Welcome back, everyone! Prior to the holiday break, this blog had been dedicated to covering the lore of Rivenstone. We were setting the stage, as it were, for the epic battles that our upcoming miniature wargame sets out to recreate. Now that we’ve described the various factions that are fighting amongst each other, and why, it’s time for us to delve into how you’ll take control of the action.
Over the next several weeks, this blog series is going to explore the rules mechanics of Rivenstone. We aren’t looking to recreate the rulebook in its entirety here, so there will be many granular details we must gloss over, but instead we want to help you have an understanding of the basics of the game’s core features.
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In today’s post, we’re going to give you a very basic overview of the game that we can then build upon in future posts. Think of this post like the elevator pitch for Rivenstone, where we answer the fairly simple question: “What is Rivenstone?”
Rivenstone is a tabletop miniatures game for two players. Players build a force from their collection of Rivenstone miniatures and send them into the field in a variety of scenarios. Each scenario is combined with an event deck to create a narrative wargaming experience that reflects the conflict raging across the world of Venn. Any scenario works with any event deck, allowing you to create a wide variety of battle conditions.
The selection of miniatures a player chooses to use in a game of Rivenstone is called their warband. Each player customizes their warband (which contains mighty heroes, groups of followers, and a barracks) after they know which scenario and event deck they are using for the game. The typical warband is about ten to twelve models in total, meaning that assembling and painting your force doesn’t take too terribly long.
In Rivenstone, a player always stays in the game no matter how many models in their warband are destroyed by their opponent. Models in a player’s warband spawn at their barracks at specific intervals in the game. This means that each battle is about more than just defeating enemy warriors. A player must win the game through a mixture of strategy, tactics, and destroying enemies at key locations on the battlefield to prevent them from obtaining victory. The game is less attrition- based, like many other wargames, and more tempo- based.
Players must make the most of their force to harvest rivenstone deposits scattered across the battlefield, defeat opposing warriors, and secure the objectives provided by their scenario. Harvested rivenstone provides one of the game’s two major resources called shards. Rivenstone shards are consumed by models to unlock powerful abilities or increase their offensive output, which can help them gain an edge in defeating their opponent.
The winner of the game is the player who has the most victory points at the end of it. Victory points are scored three ways: by meeting the objectives of the scenario the players choose to play, by destroying enemy heroes, and by utilizing heroes to complete tasks specific to that model regardless of which scenario is chosen.
Thank you for joining us for the first installment of the gameplay of Rivenstone. We hope you come back for next week’s installment as we start breaking down some of the individual elements we’ve discussed here in greater detail.
