#oneaday Day 603: Awesome minis painted quick

Today I've been doing something that I haven't done for probably 30 years or so: I have attempted to paint some miniatures. As I alluded to a while back, this is a field where "technology" (for want of a better word?) appears to have come on quite a bit in the years since I last tried it, and I was particularly interested in trying out something called "Speedpaint".

Speedpaint is a formulation of paint that, in contrast to the usual thick matt acrylics, is very thin and semi-transparent. You brush it all over a model and the nature of its formulation means that it works its ways into all the little nooks and crannies by itself and naturally darkens and lightens according to the undulations of the model. In other words, it goes darker when it gets into deep cracks, and creates natural highlights in elevated sections.

I was especially interested in trying out the "Speedpaint Markers", which combine the simplicity of Speedpaint with the straightforward, mess-free approach of using a pen rather than a brush and palette. And for the most part I'm very impressed with the Speedpaint Markers; they're a convenient and easy way to get some colour on to a model, and the Speedpaint within them works exactly how it's supposed to, making it easy to create convincing and realistic effects with just a single coat.

I've been painting some of the furniture from HeroQuest today, as these are fairly large pieces that are, for the most part, relatively straightforward to paint. And in doing so, both the strengths and the weaknesses of the Speedpaint Markers have become apparent.

They're great for covering large areas. Painting one of the door miniatures, the tomb, the tables and the stonework around the fireplace was simplicity itself. The paint did its thing and created some nice shadows and highlights with minimal fuss; I found that it needed just a little more than a single coat to look good, but it's still a very quick way to get something painted.

The weakness of the Markers is that although their tips are relatively fine, they're still a long shot from a proper detail brush, and as such it's difficult to paint very fine details with any great accuracy. This means that it's difficult to, for example, paint the books on the bookshelf miniature, or the little bits and pieces scattered around the alchemist's table.

Thus I have concluded that the best approach, for now, is to have both the Markers available for large, simple areas, and some more conventional brushes, paints and a palette around for more fine detail work. This means that I have spent considerably more on this little experiment than I perhaps initially intended — and part of me, the cynical part, suspects that this is how they "get" you — but will hopefully be able to do a much nicer job once I have some more appropriate bits and pieces.

I've enjoyed what I've tried, though. The results I've had with the Speedpaints today are considerably better than the cack-handed attempts with acrylics I did back when I was in my early teens and didn't really have the right brush for the job. In fact, in retrospect, it was not having the right brush for the job that put me off taking things any further; I got frustrated that I felt it was too difficult, and just sort of gave up.

After today's little experiment, I'm keen to have a proper crack at it though. It'd certainly look very cool to have at least some painted minis on the table the next time we play HeroQuest (which, all being well, will be next weekend).

So I guess I'm Someone Who Paints Miniatures now. I suspected that Someone was always inside me, what with the inherently nerdy nature of the surrounding hobby. I've just come to it a little… late, is all.

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#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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#oneaday Day 584: Paint chase

"Are you going to paint them?" Andie asked, looking at the wealth of miniatures in the big-box HeroQuest set that arrived today.

"Probably not," I said. "I don't know how."

This probably isn't quite accurate — as Andie pointed out, the how of painting something is pretty bloody obvious. But what I meant by that was I have no idea how to do it in such a way that it doesn't look absolute shite.

Now, granted, I am basing this on my previous attempts to do this, some 30+ years ago, when I had a Citadel Miniatures starter paint set and a single brush that was, frankly, woefully inaccurate for the job at hand. The results were, as you might expect, Not Very Good — not least because I only ever really got as far as doing base colours, and never got into doing highlights and shadows. I always got hung up on the how of those bits — how do you know which bits need highlights and shadows? (Obviously, you shine a light on it, and put shadows in the bits that have shadows in them, and lighter bits on the bits that have light on them — I realise that now.)

With this in mind, I've been pondering whether I should try again. And I was surprised and pleased to discover that miniature painting technology has, unsurprisingly, moved on quite considerably in the intervening 30+ years since I last attempted it.

I'm especially interested in some curious little gizmos called Speedpaint Markers by a company called The Army Painter. This is, in turn, a spinoff of a type of paint this company creates called Speedpaint, which purports to do all the highlighting and shadowing for you to a certain extent. It does this through a particularly blended paint, whose properties mean that when it gets into cavities it takes on a darker tone, while on flatter, more raised areas it has a lighter tone, and on everything in between it has a… well, kind of "normal" tone, whatever that means for the specific colour you're using. It's a different sort of idea to acrylic-based paint, which is what I had previously experimented with, and looks like being a very beginner-friendly approach to painting minis.

The Markers take things a step further. Rather than requiring a specialist brush, palette and other equipment, they're a little brush-pen hybrid that delivers the paint right onto the miniature without any other equipment required. Obviously you still need to prime them beforehand, but that's simple enough that even I can do it.

I'm tempted to give them a try. It's a bit of money to get a decent starter set of colours (and, annoyingly, the one thing the "starter set" of markers lacks is a regular flesh tone) but if it really is as easy as it looks to use these things, I might finally be able to enjoy something that has, to date, eluded me.

I dunno. I'll think about it. But it would be cool to have painted minis for HeroQuest.

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#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.

