Monday, June 17, 2024

Game Review: Hero Quest (2021)

Creator:
Stephen Baker
Publisher: Avalon Hill
System: Hero Quest
Marketplace: Amazon

I received a copy of Hero Quest (1989) for my birthday when I was 11. A product of Milton Bradley in conjunction with Games Workshop, it was designed as a tool for introducing young people to the concepts of role-playing games, but with minimal amounts of the play-acting and dramatic storytelling.
Hero Quest consisted of a board, and a collection of minis and frogs, along with cardboard tiles and specialized diced resolve combat. The combat system was loosely based on Warhammer Fantasy Battles, with various icons on the dice representing one and six, two and six, and three and six chances of success on a d6 roll.

The symbols were variously a skull to represent a wound (3 in 6), a shield to represent a hero deflecting an attack (2 in 6), or a skull to represent a non-heroic unit deflecting an attack (1 in 6). 

Original 1989 box

The System

Players chose from one of four units to be there player character, a barbarian, a wizard, an elf, or a dwarf. The barbarian, of course, had starting equipment that boosted their combat ability, and eight hit points p. Elves and dwarfs headache middling sex hit points. The elf had limited spell casting ability, while the dwarf started with unique abilities when attempting to disarm traps.

Magic was handled with a deck of 12 cards with three cards per suit, with four suits  representing the four classical elements. Wizards could pick three elements and use those nine cards once each during the session, file elves got the remaining Elemental three cards.

The game master takes the role of Zargon, the evil sorcerer. Whenever a new room is accessed, Zargon puts the minis in that room in play, lays out the room, and States any important details about it.

On a player's turn they roll 2d6 to move up to that number of squares, and they may take an action. They may either move then act or act then move, but they may not bank movement points so that they can move, act, then move again.

Aside from attacking or using magic, Player Characters can search for treasure, secret doors, or traps on their turn. If they search for treasure, any preset treasures designated by the module are found first. If none are present, or they've already been found, the player May instead draw cards from a treasure card deck, which also includes traps, wandering monsters, and other hazards, making treasure hunting perilous, but potentially rewarding. A character may only search a given room once.

If they search for traps, the GM will point out any squares that have a trap for a location. A dwarf, or any other PC who happens to be carrying a toolkit may attempt to disarm or spring the trap. With slightly different mechanics for the dwarf disarming versus the humans or else disarming it. A character may also choose to jump over a square that they believe is trapped by spending extra movement and rolling a die to see if they managed to successfully avoid triggering the trap.. secret doors are revealed automatically the first time my player searches.

On Zargon's turn, the GM may move each monster up to a total of its listed movement rate, and may make an attack. At the beginning of some scenarios, Zargon is issued spells from a "dread spell" deck that he can choose to cast as one monster's actions during his turn. Like the player character spells, once a dread spell has been played once, it is gone for the rest of the scenario.

Hero Quest
contained a book of scenarios with 14 adventures. It indicates we are to lie down tiles that show where there's solid walls a player character may not cross, and where to lay out doors, set pieces, and monsters each time a new room is explored. Or if other special circumstances are met described in the scenario.

Player Characters could persist between scenarios and use gold earned in the dungeon to buy gear that increases their attack and defense dice or gives them the ability to attack diagonally or at range. There was a notepad of custom character sheets included.

A Player Character who is reduced to zero body (hit points) has one round to drink a healing potion on their person or be given one by another player or subject to a healing spell. Otherwise they are out of play for the rest of the scenario. While the game has consistently said that such characters are killed, the player May play another character of the same class with all of the same equipment and achievements under a different name starting in the next scenario. Why the game even bothered saying the PC is dead instead of wounded and unable to continue is merely stylistic.

When I was a kid and still had the game, two expansion sets were released with a book of an additional 10 scenarios and some additional cards and minis. Keller's Keep, the first expansion was not distributed in Atlantic Canada to my knowledge, but the second expansion Return of the Witch Lord was given to me as a gift a month after receiving the game.

Shortly after I received this gift, and the expansion set, my family took a vacation and Halifax Nova Scotia, and my brother and I played through all 24 scenarios that were available to us in a single long weekend. It was immense fun and I still had fond memories of it for years afterwards. Occasionally we would replay it, and I turned my hand to designing my own scenarios eventually. 

