How to Play
Valheim Runestone is a 1v1 card game played on a small 3×3 board. Get your opponent's health to 0 and you win.
Getting cards
You don't buy or unlock cards from a menu — you earn them by playing Valheim. Kill creatures, loot chests, and buy from Haldor, Hildir, and the Bog Witch, and cards show up in your collection automatically. Open your Card Folder (the floating "Cards" button, visible while your inventory is open) any time to see what you've got.
Building a deck
Open the Deck Builder to make a custom deck, or just use one of the 6 pre-built decks to get started immediately — no need to build anything before your first match. A legal deck needs enough cards to actually play with; the builder tells you if something's missing.
Starting a match
Click the floating Board button to open the game board. From there you can start a solo match against the AI any time, or hit Challenge Duel to challenge another player on your server to a live match instead.
The board
The board is 3 rows x 3 columns. Your creatures deploy into the row closest to your own name plate; your opponent's deploy into the row closest to theirs. The middle row is open ground — whoever wants to push forward has to fight through it.
Resources: Runes
Each turn you get more Runes to spend — 1 on your first turn, 2 on your second, and so on, up to a cap (6 by default, adjustable by whoever's running the server). Every card has a Rune cost; you can only play what you can afford that turn. Unspent Runes don't carry over.
Your turn
On your turn you can, in any order:
- Play cards from your hand — creatures, equipment, or items — as long as you can pay the Rune cost.
- Move one creature to an adjacent empty square.
- Attack once with one creature that isn't summoning-sick or stunned.
Then end your turn and your opponent goes.
Creatures
Each creature card has an Attack and a Defense value. Defense acts as its health — it doesn't reset between turns, so damage sticks around until the creature is healed or dies.
A creature that's just been played is summoning sick and can't attack that same turn (but it can still move). After that, it's ready.
Attacking
By default, a creature can only attack an enemy in an adjacent square — up, down, left, or right, not diagonal. Some creatures have special keywords (shown right on the card, and in their in-game tooltip when you hover over them) that change this — ranged attacks, flying, extra movement, and more. Rather than memorize a big keyword list up front, just read each card as you get it; the tooltip always explains exactly what it does.
A creature can only attack if there's an actual enemy creature it can reach — if your opponent's side of the board is empty, or nothing of theirs is in range, that creature simply can't attack this turn. Some card abilities work differently and can hit your opponent's health directly, but that's a property of the specific card, not a fallback for a normal attack.
Winning
A player's health starts at 15. Get your opponent to 0 and the match ends immediately. If a match runs long, sudden death can kick in (if enabled on your server) — health starts slowly draining each turn to push things toward a finish rather than stalling forever.
Rewards
Beating the AI grants a real reward pulled from Valheim's own items — better rewards unlock as you defeat more of Valheim's bosses, so early wins won't hand you late-game gear. Beating another player in a duel pays out coins based on how much health you had left when you won.
That's it
Everything else — what a specific keyword does, what an item's effect is, exact card stats — is right there on the card itself. Open your Card Folder and start reading.