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 Dryaktylus wrote:


They had Avanced Space Crusade and Tyranid Attack as more complex versions of Space Crusade in the same way as Advanced Heroquest and Warhammer Quest (both 'Advanced' versions needed to be replaced when the cooperation with MB ended), but both were just 'fighty' boardgames without much RP elements.

Oh disagree with Advanced Heroquest.

It was the perfect distillation of the setting into a boardgame.

It clearly illustrated that the only people desperate enough to do this dangerous work were the nutters on the edge of society. If you got a magical item it was so rare their wasn't a trade in value as to you it was effectively priceless. You needed lackeys to carry your gear. the wizard had to contend with not only difficult spells but their expensive components. Yes he could cast it, but the goblin scalps are near worthless and these ingredients cost over 50 gold...

And combat was deadly. You frequently would just run from common monsters as their were few bounties on them and they had a good chance to kill you.

Though combat had a (doorway) flaw that you felt you had to exploit to survive the vicious combat.

Five years ago I'd have said a re-release was pointless as game design has moved on and an updated ruleset but with the same scope would do much better.

But then they re-released Hero Quest with the exact same rules and it seems to be doing exceptionally well, so clearly I know nothing.

The_Real_Chris wrote:

 Dryaktylus wrote:


They had Avanced Space Crusade and Tyranid Attack as more complex versions of Space Crusade in the same way as Advanced Heroquest and Warhammer Quest (both 'Advanced' versions needed to be replaced when the cooperation with MB ended), but both were just 'fighty' boardgames without much RP elements.

Oh disagree with Advanced Heroquest.

It was the perfect distillation of the setting into a boardgame.

Spoiler:

It clearly illustrated that the only people desperate enough to do this dangerous work were the nutters on the edge of society. If you got a magical item it was so rare their wasn't a trade in value as to you it was effectively priceless. You needed lackeys to carry your gear. the wizard had to contend with not only difficult spells but their expensive components. Yes he could cast it, but the goblin scalps are near worthless and these ingredients cost over 50 gold...

And combat was deadly. You frequently would just run from common monsters as their were few bounties on them and they had a good chance to kill you.

Though combat had a (doorway) flaw that you felt you had to exploit to survive the vicious combat.

With 'both were just 'fighty' boardgames without much RP elements' I meant Avanced Space Crusade and Tyranid Attack.

deano2099 wrote:
Five years ago I'd have said a re-release was pointless as game design has moved on and an updated ruleset but with the same scope would do much better.

But then they re-released Hero Quest with the exact same rules and it seems to be doing exceptionally well, so clearly I know nothing.

People keep saying game design has moved on - whilst at the same time chess, drafts, checkers, poker, the list goes on like crazy are ALL old games with some being hundreds of years old.
Meanwhile in the Video Game world old games - with all their pixel, slow response goodness - have been brought back onto modern systems with some even getting full remasters


What was fun 10 years ago can still be fun today.
Meanwhile most "games have advanced" isn't really advance but rather just different approaches and ideas - some of which are good and some of which are not so good.

The_Real_Chris wrote:
Oh disagree with Advanced Heroquest.

It was the perfect distillation of the setting into a boardgame.

It clearly illustrated that the only people desperate enough to do this dangerous work were the nutters on the edge of society. If you got a magical item it was so rare their wasn't a trade in value as to you it was effectively priceless. You needed lackeys to carry your gear. the wizard had to contend with not only difficult spells but their expensive components. Yes he could cast it, but the goblin scalps are near worthless and these ingredients cost over 50 gold...

And combat was deadly. You frequently would just run from common monsters as their were few bounties on them and they had a good chance to kill you.

Though combat had a (doorway) flaw that you felt you had to exploit to survive the vicious combat.

Exalted, Advanced Heroquest was amazing

Young ULM spent way too many hours playing it, even the single player version.

