Tag: cooperative games

#oneaday Day 589: HeroQuest First Light, First Session

I've done it! I've finally played a game of HeroQuest with actual real human people. And we had a really good time! We got through the first two quests in the First Light campaign — I've bought both First Light and the big-box core set, but I wanted to give First Light a go because it's a completely different campaign to the big-box core set, and the big-box core set campaign is largely based on the 1989 original, which I was already familiar with.

Both sets stand by themselves, and both are a good means of getting into HeroQuest as a hobby; the main difference is that First Light is a lot cheaper and comes in a smaller box, because it lacks the big collection of plastic miniatures included in the big-box core set. And, having played the game with those big-box core set miniatures today, I'm glad I picked it up; making the whole game a lot more "3D" really adds to the atmosphere and makes it look great on the table. (For the budget-conscious, the cardboard standees for monsters in First Light have some great artwork on them — and you do still get miniatures for the heroes and a recurring dragon boss — but all the furniture items are flat cardboard tiles that just show a plan view of the furniture. They serve their purpose, but it's hard to deny that the 3D furniture is just better.)

Playing Zargon (known as Morcar in the European '80s version) is an interesting experience. One thing you have to remember while playing is that although you are technically an "adversary" for the Hero players, you are not necessarily trying to defeat them. You are, instead, attempting to facilitate a fun session of storytelling, using the game mechanics as a framework, and that sometimes means quietly fudging things a bit, rebalancing the difficulty on the fly and responding to things that happen in a way that isn't necessarily laid down for you in the Quest Book in black-and-white.

Some people turn their nose up at HeroQuest because of its simplistic mechanics, and I can totally understand that; there are games with similar theming that go much harder on strategy and tactics, with each encounter feeling a lot more like a tabletop wargaming skirmish than a dungeon crawl. For some, that's what they want; for me, though, I've always been very fond of HeroQuest's straightforward mechanics, because not only do they keep the game pacy and help emphasise the collective, emergent narrative of the players' quest, they also make it very easy for newcomers to pick up. There's very little trawling through an epic rulebook once you have the basic rules sorted, which means there's very little downtime, and a lot more time for moving, fighting and searching things — because those are the three main things you do in HeroQuest.

The two quests we played today were enjoyably different from one another. The first was a relatively open-plan dungeon in which the Heroes, by chance, picked the "correct" way to go at the beginning and ended up at the concluding encounter relatively quickly, but in the process they also missed out on potentially collecting a bit more treasure. The second quest had an interesting series of magic portals that could send the Heroes to different parts of the dungeon, some of which connected with one another and some of which did not.

The second quest was noticeably harder than the first. The Heroes did have a bit of a run of bad luck with dice rolls — particularly once they opened up a secret room and found a pair of Mummies, which are surprisingly tough enemies to beat — but that made their eventual victory over the quest's "boss" feel hard-earned and definitely worthwhile. And relatively little Zargon fudging was required to keep everyone alive!

The cool thing is that I think the Hero players learned something from how these two quests went down — notably, that it is helpful to stay together, but in a tactically advantageous formation so, for example, the Wizard doesn't get twatted in the face, so the Barbarian doesn't block doorways and so everyone is able to get a chance to line up and punch something. The Wizard got equipped with a staff after the first quest, which allows him to attack diagonally, so that helped inform some tactics, and the Heroes have also determined that getting themselves some better equipment probably wouldn't be a terrible idea, either.

Lots of scope for growth, and the players enjoyed themselves enough to want to play it again! So with any luck, in a couple of weeks' time, it'll be hitting the table again and the campaign can continue.

I'm really very happy about this. I've been wanting to run a proper game of HeroQuest since I was, like, ten, and now I am. And I'm having fun! Sometimes you just need patience. And to buy the game multiple times in the intervening years.

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2184: Warhammer Quest Cards: A First Attempt

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Tried out Warhammer Quest: The Adventure Card Game with three of my regular board gaming buddies for the first time this evening. We challenged the first quest, which challenges the party to make it through three random locations and a quest location before getting splattered across the nearest wall, and came pretty close to completing it, but were ultimately unsuccessful. Fortunately, the penalties for losing this first quest are relatively minor, though we do miss out on the potential to grab a Legendary item in the next quest as a result.

So how does the game play? Very well, as it happens; each of the four characters gradually start to show how distinctive they are as the game progresses, with each having a clear specialism which can be further developed through the campaign progression system after each quest. The Bright Wizard is particularly good at dealing area-of-effect damage, for example, though many of her abilities require her to take damage in order to have increased effects. The Waywatcher, meanwhile, is very good at exploring, while the Dwarf Ironbreaker is good at tanking enemies and attacking two (or, later, three) at once. The Warrior Priest, meanwhile, is the aid-bot of the group, with his Aid and Rest actions both being particularly strong and benefiting both him and the party: Aid, aside from its usual effect of potentially granting a party member bonus "free" successes on a subsequent action, also heals both the Warrior Priest and the target of his Aid, while his Rest action allows him to endow a party member with the Empowered condition, which is very useful indeed — it prevents an action from being exhausted on use, as well as providing a bonus automatic success and defence on top of any results rolled.

The quest starts relatively straightforward, but gradually escalates as you progress. We cleared the last random location in a somewhat bloodied fashion, which meant we weren't in a particularly good position to deal with the Nemesis Odious Grump in the final location, particularly as the Peril track had advanced to its final stage, granting him two bonus activations per turn on top of his usual attack. Somehow we reached a position where in the last couple of turns, two party members were dead, leaving the Waywatcher (my friend Tom) and the Warrior Priest (me) to soak up the incoming damage from a good seven or eight enemies, which, of course, wasn't going to happen at all.

I get the impression the different quests each reward a somewhat different approach. This first quest rewards a quick, efficient exploration process, for example; the quicker you can get through the locations, the fewer enfeebling effects you'll suffer and the less you'll have to deal with Odious Grump being a nuisance. It's all very well knowing that, mind, but it's not always easy to put into practice: the game's elegant mechanics of exhausting your actions as you use them but allowing you to refresh them through the use of your character's otherwise weakest ability makes for some interesting strategies, particularly when you contemplate how the different party members can interact with one another by, say, Aiding one another to refresh actions ahead of time, or using other actions to exhaust enemies or cause them to retreat, taking some of the pressure off comrades.

It's a really interesting game. The basic mechanics are very simple to understand, but the execution of a quest gives the game a surprising amount of depth that might not be immediately apparent. I'm very keen to see how the game progresses over the course of the complete five-quest campaign, and everyone in our group seemed to enjoy the experience, too. So I call that a win — particularly as it was eminently possible to get through a whole quest on a weeknight evening, which is more than can be said for more conventional board-based dungeon crawlers such as Descent: Journeys in the Dark or indeed the original Warhammer Quest.