of Kellos and Walkers of the Wild are Item and Ally Card Expansions, which means that they feature 30 new cards to add to your market deck. Runebound being what it is, the market deck must contain a mixture - cheap, useful items and allies all the way up to enormously powerful, enormously expensive end-game effects. Everything from street urchins and daggers through dragon-blooded champions and flaming swords are represented here. Each deck also has its own theme when it comes to these items and allies. Champions of Kellos features priests and other followers of the Burning God, as well as their artifacts, whereas Walkers of the Wild fixates more on the savage men and women of the frontier.

One theme that runs through both decks is mechanical, rather than flavorful - many of the allies in both Champions of Kellos and Walkers of the Wild serve to accelerate your gameplay. They are resources that you can invest in to reap rewards down the line. The Orphan of the Sun (from Champions), for example, pays for herself quite quickly - she is cheap, at 2 gold, can save you money on future hirelings, and still has respectable stats as an ally in her own right. The Orphan of Light (also from Champions) can be used to sell an item for far more than you could otherwise, again repaying the investment required to hire her quite easily. The reasoning is that not every ally a hero recruits has to be a mighty warrior - there are other abilities that heroes can find just as useful in advancing their goals. Champions of Kellos has a few other Orphans that work on the same principle - inexpensive allies with useful abilities that can have a considerable long-term effect. Walkers has a small number of characters who are cast from the same mould, but also takes the concept in a slightly different direction.

Walkers features many characters who can make your hero's life easier in the wild. Gyrik Tree-Speaker, for example, can allow you to visit town without having to waste the turn traveling there! The time this saves you can dramatically speed up your accumulation of experience points and gold, and his ability is also useful for those instances where you want to race another hero to a particularly desireable item. Gyrik is also a perfectly respectable ally to have in combat for his cost, but what's going to make him exciting to heroes who come across him is that tree-speaking ability!

Byr, Forest Warden, is one of several characters in Walkers who speed you up in a more literal, obvious way - they assist your movement. There's nothing more frustrating than being JUST shy of reaching an important adventure jewel, and with a man like Byr on your team, those occasions should be a thing of the past. You'll note that the allies shown here span from 1 to 4 gold in cost, and certainly most of these "accelerant" allies are on the lower-end of the price scale. The reasoning is fairly simple: the earlier you can buy one of these characters, the more benefit they will give you over the course of the game. However, this does not mean that all the allies from Champions and Walkers are cheap with small, useful abilities - far from it! But if you want to see the real bruisers and terrors of these two sets, you'll have to get your hands on a copy yourself ...