It felt like a massive step up from the OG Heroquest. Creating individual heroes and their henchmen, rolling for starting stats, the board tiles, all helped to create a great atmosphere.

 Hellebore wrote:
I enjoyed old WHQ quite a lot, but it did have a very repetitive game experience.

Within a few levels you'd be getting a whole room full of rats that meant you couldn't move and then each hero would just slaughter everything near them. so you'd be putting all these models on and then just removing them. Leveling up still had this happen, just with goblins or skaven instead.

And then the wizard got bonkers very quickly.

If they could make the game more interesting in those areas I'd be up for a new edition. Never really liked the current design style of the Quest games.

My experience with WHQ has all been in the last few years. I slooowly pieced together a complete set over more than a decade by gradually getting hold of the various bits and pieces, and using proxies when necessary. My Lair of the Orc Lord boyz are made from an old plastic Blood Bowl team.

I love the game ... which puzzles me, because on paper it doesn't look like fun. It's mostly a mindless, repetitive exercise in rolling dice. There's very little real exploration (unlike original HeroQuest), and not much in the way of tactical decision-making, at least when you're starting out and lack items or abilities.

Yet somehow it's consistently entertaining and keeps generating memorable emergent stories from all the random nonsense. Especially once you add the extra variety offered by the expansions, White Dwarf add-ons, the Roleplay Book extra monsters and events, etc.

One of my favourites was the time we met all three expansion mini-bosses (Skabnoze the shaman, Gunther the necromancer and the assassin rat from the White Dwarf Skaven mini-expansion) in neighbouring rooms of the same dungeon. It was as if we'd stumbled onto some kind of nefarious G20 summit. And just when we thought we'd licked them, it turned out the Chaos Warrior had stolen something from a pack of MInotaurs, and they finally caught up to him and killed us all. What precious item had the Warrior stolen? Three gold coins.

Plus, because it's cooperative and not too brain-straining, it's simultaneously tense and relaxing. You can chat about life/politics/what's wrong with the latest Star Wars movie while playing it, without fear of losing track of what's going on.

Our main problem is surviving more than two quests in a row with the same heroes ...


Regarding the 30th anniversary, I'm a bit surprised they mentioned it at all. For a long time GW seemed reluctant to mention the original WHQ. I got the impression some kind of drama happened behind the scenes, similar to Gorkamorka--another game GW spent a while pretending never existed, unlike Necromunda, Epic, etc. But that's just my vague impression from cryptic hints on various forums. I could be completely wrong.

 Hellebore wrote:
I enjoyed old WHQ quite a lot, but it did have a very repetitive game experience.

Within a few levels you'd be getting a whole room full of rats that meant you couldn't move and then each hero would just slaughter everything near them. so you'd be putting all these models on and then just removing them. Leveling up still had this happen, just with goblins or skaven instead.

And then the wizard got bonkers very quickly.

If they could make the game more interesting in those areas I'd be up for a new edition. Never really liked the current design style of the Quest games.

And when you got to high levels, you were just rolling to see how many greater daemons or Chaos lords were in the next room, since there were so few monsters of an appropriate challenge.

And then you’d get casually murdered to death when visiting the toilet afterwards.

> But then they re-released Hero Quest with the exact same rules and it seems to be doing exceptionally well, so clearly I know nothing.

Familiarity and Nostalgia.

For children's games, researchers found out that the most popular titles were selling because the parents were already familiar with the rules, and because they already knew about the game. Not hard to find a better children's game than Life or Hi Ho, but your average parent isn't going to pick up these better games because they're not familiar with it (and because they're *way* more expensive).

So, for HQ, I'm sure if the game was sold only on the design, it wouldn't have sold well. But it was the only game of its kind a generation ago, was OOP (and many backers owned it as a kid, played the **** out of it, and either lost their copy or wore it out) and had "free" advertising by GameZone as well, so was immensely popular. Compare this to how the HeroScape crowdfunding failed, though HS without prepainted figures (and different factions?) made it even less popular.

