HeroQuest. There’s a bunch of games that I never got to play, or maybe only played once, back in the day. I thought I’d missed my chance, or maybe I’d just never know anyone else who wanted to play.
My solution was a long, difficult and expensive one, but it sure paid off. I grew two children, and now they are forced to play games of my own choosing from now until ETERNITY ENDS. Also, my boyfriend is an avid boardgamer. So, you know, it all worked out to bring us to tonight’s game night.
I’ve had this game set up on our gaming table for at least a month. People were getting sick, or were busy, or for whatever reason, we just haven’t been gathering at the gaming table as often as we used to.
So, what is this… “HeroQuest”?
HeroQuest is the answer to the question, “What if Dungeons & Dragons were a board game?” The HeroQuest game board is a map of corridors and rooms. The game includes doors, both open and closed, to provide access to the rooms, and stone walls with which to close and open corridors, to turn the basic map into almost any conceivable dungeon (for the base game).
The scenario book contains 14 different adventures that bring you from the relatively easy map of The Trial through to meeting the scheming wizard Zarkon in his lair in the last. It is Zarkon who is putting the adventurers through this gauntlet.
Barbarian, pretty sure that’s not how you hold a sword.
One player plays Zarkon, the one that reads the scenario, runs the monsters, sets up the dungeon generally acts as the DM for the game. But really, they are just another player.
The four heroes are distributed among the other players. In our game, Ally played the Barbarian, Kasul doubled up with Dwarf and Elf, and Drew played the Wizard. I played Zarkon for this adventure, but next time, I will swap out with Kasul.
In turn, clockwise from the Zarkon player, heroes can move and take an action; both are optional. Actions are: looking for treasure, attacking a monster typically next to you, casting a spell, searching for secret doors, or searching for traps. Heroes can ask Zarkon what they can see from their current position, or to open a door they are standing next to, as bonus actions.
Searching for treasure can reveal treasure, gear, potions, or wandering monsters.
Since it is super important to be looking for treasure to get upgrades and especially healing potions, you’d think the best strategy would be for everyone to move from room to room together, looking for treasure together in order to quickly stomp on any wandering monsters that might appear.
Instead, the wizard went rushing ahead, opening doors, and generally causing a ruckus. Nonetheless, everything was working well until the wizard used a Pass Wall spell to stick his head into a room and aggroed more monsters while the rest of the adventurers were making their way to the exit. This cost the Elf her life, and she will be returning to the next adventure as a new elf. The Barbarian grabbed her gold on the way out.
Luckily, there aren’t levels to lose.
Both heroes and monsters have the same stat blocks. Number of attack dice, number of defense dice, body points (health), mind points (mana), and that’s pretty much it.
Battles run along the lines of Warhammer 40K and similar games. The attacker rolls their attack dice, and potentially hits when the dice show skulls. The defender rolls defense dice, and blocks skulls with shields — white shields for heroes, black shields for monsters. The defender takes a point of body for each unblocked skull the attacker rolled.
And that’s it, that’s the game. Super easy and quick to run. The Zarkon player and the hero players can RP as much as they like, and even in our not super RP heavy table, we were getting in some dialogue. Mostly talking about the wizard. The elf was blocking every swing, we started calling him Lucky… until a devastating abomination took him down.
Of course, this wasn’t as rewarding as an actual game of Dungeons & Dragons. You can only choose from a set list of actions. The monsters can only do what they do (although later adventures introduce Dread Spells and other mechanics to make the monsters a little deadlier, a little more memorable). It is a board game, not a tabletop roleplaying game.
I have played a lot of D&D-inspired board games, though, and I think this is the one that comes closest to being a D&D experience. We’ll see if we get through all fourteen adventures in this base set, and I’ll write about them if we do.
I have not played the new version but I have the original and when I was younger, my friends and I played it all the time. I like it as a D&D lite sort of experience. I actually think I recognize the board layout there in the photos as well still, despite the newer style pieces.
The BEST part about the furniture is when the heroes would open a new room… I’d carefully place the furniture… make sure it was all nice and set up before I placed the monsters and showed them what they’d be fighting.
Felt good.
That is a fun game. Played the heck out of it freshman year of college, even cooked up house rules for levelling so we could have a sort of campaign. Of course, that also meant I had to bump the monsters up eventually, and it kind of sprawled from there. The minis for the furniture are a really nice touch and give it good atmosphere.
Back in the 90s there weren’t a ton of games like this, but there is a practical cottage industry of dungeon crawler boardgames now. Warhammer Quest hits a nice sweet spot between something like Heroquest and an actual PnP game, though I’m not sure it’s still in print. There was also an “Advanced Heroquest” game that I have sitting in a closet and may never have actually played.
Among more modern fair, there is an Old West meets Cthulhu themed board game I really dig. I also bought Descent for half price on Amazon last year. The minis are gobsmackingingly detailed, but you can’t play it without a phone ap. That has me a bit worried about the longevity.
Okay, I want to know more about this Old West meets Cthulhu game… I did some googling and nothing quite sounds like a HeroQuest-flavored Western/Lovecraft mashup.
It’s called Shadows of Brimstone. It’s a lot like Heroes’ Quest, and even more like Warhammer Quest (“heavily influenced” by Warhammer Quest would be charitable). It comes with a booklet that has scenarios, but the maps generate themselves from cards as you go. It’s designed for you to keep your characters and level up in between sessions. It’s a heck of a lot of fun, though not as simple as Heroes Quest.
The only issue I have with it is that it becomes unwieldy to track your character’s progress in between sessions eventually, especially using the character sheets it comes with. I have vaguely considered designing new fillable PDF sheets for it that you can update and print out.