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Runeboard

A dark, hex & card-driven strategy game of armies, alliances, and ancient powers across Middle-earth.

Website · Download · Dev Diary: The AI

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Strategy with the soul of an old fantasy table

Runeboard brings a sweeping conflict to a living hex map. Muster distinct armies, guide legendary characters, claim strongholds, and play illustrated cards that can turn a desperate battle.

Every campaign grows from competing powers and shifting fronts. Roads, rivers, mountains, and hidden lands shape the choices before you — and the story left behind.

A living tabletop

The war is played with miniatures on one continuous hand-painted map:

• Live 3D figures — every hero and captain is an animated figure on a painted base in its nation's colour.
• 171 hand-built settlements — each town, hold and ruin has its own painting, and its own miniature rebuilt from it: Imladris, the seven circles of Minas Tirith, Hobbiton's smials, Orthanc, Barad-dûr…
• A board that breathes — drifting cloud shadows, chimney smoke, fog that rolls back as you explore, seasons that follow the calendar, and dusk while the rival nations move.

Three fronts, one fate

Every move writes history

• Shape your armies — Recruit troops, combine forces, and march commanders across a dangerous world.
• Play the moment — Build a deck around your power and answer the battlefield with characters, actions, spells, and events.
• Outthink rival powers — Read the terrain, defend vital routes, and pursue objectives before the age turns against you.

Take command of your campaign

1. Pick a scenario — From the classic random earth of Champions of Middle Earth to the authored 2950 T.A. story of The Untold War of the Ring.
2. Browse the company — Cycle through available leaders (Gandalf, Saruman, Sauron, and their many flavours), each with its own deck identity.
3. Confirm your choice — Start the campaign as that leader, with your capital, characters, and starting resources laid out on the hex map. Fog of war hides the rest of Middle-earth until you explore it.

Every character doubles as a card — hover a leader's name to see their full stats and portrait, or an underlined army name to see its card. Move hex by hex with the arrow keys or WASD; spotted enemies are traced in red, spotted neutrals in grey.

Gallery

AI

Every rival nation, and every character it commands, is played by a layered AI rather than a script: it reads the board, remembers what it has seen, sets itself missions, plans them, and checks its judgement against a neural network. Turn on Watch Mode and the whole war plays itself. The stack is written up in detail here:

Utility AI	All nations score danger, opportunity, growth, and stagnation to weigh their options.
Blackboards	Store the situation of the world, and register/remember nation and character missions.
Hierarchical Task Network	Plans tasks for characters, decomposing them into specific possible behaviours.
Behaviour / State Trees	Execute behaviours depending on Utility AI scores and feasibility.
Neural Network	An MLP trained on supervised best strategies, consulted alongside the rest of the stack.

The art

Runeboard's retro illustration style started on paper, not in a prompt box:

1. Scanned old black & white illustrations from old RPG books.
2. Redrew and repainted some of them for a unique retro feeling.
3. Hand-painted 25 of them using colour schemes and techniques from the 80s.
4. Trained a LoRA on an open-source, open-weight Qwen Image model.
5. Queried that model — trained on the original art — to generate the game's cards.

Hexes started as assets from the Unity Asset Store, repainted by hand.

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An independent, non-commercial fan project inspired by classic fantasy strategy games.

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