HeroQuest Relaunched By Avalon Hill

September 23, 2020 by avernos

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Well if you've been living under a rock you may have missed the news that something was happening with HeroQuest as two weeks ago Avalon Hill started running a countdown. Last night the timer ran out and surprisingly their website didn't fall over. Once people had spammed their F5 keys they were left looking at the news that HeroQuest was returning but with several caveats.

HeroQuest Spread

HeroQuest in all its rendered glory // Avalon Hill

The first caveat is that the game itself is only being relaunched if it hits the target of $1,000,000 *insert Dr Evil gif here* because this game is being crowdfunded on Avalon Hill's parent companies own platform, Hasbro Pulse. That's not going to be a major issue I don't think as they're three quarters of the way to the goal and still have six more weeks to run. The second caveat is slightly more important though, if you're outside of the United States of America, its territories, or Canada then you are out of luck.

Yup the rest of the world need not apply. I have a feeling that it may be due to licensing issues as the original version was co-produced by MB Games and Games Workshop, so this may be purely logistical as I can't imagine Hasbro would let a market go untapped. Also for the Canuks in the audience be careful when jumping in, one person reported last night that the postage was costing £135 which is $36 more than the actual game was setting them back. So with that out of the way and only the US readers still browsing lets take a bit of a browse at what is available.

HeroQuest Character Cards

HeroQuest Character Cards

The familiar characters are back with a few changes, the first is that the elf is no longer a ranger and the second is that the elf is now female. Female I can understand but replacing half of the ranged fighters in your set with a third melee character seems unbalanced. The character cards along with all the artwork has been redone but that's not particularly surprising, in most respects it looks like they were handed a copy of the original game and asked to reproduce the concept in their own style.

Barbarian Render // HeroQuest

Beyond the artwork the renders for the models look well capturing the look of the miniatures as they are illustrated now, but with the improvements in sculpting and manufacture of plastic components they're not as flat and static as the originals. It's nice to see that the Barbarian got a foot on rock just for Warren, and the Gargoyle and sorcerous Liche have also been giving a dust off and spruced up for 2020.

Campaign Levels

There are two levels of pledges available for backers, the Heroic Tier offer which includes the core game (featuring 71 highly detailed character and furniture miniatures) as well as 4 bonus hero miniatures and 1 exclusive Sir Ragnar miniature only available during the HasLab campaign and the Mythic Tier includes the Heroic Tier offer  as well as 2 game expansions, 2 more exclusive figures, and all available unlocks.

The fact that both of these mention that there are exclusives only available during the campaign means that it will be available post crowd-funding and hopefully even outside the US. In the meantime I imagine scalpers are warming up their credit cards to make a killing on these.

HeroQuest Alternative Characters

Exclusives

The exclusives include alternative versions of the heroes in the core pledge, so there will be a pair of each character, one male and one female, along with the long suffering Sir Ragnar. The Mythic version has a Warlock Character again a pair although I have no idea how different that is from the mage. The only other change to the game is the addition of fishmen called Abominations. Otherwise that's it, from the video and cards that they have shown it is a relaunch, gameplay looks to be exactly as it was 30 years ago and depending on your point of view that is either going to be fantastic news or the worst thing ever.

The sculpts on the miniatures look great, I assume the quality will match the renders when it comes to production but for a lot of people outside of North America I can't help but feel that they dropped the ball on this one.

"The sculpts on the miniatures look great, I assume the quality will match the renders when it comes to production but for a lot of people outside of North America I can't help but feel that they dropped the ball on this one."

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