Reply To: Could Heroquest be finally coming back again?

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The point of Heroquest (in that regard) is that the monsters don’t challenge you too much individually but that enough monsters will, over the course of an adventure, grind you down if you don’t take good care of yourself. You’re not trying to defend yourself against all the monsters in one encounter. You’re trying to defend yourself against all the encounters over the course of an adventure and manage resources (like Body Points) over time, making them last and knowing when you’re badly wounded enough to need to be even more careful.

It’s an older design aesthetic most familiar with those who’ve played D&D/AD&D 1st & 2nd edition where it was all about surviving and enduring the odds and managing resources (like hit points) to survive. 3rd edition & onwards became all about alpha strike – smashing things down before they got a chance to retaliate. The modern game designs lead more towards every foe needing to be extremely dangerous and challenging because it probably won’t get the chance to use most of it’s damaging potential. Essentially there’s lot of glass cannons and paper tigers while game design sued to favour the boxing match/champion approach where it was all about surviving the fight and being able to survive the next one as well.

 

Both approaches have their merits and can be enjoyed their own way for different reasons (they’re  a different kind of enjoyment). One’s about instant gratification and the other is about the more long term approach. It would be interesting to see what a new version of Heroquest would be like as various attempts after Advanced Heroquest have failed miserably to capture the feel. Mantic’s version (Dwarf King’s Hold and Dungeon Saga) have a painful dice pool combat system that, while quick, clearly feels like it belongs in a mass battle wargame and not in aboard game. For some reason they don’t quite capture that adventuring hero feel. That doesn’t mean the heroes should be more powerful. it means that Dungeon Saga and Dwarf King’s Hold feel too clunky. Hybrid (the Confrontation dungeon crawler) failed miserably and suffered from some terrible translations including spending one and a half columns of text to explain that a miniature based with four sides has a front, back, and two flanks. And the bad sentences… “A figurine can only attack to it’s front side. A figurine can only defend to it’s front side, it’s left side and it’s right side. It is therefore important not to expose your back side to the enemy or you will be unable to defend yourself.” Clearly a quality English language translation was a low priority for Rackham as usual as this was all presented incredibly seriously instead of the tongue in cheek tone you’d expect to accompany such a batty translation.

 

Descent suffers from a massive immersion breaker. Heroes constantly teleporting back into town for shopping mid run can easily kill the tone. Gloomhaven is too obsessed with it’s deck management aspects to have that simple free roaming Heroquest feel. Essentially a lot of modern dungeon crawler board games have an idea, a special thing that they want you to do in a very specific way (Dungeon Saga’s dice pol mechanic, Gloomhaven’s card decks etc) and have a very intricate series of rules for the procedure because they want it to be the most interesting and exciting thing in the game. Often they end up just overthinking it and this often results in something clunky.

 

Something like a fantasy version of Space Hulk could work quite well (which is ironic as Advanced Heroquest’s room and tunnel floor sections were blatantly similar to the Space Hulk ones and, while Warhammer Quest used similar floorplans to recapture the feel, the rules were clunky, too based directly on Warhammer, and utilised the god awful d66 method and some horribly open ended encounter tables that were often poorly balanced).

 

In many regards Claustrophobia (the Hell Dorado board game) comes quite close to capturing that Space Hulk/Heroquest feeling of a simple system that invites lots of tactical options and allows you to think creatively. If you’re sitting there with Gloomhaven staring at two cards and thinking which one you want to play first and which second and knowing that one may very well be removed from your deck after the encounter anyway it’s easy to get too hung up on the mechanics and not enjoy that feeling of adventure that a simpler rules set can offer.

 

Now there’s been some newer games I haven’t been able to delve into yet like Shadows of Brimstone. I did back Dark Rituals: Mallus Maleficareum on kickstarter which is, by all accounts, the Fantasy Shadows of Brimstone so I’m looking forwards to giving that a try. I’m also looking forwards to Oathsworn but that’s more of a boss fight game than a dungeon crawler (with nice story based adventuring sections inbetween. Very Fighting Fantasy). Darklight: Memento Mori is actually a really good boardgame if you want to capture that Warhammer Quest feel with a Dark Souls vibe to it. Mechanically it does a good job of feeling very Warhammer Quest which is great for the nostalgia feel (And the miniatures are really nice) but not so good for the simpler more wholesome Heroquest feeling.

 

Now I hear that Mythic Games are planning on doing a Darkest Dungeon boardgame and I’ll be honest, I’m a massive Darkest Dungeon fan so I’d probably be all over that even if it is being done by Mythic Games just for the miniatures alone. There’s only so many dodgy unofficial Russian Darkest Dungeon miniatures I can collect (and I have most of them). If the rules and gameplay are any good that’s an added bonus.

 

I suppose a new Heroquest would need to keep the game’s simplicity and accessibility. It probably wouldn’t be able to use the Old World setting then there’d be things like the Fimir.