Tag: hasbro

#oneaday Day 583: Heroic leap

(Experimenting with some different techniques today. The above isn't what I'd call a "finished" image but I feel like I can probably build that into something.)

We were originally supposed to be having some friends over to play HeroQuest today, but the collective illness of me, Andie and at least one of the friends in question over the course of the last week caused us to postpone to next weekend. So I can't really offer a recap of what occurred in our first session, but I can take a moment to ponder exactly why I'm looking forward to jumping into this.

HeroQuest was an important part of my childhood. I was introduced to it through my brother's girlfriend at the time, who was big into heavy metal, fantasy role-playing and suchlike. Her Dad was into miniature wargaming, also, so I wonder how much that was an influence on her — though, of course, Warhammer and its ilk was always a lot cooler than the sort of "historical re-enactment" miniatures her father collected. Perhaps it was a case of "oh, I kind of like those, but I don't want my Dad to think he's cool, so I'll get into something tangentially related".

Anyway, fact is, I was introduced to HeroQuest by my brother's girlfriend, who did an admirable job of putting up with her boyfriend's annoying younger brother by letting me look at her stuff. I don't think I ever actually played HeroQuest with her, but I was so enamoured with it that I asked my parents to get me a copy of Advanced Heroquest one birthday or Christmas, and I got it. Still have it, in fact.

To my frustration over the years, I've actually had relatively few opportunities to play either the original HeroQuest or Advanced Heroquest with real people. Fortunately, Advanced Heroquest includes some very robust solo play rules, so it wasn't a complete waste, and I did manage to play it a few times with people over the years. But the original HeroQuest was always something I really wanted to play with other people over the long term — ideally with me in the role of the games master, taking the players through a full campaign of adventures.

HeroQuest, for the unfamiliar, is a fairly straightforward dungeon-crawling board game. The original MB Games version from the late '80s was developed in conjunction with Games Workshop's Citadel Miniatures brand, and thus was regarded as part of the Warhammer universe; Advanced Heroquest made this much more explicit. A few years back, however, Hasbro and its Avalon Hill brand, now rights holders for the HeroQuest license, decided to resurrect the game with a crowdfunding campaign.

The new HeroQuest has had a few changes since its late '80s release. The new version is now universal worldwide, being based on the previous incarnation's North American rules, rather than having European and North American variants. This means a few things. Firstly, the games master player is now called Zargon instead of Morcar, which to my mind is an infinitely worse name, but it seems "Morcar" is being reintroduced to New HeroQuest with an upcoming expansion, so I'm not too mad about it. Secondly, the game is a tad more difficult — in the European original, all monsters had just one Body Point, so you just had to hit them in order to kill them, even in the case of "bosses". Thirdly, there are some differences and variations in how the quests are composed.

I initially bought the First Light standalone "starter" set for HeroQuest but, having seen a good price on the full-size core set, I've splurged on that too. (Christmas money!) It's actually worth having both, though, because First Light has a completely different campaign of quests to take on as well as a double-sided board with a new map layout that isn't in the original. The downside of First Light is that as a lower-cost starter set, it only has five miniatures: the four Heroes and a dragon boss that recurs throughout the First Light campaign; the remainder of the Stuff is implemented either as flat cardboard tiles, or cardboard standees. Conversely, the full core set has miniatures for all the main monster types in both the First Light and original core quests, plus plastic 3D furniture to put in the rooms.

I'm really looking forward to getting into playing this, because as much as I have had fun with some subsequently release dungeon crawler games such as Descent: Journeys in the Dark, The Legend of Drizzt, Gloomhaven and another one I've completely forgotten the name of, a lot of those feel like they get a bit bogged down in being tactical wargames rather than exploration-focused dungeon crawlers — and it's the exploration and storytelling that has always attracted me to HeroQuest and its surrounding works.

Hopefully at this point next week I'll be able to provide a report on how our first session went. I'm looking forward to it a lot, and hope it will be able to become a semi-regular activity. We shall see!

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#oneaday Day 255: I need a Hero(Quest)

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.