Behind the Design: RuneScape Kingdoms Board Game
Welcome back, 'Scapers! Today, we're peeking behind the curtain on Shadow of Elvarg, the RuneScape: Kingdoms Board Game.
If you’ve ever wondered how we captured the magic of Gielinor, translating skilling, quirky NPCs, and iconic gear into a cohesive tabletop experience, this is the blog for you!
RuneFest 2025
Before we get into it, we wanted to remind you that we’ll be at RuneFest 2025 in Birmingham next weekend, on the 1st and 2nd of March!
Check out our previous RuneScape blog here for more details.
Right, now let’s get into the design notes!
Skilling
We started off by establishing the two core pillars we wanted to base our engine on — skilling and immersion
As longtime fans, we knew up front skilling was such a massive feature of the RuneScape experience, and we wanted our game to reflect that. To make that happen, we needed to start by establishing which different skills we wanted to port in.
Much harder than it sounds! 26 is way too many skills for a board game, but we needed the different skills to have a reasonably even spread across the different situations you might find yourself in as a player.
Eventually, we decided to combine a few skills for the purposes of board game representation, keeping the number manageable for the table, while still representing all the most important skills.
Prototyping
We then spent a long time (and a significant amount of printer ink) building and testing various prototypes that did the skilling experience justice.
These prototypes had a few different design goals:
- Skilling should feel fun and engaging.
- Players should always feel that they’re moving forwards.
- All skills should feel useful (players shouldn’t be in a position where they aren't happy that they’ve levelled something up).
- There should be LOTS of ways to skill up!
Our real “eureka” moment came when we made the very simple observation that it might be cool if EVERY test you took gave you experience — pass or fail!
From there, it was simply a matter of building content that enabled that as much as possible, such as lots of side quests involving skill tests, or exploration cards that can be drawn every turn (which almost always contain a skill test). Lots of “campaign specific” mechanics are also resolved with a skill test.
Basically, we established a mantra of “if it’s a thing, it's a skill test”!
The Core Loop
After that, the rest fell into place quite easily. We decided to gate the campaign quests behind certain skill levels, so that players not only had a clear immediate goal with their skilling, but also so they’d know that the other skills they happen to level may prove useful somewhere down the line.
We also placed specific skilling points around the map to link skilling with moving, and included generous skill rewards in side quests to let players really focus on the specific skills they wanted.
And there it was — the core gameplay loop! From there, we added equipment, resources, and a few other bits throughout the game's development to really make the engine run smoothly.
Immersion
But what about the other design pillar we mentioned earlier?
Immersion is very different from building a game engine around a set of skills. The immersion we were aiming for couldn’t really be achieved with numbers, so we started by trying to understand what makes RuneScape really FEEL like RuneScape.
Ultimately we boiled it down to a few key aspects:
- Quirky NPCs.
- In-world references.
- Iconic enemies.
- Even MORE iconic gear.
We approached these aspects in two ways. First, we worked very closely with Jagex’s lore council to faithfully represent iconic questlines while adapting them to live in boardgame land, include as many familiar NPCs as we could possibly fit, and sculpt a set of miniatures that sent players straight down memory lane.
Second, we spent an enormous amount of time creating many original art pieces to depict characters, gear, and enemies!
The Finished Game
In the end, it all came together to create RuneScape Kingdoms: Shadow of Elvarg — a board game designed to thoroughly and faithfully recreate the experience of traversing Gelinor on the web.
Want to try the game for yourself? If you’re coming to RuneFest, we’ll have demo sets available for you to play at our stall! Look for us next to the Grand Exchange — see you there, ‘Scapers!
