Head over Heels – Dungeonalia entry

Almost straight away I had an idea of how I wanted the game to look – not too dissimilar from the video game. It would be important to keep the quirky humour and the slightly strange characters and place settings. Or, at least, keep as close to them as possible.

Immediately Cast n’Play sprung to mind.
I already have a vast back catalogue of their minis, having been a Patreon supporter for a number of years. Their recent release of “Terrain Essentials” (https://www.castnplay.games/terrain-essentials) had a load of great ideas for terrain and obstacles for bringing this game to life on the tabletop.

Their frankly stunning Terrain Interiors (vol 2) set already looks like it has many of the things I think I’ll need to recreate many of the rooms throughout the game (https://www.myminifactory.com/frontier/terrain-essentials-vol-ii-interiors-812)

I love the way their walls connect with little offset bricks on each end.

For my own game, I think I’ll remove the little pegs from each wall section, and use some tiny neodymium magnets to help place them both on the tiled playing area, and for connecting wall sections together.

I’ve already commissioned my son-in-law to do some 3d modelling for me – starting with the main characters, but also some of the more recognisable baddies and terrain pieces. While I’m waiting on his models, I found a couple of models on Cults3d (https://cults3d.com/en/3d-model/game/head-over-heels).

They’re not brilliant, but they’ll do as “placeholders’ until I get my own models sculpted.

The idea of a modular, room-based dungeon crawler – the kind of game Demon Ship promised to be, but failed to deliver – just wouldn’t go away.

A game that had all the elements of a fantastic video game like Head over Heels – quirky scenery, comedy characters, a bit of fun, not all miserable serious grimdark nonsense – a dungeon crawler that didn’t need a massive 8ft square board to explore, with something a little more cerebral than just encountering monsters and rolling dice to defeat them….

I wanted to make a game a bit like Head over Heels. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought “maybe I should just turn Head over Heels into a tabletop game instead”.

So that’s what I’m trying to do.

Now, a straight “port” of the game simply won’t work – there’s not really enough going on in most rooms to make it interesting enough, if the player has to set up and break down each room as they enter it. And the room layout might need to change a little bit (in most rooms, the entrance doorways straddle two “squares” but for a grid-based game, we’ll have to nudge things around a bit, to get them to line up with a grid). But the general idea should be there.

The idea is to create a complete game – ruleset, 3d models for printing (or links to where they can be sourced if from a third-party) and all the gaming tokens, chits and cards – everything necessary to actually play the game.

Here goes….