Through various combinations of circumstances, I found myself looking at the information about Hasbro's recent(ish) reboot of HeroQuest earlier, and I actually found my finger hovering over the "Buy" button (it was £30 off on Amazon, putting it down to a much more reasonable £70 from its usual £100 price tag) before the rational part of my brain kicked in, reminded me that I haven't seen another human being other than my wife in my house for a very long time indeed, and found myself feeling a bit sad that I, seemingly, would be forever deprived of playing something that I think would actually be rather fun.
Of course, this is nothing new. Growing up, I had a copy of Advanced HeroQuest (still do, in fact) that I played with other people precisely… twice, I think. Space Crusade (which I no longer have) hit the table a couple of times, and a couple of more recent successors like Descent: Journeys in the Dark also had a couple of plays, but I have never yet managed to play through a complete campaign of any game like this. And this makes me sad, because I have wanted to ever since my brother's teenage girlfriend (as in, girlfriend when they were both teens, to be clear) Allie introduced child me to the original MB release of HeroQuest many, many years ago.
Part of me is just saying "fuck it, buy it anyway" and maybe convince my wife to play, or perhaps convince my few remaining in-person friends to come play it for a day when I manage to pry them away from their oh-so-busy personal lives for the one occasion a year they'll actually leave their houses around my birthday. But that rational part of me keeps saying "you'll never get anyone to play it, you'll have wasted your money".
And perhaps I will have. But part of me still wants it.
There's something about the original HeroQuest that I've always liked. I know there's elements of it that are stupid (like the roll-to-move mechanic, which is at least phrased as "you may move up to that many spaces" rather than "you must move that many spaces", and the fact every monster in the base game only ever had 1 body point, meaning it was nearly as easy to kill a lumbering Gargoyle as it was a pathetic Goblin) and that other, later games did what it's doing a lot better. But I also think there's still a distinct appeal to HeroQuest that those "better" games lack.
Take Descent: Journeys in the Dark, for example. Ostensibly this is the same kind of game: you have 1-4 hero players competing against an antagonistic player who is in control of all the monsters. But each scenario is much more of a tactical strategy game challenge rather than a dungeon crawl. There are elements of exploration, sure, but the whole thing feels less about delving into dank dungeons, and instead more like a wargame. That's not necessarily a bad thing; I just think I prefer the dungeon crawling aspect.
Then there are games like Gloomhaven, which, although critically acclaimed, make me feel like they overcomplicate things massively — and again, each scenario often ends up feeling more like a wargame than a dungeon crawl. I wanted to like Gloomhaven, particularly after a friend spent a lot of money on the fancy Kickstarter edition, but I just… didn't. It really didn't grab me, for some reason, and its potentially interesting "Legacy" elements, predictably, went mostly unused because we only played a couple of sessions of it.
I think the place for something like HeroQuest is firmly in what often gets described as "beer and pretzels" territory: a game that everyone around the table can enjoy, but which no-one really needs to concentrate on too hard. A game you can play while gradually getting more and more intoxicated and still have a good time. A game that you can easily introduce newcomers to without having to spend an hour discussing the rules — and a game that a group can easily return to several weeks or months after their last session and still remember how to actually play.
So I dunno. I feel like buying a copy of HeroQuest would be silly. But I still kind of want to. I haven't yet decided if I'm going to. But I'm certainly considering it.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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