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#oneaday Day 897: Dungeon Crawling

I'm a big fan of board games, as regular readers will know. And I have fairly diverse tastes, too — I like everything from Eurogames such as Catan to theme-heavy Ameritrash like Last Night on Earth. Exactly what I want to play at any given moment is largely determined by my mood at the time, but I can pretty much always muster up enthusiasm to play a dungeon-crawling game.

I own several dungeon crawlers, but I'm planning on picking up the very interesting-looking Descent: Journeys in the Dark Second Edition when it releases, as it sounds like just the sort of game I want to play. It also sounds like it's been improved significantly over the original edition, which could take up to 4 or 5 hours to complete a single quest. The new version reportedly keeps play sessions down to much more manageable lengths while incorporating a solid "campaign" system for character advancement and a branching narrative. I'm looking forward to it a lot.

As for the ones I already own, each of them have their pros and cons, and I like them all.

Starting at one end of the spectrum we have Games Workshop's Dungeonquest, which saw a rerelease by Fantasy Flight Games recently. Dungeonquest is gloriously random and is best left on the shelf if you like to plan out what you're doing well in advance, because progression is determined largely by the luck of the draw. Consequently, it is a very difficult game to "succeed" in — even the instruction manual helpfully informs you that players have approximately a 34% chance of survival in any given playthrough.

In Dungeonquest, players take it in turns to draw dungeon tiles from a pool in order to build the dungeon as they go. If it's a corridor, they get to move again. If it's a room, things happen, determined largely by drawing cards and making skill checks. If it's a special room, super-special things (usually bad for the player) happen. Many of these things end in instant death for the player, meaning games can be over relatively quickly if you're unlucky.

The aim of Dungeonquest is to make it to the middle of the board to raid the slumbering dragon's massive treasure pile, then make it out again before the sun rises — the time limit in question being represented by an ever-advancing "track" at the side of the board. If players don't get out before sunrise, they die. If they run out of health, they die. If the fall down a bottomless pit, they die. Hilarity (and, usually, frustration) ensues. It's not a great game, but it is an entertaining one.

Moving up somewhat is MB and Games Workshop's Hero Quest. This was my introduction to fantasy role-playing when I was a kid, and it still holds a very fond place in my heart to date. It's an adversarial game where a team of up to four "hero" characters of varying classes take on the forces of darkness, controlled by a single "evil wizard" player. The evil wizard has a book of preset quests with which to challenge the heroes, and following these through in sequence provides a rather loose narrative. The game was later expanded with a number of additional packs that broadened the scope somewhat with new monsters, traps and additional rules to make things more interesting.

Hero Quest is good because it bridges the gap between traditional "family-friendly" board game conventions and the more abstract, strategic nature of role-playing games. It's accessible enough for pretty much anyone to understand, has high-quality components and a wide variety of things to do — plus is very expandable and customizable.

Advanced Heroquest not only changed the "correct" way to punctuate the phrase "Hero Quest"/"Heroquest" but also revamped the game completely to be significantly closer to a Dungeons & Dragons-style role-playing game. It also incorporated rules for limitless replayability including random dungeon generation, character advancement and a heavy emphasis on customization. While the original Hero Quest released an expansion allowing players to create their own adventures, Advanced Heroquest practically demanded that the Games Master (or "GM" — effectively the "evil wizard" player by another name) come up with some of their own creative, fresh ideas. And it was up to the GM in question how far they wanted to take it — Advanced Heroquest's rules catered for simple story-free "hack and slash" dungeons as much as elaborate, story-driven scenarios featuring light role-playing. The game even came with full rules for solo play, which was a godsend for me when I was a kid, as short on nearby friends as I was.

Then came Warhammer Quest. This is pretty hard to find now, which explains why I paid nearly £100 for a copy on eBay. Warhammer Quest takes the formula of Advanced Heroquest and shoots off in a different direction rather than necessarily making it more complex. Warhammer Quest has a lot more in the way of random elements, but also features a lot more rules to prevent the game from running away from the players. Where Advanced Heroquest often had dungeons that spiralled off into myriad dead ends, Warhammer Quest's dungeon generation rules ensure that players move quickly from encounter to encounter on a much more linear path, giving the game a much faster pace. That's not to say that either approach is "better" as such — Advanced Heroquest had the thrill of exploring the unknown, while Warhammer Quest always had something interesting through the next door — but it marked a significant difference between the two.

Warhammer Quest contains a fairly heavy degree of luck. If you were playing a campaign, after completing a dungeon you then had to roll repeatedly on a table to determine the events that happened during the journey back to town. These frequently got rather ridiculous, as demonstrated abundantly through the adventures of Kurt von Hellstrom and his friends.

Warhammer Quest has one cool thing over its two predecessors, however — it can be played without a GM/evil wizard. The base rules for the game include an artificial intelligence system for the monsters that determine how they move and attack, allowing all the players at the game table to cooperate and take on the dungeons together rather than one being forced to constantly be "the bad guy." Rules were there to allow the game to be played with a GM, too, but for those craving a purely cooperative experience, Warhammer Quest was a great one.

I don't get to play these games nearly as often as I'd like to. I'm hoping that I'll be able to get Descent out regularly once I get my hands on a copy — and I'm also pretty curious about the Dungeons & Dragons boardgames, too. Full reports on each and any of those I get the chance to play will, naturally, follow.