By 1990 a third expansion Against the Ogre Horde was released, but it never saw release in my province, and the game had waned in popularity in North America. I have never seen a copy of Advanced Hero Quest - the expanded game - in person. Outside of North America a fourth expansion Wizards of Morcar (a regional re-name for Zargon in the UK and Australia). Two North American Expansions: The Frozen Horror and The Mage of the Mirror came out in the early 90s, but as with the other expansions, suffered poor distribution in Eastern Canada.

Re-Release


In 2021, Avalon Hill  (which was is currently a Hasbro Subsidiary) re-released hero quest. They promised nearly identical gameplay to the original, but with higher quality materials, and a few mild tweaks. I just received a copy for my 45th birthday and have played several scenarios with my wife and children.

This is being great family fun! We've seen a lot of laughter and a lot of smiles, and even my youngest son, who doesn't like Dungeons & Dragons for being "all battle" (which may be true as his brother plays it) has really enjoyed this Lo-Fi dungeon crawling skirmish game.

There's something about the miniatures, the set pieces, and the overall design aesthetic of the game that makes it a great gateway drug into role-playing games, and a fun experience even if you're an advanced player of such games.

However, the re-release of the game did come with a substantial hike and price. At present the board game costs about a $150 CAD. And when Avalon Hill first released it, it's lack of availability in Canada meant that you nearly had to pay that again ($112) in shipping costs.

So what has changed, and how do they justify that immense price tag?

I will start by saying that the quality of the miniatures is substantially improved. They are incredibly finally detailed, with multiple variations on orcs and goblins with different weapons and clothing, even different sexes in order to add a little variety visually. Each piece of miniature furniture is a more finely detailed version of the ones that you received in the original box back in the 90s.

Divorced from Warhammer

The game has divorced itself from the Warhammer Fantasy universe. The Fimir which represented the highest level of non-human living opponent has been replaced by an "Abomination": a piranha like fish man that evokes HP Lovecraft's Shadow Over Innsmouth. References to the forces of Chaos have been replaced by references to The Dread, and the "Chaos Warriors" have been renamed "Dread Warriors" and given a slight cosmetic change from the classic Chaos Warrior design of Warhammer Fantasy Battles. Names of specific places have been substituted for generic non-Warhammer places in the read-aloud fiction, as well.

The Minis

The only minis that come left on sprues are random pieces of bones for scattering around the map, and most of the miniatures have been filed and finished after being moulded, although a couple of my goblins retain nubs from where they've been cut out of their sprues. They are printed on a fairly sturdy and high quality plastic that feels heavier and slightly more durable than the minis I had as a kid.

Box and Printed Props

The artwork on the cards remains the original artwork, although the cards feel somewhat higher quality in their printing. Much of the artwork on the box and in the books is a repainting of the original artwork slightly tweaked to more modern aesthetic and design.

The game box itself is massive and heavily reinforced. Unlike the original release which simply gave you a large enough box of pile The minis in, this box comes with a pair of lidded vacuum-formed trays for holding your dice, minis, and card, with a glossy colour printed card-stock slip case to go over the trays with copies of the box art.

Most of the cardboard tiles remain the same, but they have replaced the cardboard door standies with plastic minis of open and closed doors.

I do not recall if there was a GM screen with the original hero quest. I seem to remember needing to hide my scenario book, or use the one DM screen I owned as a kid, which was the removable slipcase cover for Under illefârn, but I have 34 years of memory leakage to work through on that front. The Avalon Hill release has a GM's screen with cool artwork and a table with all of the monster statistics present on the back.

As far as my memory serves me the scenarios remain unchanged, and the game rules remain essentially the same. They have tweaked magic selection so that the Wizard picks one element first, then the Elf does, and the Wizard gets the remaining two.

My Thoughts

In other words, it is a beautiful game with highly detailed many of the higher end of quality for moulded plastic. Everything is sharply detailed, and pleasing in the hand as well as to the eye.

Overall I'd say that it has been a substantial improvement in the quality of the physical product. And the game remains quite fun. I'm very satisfied with it, and, I consider it worth the purchase has a way to share a favourite old game with my sons, and help my older one work on his teamwork skills while introducing the younger one to the joys of fantasy gaming.

Is worth noting that all of the original expansion sets are available, and new ones are being released, giving the game a means to substantially extend its replay value, and the rule book also offers better guidance on designing your own scenarios than it used to.

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