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Could Heroquest be finally coming back again?

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This topic contains 41 replies, has 14 voices, and was last updated by  ced1106 3 years, 7 months ago.

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  • #1553675

    balginstondraeg
    Participant
    1151xp

    Copied from another forum:

    https://techraptor.net/tabletop/news/restoration-games-applies-for-heroquest-legacies-trademark

     

    The Quest Continues
    Restoration Games has filed a trademark under the name HeroQuest Legacies. The trademark covers “tabletop hobby battle games in the nature of battle, war, and skirmish games” and is likely to be a reboot or continuation of the classic 1980s HeroQuest board game.

    What exactly is HeroQuest Legacies?
    We don’t actually know yet. Restoration Games is well-known for restoring classic games from bygone eras that have been out of print for some time. According to the company’s “About” page, they “take the stuff we like and really make it the star” while “quietly [discarding] the outdated stuff that’s not really working for us”. As such, we can perhaps expect HeroQuest Legacies to be an updated version of HeroQuest that offers a twist on the classic dungeon crawler gameplay of the original. The “Legacies” part of the name also suggests Restoration wants to honor HeroQuest’s history and perhaps create some variations on gameplay that take this history into account. It could also mean that whatever it is will use a legacy system, meaning an ongoing campaign could be in the cards.
    This news comes after many years of the HeroQuest IP lying dormant. HeroQuest was originally a collaboration between Games Workshop and Milton Bradley, and the modern WarhammerQuest line is intended as a spiritual successor to the original game. Games Workshop allowed the HeroQuest trademark to elapse, and it was then picked up by tabletop RPG designer Greg Stafford, who used it as the name of an RPG system. After Stafford’s death in 2018, his IP were picked up by Moon Design Publications, who have since taken legal action against a HeroQuest board game.

    Why is a new HeroQuest game coming now?
    According to Reddit user corporat, Moon Design and Restoration could have made an agreement. HeroQuest, the tabletop RPG Stafford created, has been renamed to QuestWorlds, paving the way for a new HeroQuest board game. A sister RPG product, HeroQuest: Glorantha, was planned, but Moon Design has registered a trademark for the name Hero Wars, which was the name Stafford’s RPG had before it was called HeroQuest. All signs point to Restoration Games having the rights to produce a HeroQuest board game, so whatever Legacies is, it’s safe to get excited about it if you’re a HeroQuest fan.

    https://trademarks.justia.com/900/31/heroquest-90031594.html

     

    Moon Design are one of the reasons the Gamezone Heroquest 25th anniversary edition became mired in controversy and basically never came out as far as I’m aware. This could be interesting and it’s basically a “watch this space” situation as far as I can tell. It has got me more than a little excited ‘though.

    #1553678

    mage
    Participant
    20595xp

    I’m not sure where this is all at at the moment or if will even go anywhere but hopefully more is happening.

    #1553681

    onlyonepinman
    18051xp
    Cult of Games Member

    Moon designs is the reason that it was taken down from Kickstarter, the reason it never came out is because Gamezone utterly mismanaged the project which was funded to the tune of  €679927 on Spanish crowdfunding site Lanzanos.  I believe that Gamezone are currently the target of a class action lawsuit in the Spanish Courts as a result of their mismanagement of the project.

    #1553682

    onlyonepinman
    18051xp
    Cult of Games Member

    Being brutally honest, I have backed a couple of dungeon crawlers over the last decade and I think that itch has now been thoroughly scratched.  Even the nostalgia ofthe Heroquest brand is probably not enough to draw me in.

    #1553756

    balginstondraeg
    Participant
    1151xp

    There’s a rumour going ’round that they might have one or two unpublished Heroquest Expansions as well in rough draft form from one of the old designers. Then again two of the Heroquest expansions never got published over here in Britain anyway (although I hear they weren’t very good).

     

    Rumour is they might have a Wizard quest expansion and a Dwarf quest expansion.

    https://restorationgames.com/welcome-mike-restoration-will/

    #1553925

    totsuzenheni
    Participant
    5651xp

    I’m curious, and it’s possible i might buy into HeroQuest Legacies, but as mentioned above there are other products to ‘scratch that itch’ with. Those other products might not be quite the same as the original HeroQuest, and so if HeroQuest Legacies is more like the original than those products it might still be unique enough in some way to merit investment, but that begs the question of what it is that they’ll change and whether or not HeroQuest Legacies will, as a result, end up any more like the original HeroQuest than any of the other similar dungeon crawls out there. For my money i’d be more interested in something like Advanced HeroQuest. Also, i think part of what made HeroQuest so memorable is that it led into the wider Warhammer world and product line.

    #1554021

    balginstondraeg
    Participant
    1151xp

    Heroquest was a pretty good game.

    Advanced Heroquest was even better!

    Warhammer Quest was garbage in comparison to Advanced Heroquest.

    #1554072

    sundancer
    42552xp
    Cult of Games Member

    My initial hobby butterfly says: YES! GIVE ME!

    And then I remember the price of “return to dark tower” and that’s a cold shower for you there…

    If it’s reasonable priced: maybe

    But I think they will squeeze it good. And who could blame them? Make the TM pay 😉

    #1554179

    mrpage
    Participant
    621xp

    Hero Quest (and Space Crusade) was all designed by a guy called Stephen Baker who also designed Heroscape, Battle Masters, Battleball and Axis and Allies Global.  I feel like he should better known, these are games that brought a lot of people into the hobby.

    #1554237

    darthcheese
    Participant
    4192xp

    Wow, I own or owned 4 of those games.

    #1554256

    limburger
    21533xp
    Cult of Games Member

    I think it relies a little much on nostalgia.
    And as dungeon crawlers are their own genre it wouldn’t be as unique as it was.
    So unless it is dirt cheap (which it won’t be) … I doubt it can be anything other than a boutique product for rich folks.

    /me has Advanced Heroquest somewhere … (do people really want to pay 200+$ for that thing on fleabay ? … hmmm )

    #1554295

    darkvoivod
    7112xp
    Cult of Games Member

    I’ve played both heroquest and and advanced heroquest not so long ago. I found advanced heroquest a slog. It was slow and boring. I sold of my copy to a friend, who collects GW games, for the same price I got it from ebay for.
    Heroquest itself I got a pristine copy off off a site to sit on my shelf and I probably will paint it up at some point, but it’s certainly a kids game.
    It doesn’t hold up to more modern games of the genre. I LOVED it as a kid and it was my gateway drug, as well.
    But for modern audiences there needs to be some serious re-balancing done as, when played with adults, the hreoes have a breeze. We call it swat-quest in my gaming group. Players would methodically clear room after room. Search for threasure and prepare for the next room. That’s not to say we didn’t have a good laugh for a couple of evenings.

    But If I hadn’t played it as a kid, I’d been seriously dissappointed

    #1554451

    balginstondraeg
    Participant
    1151xp

    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.

    #1554471

    doomzombie
    5478xp
    Cult of Games Member

    I own two of those games, Hero Quest and Space Crusade.

    • This reply was modified 3 years, 7 months ago by  doomzombie.
    #1554536

    pacific
    Participant
    400xp

    Fantastic write-up there @balginstondraeg – I will have to check out a few of the games you have mentioned.

    Warhammer Quest always seemed like such fun to me – although it’s so many years ago since I played it, and I don’t know how well it would stand up now having played so many other games in between.

    I have just got hold of Arcadia Quest and am very much looking forward to painting up the minis and playing that game. Although I know that’s very different in aspect to the Warhammer/Heroquest games of yore.

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