Reply To: Could Heroquest be finally coming back again?

[odinsgrandsonParticipant 4288xp 0]

– Is the hole in the market simply “A kid friendly dungeon crawler that is available at department stores and toy stores?” Because we did have HeroScape for a while there, and I don’t really know if nothing else has taken over that niche.

– I think it is kind of silly to keep bringing up the competition with video games. Over the last decade, board games have clearly shown that they can succeed in today’s market just fine.  Sure, Animal Crossing probably outsold your board game, but that’s not the bar for success (even from a retail stockist’s standpoint).

I think the more immediate concern is whether there is a place for Hero Quest in a market with lots of great dungeon crawlers.  I think the answer is “sort of.”  Certainly a lot of us will be passing on it that would have happily backed it a decade ago.

– Yeah- toy store and department store shelves tend to have the worst of games, but that’s changing a bit in the US.  Gloomhaven is available at Target (the second largest chain department store in the US).  Target has been increasing their selection of geek games by stocking anything featured on Geek and Sundry.  Wal-Mart (the bigger chain store) stocked CMON’s Marvel United game.

It certainly isn’t impossible for HeroQuest to get on the department store shelves in the US. But if they don’t, that doesn’t mean that they won’t sell enough copies to be a major success.

– I still think that Restoration is really going to have to consider what audience they are going for with this.

Do they want to make a kid friendly dungeon crawler?  Do they want to make a game that appeals to the middle aged men who played the game as kids?  Even if their intent is to have a game for nostalgia fans to play with their children, there are some changes they might want to implement.

It isn’t always wrong to change the audience- or acknowledge that your audience has changed.  The comic books for GI Joe or Avatar the Last Airbender have an older target audience than the cartoons they are based on, and this satisfied fans quite well.