HeroQuest has always been a great first introduction to roleplaying since its beginnings twenty or so years ago. Don’t have to roll up characters, just a couple stats to worry about, everything is dice throws, and the adventure is written up for you. The only real fly in the ointment is that one player still has to act as the DM — setting up the layout, moving the monsters around, narrating the adventure. You can’t play one of the heroes and DM at the same time.
In our playthrough of the original campaign, Kasul eventually chose to be Zargon for every game. Zargon, in the lore, is the evil sorcerer responsible for the dire situations in which we find our heroes. This meant one of us — me — had to play two of the heroes, while the kids played the other two, one each. But now, I’m bringing it to the family game night — five players. Kasul can play Zargon, and I don’t have to double up anymore.
The original box was expensive — over a hundred bucks and closer to two, I think. It was worth the price, to me, for all the plastic molded monsters and set dressing.
This new starter box, HeroQuest: First Light, replaces the plastic minis (aside from the player minis and a large dragon mini) with cardboard standees, and the set dressings with printed cardboard rectangles. It’s much cheaper as a result. They even made the game board double sided to get a little more variation in the game layout. The layouts change with the scenario, but in the first edition, with a single sided game board, there were only so many variations you could make. Now that is doubled.
The adventure starts similarly: The good wizard, Mentor, has gathered together four heroes — Barbarian, Dwarf, Elf and Wizard — to track down some of the good knight Sir Ragnar’s lost scouts. Sir Ragnar was rescued at the start of the first campaign, so it’s a nice callback to the original. Presumably these are new and different heroes than in the first box. Probably the children of the original.
The first mission in this new campaign takes pains to show everything the old campaign had to offer, up front. We met every monster type at least once. Lots of traps, secret doors, hidden panels and boxes of treasure, and we went to most of the rooms.
The heroes seem a little unbalanced at the start, which we saw in the original. The Barbarian does the most damage and has the most health, with the same defense as every other hero. The dwarf lags a little behind, and only used their trap avoiding ability once. Wizard felt constrained by their limited spell selection and was forced to melee in order to participate. Elf, who was given the Earth spells, did a fair amount of tanking until her Rock Skin ran out, after which she had to stay toward the back of the pack and help with the trash while the other heroes took on the Dread Lord and various Abominations.
This will all change once we start gaining gear. The crossbow gives the Elf a consistent job to do, and the dwarf gains a battle axe that puts him on par with the barbarian, and both get armor to help with their defense. The wizard gets a few wizard-specific tools to make up for the limited spells, but we’ll see if that is enough to keep pace with the others. In our previous play through, Barbarian swapped to Monk, Wizard swapped to Rogue, and Dwarf became the sole tank. I haven’t decided if we’re going to allow substitutions yet. I have the Elf-centric expansion to allow Elf to be more of a caster, so we’ll see where that goes. Kasul says the game will be ramping up soon, requiring us to have bought some upgrades to survive.
We haven’t seen the dragon yet…