I'm waiting for Dungeon Command, myself, but that ain't gonna happen.

HeroQuest is a really nice system though.

For those well versed in the genre, it’s a bit low on crunchy detail, sure. But the hallmarks are all there, and sloppy Hero positioning can and will see them overwhelmed. And you can typically wrap up an adventure in half and hour from getting the box out of the cupboard to the last dice roll.

And it’s very accessible for newcomers young and old.

On this 30th Anniversary thing, it does feel like an odd effort with no re-release. Why show us the gameplay of a game we can’t now buy?

Yeah I've never minded the original HQ rules.

I've always liked the combined attack rules on the same dice - giving you two different success chances for PCs and NPCs without using numbers or profiles to compare to, just rolling the dice and the faces take care of it.


I actually think if you combined the GMless aspect of WHQ with the set up of HQ you'd get an even more fun game. HQ doesn't really give the GM enough to do, so allowing htem to be a hero instead vs the game would be good.

My secret hope is at the culmination of this season they announce that we'll be able to relive the cast's adventures with a copy of the game on a MTO basis.

Or just a fancied up version like the last Space Hulk anniversary. I'd be fine with either. I thought Silver Tower and Cursed City were neat, but a bit too removed from the original concept.

All the games I've kickstarted over the years were in an attempt to chase the highs that this game offered. Never owned my own copy either, sadly. A few have come really close in various ways. Darklight Memento Mori I thought came the closest, whereas stuff like Brimstone has taken the basic formula and let it run wild and mutate.

Honestly it would be odd for GW to do multiple articles and a video on a classic game format that's over 20 years old that even oldies can't play because they lost/sold/never bought it at the time and all the new customers don't even have a hope of playing.

That is unless its one of those cases where lower level staff are pushing for it and management say there's no interest; so lower level staff do a bunch of stuff like this to generate talk, hype and see if they get enough "engagement scores" and such to use as a justification to the management to say "here people were interested; they were talking; they do want the product - lets do it"


Even if that means a reprint will be over a year away.

Leave the King rest in peace.

 Overread wrote:
Honestly it would be odd for GW to do multiple articles and a video on a classic game format that's over 20 years old that even oldies can't play because they lost/sold/never bought it at the time and all the new customers don't even have a hope of playing.

They've done a non-zero amount of Blackstone Fortress playthroughs despite all the expansions being long out of print and going for a fortune on eBay but without it materialising into more availability, sadly.

>"they rereleased HeroQuest with the exact same rules"

Just a note for anyone unaware: The current rerelease of HeroQuest has the exact same rules as the old North American edition. The rules were different in original original HeroQuest, the UK edition. And that had two editions itself. (I believe Australia only got the revised 2nd edition of the UK version. Non-English-speaking countries often got a translation of the UK 1st edition, but not the revised version.)

If your evil wizard / GM was called Morcar and the first quest in your questbook was 'The Maze', you had the UK 1st edition.

If your evil wizard was called Morcar and the first quest in your questbook was 'The Trial', you had the UK 2nd edition.

If your evil wizard was called Zargon, you had the North American edition, which fiddled with quite a lot of rules and quests. Mostly unnecessary overcomplication in my opinion ... but they did add some nifty Chaos Spells.

 Hellebore wrote:


I actually think if you combined the GMless aspect of WHQ with the set up of HQ you'd get an even more fun game. HQ doesn't really give the GM enough to do, so allowing htem to be a hero instead vs the game would be good.

I think there's a companion app for the modern rerelease of HQ that does a passable job of automating the monsters and telling you what's in the next room, but I play boardgames to get away from screens ...

I remember reading back in the day in WD a Chaos Dwarf and a Dark Elf set adventures were were planned, wonder why they weren't released.

Ancient Otter wrote:
I remember reading back in the day in WD a Chaos Dwarf and a Dark Elf set adventures were were planned, wonder why they weren't released.

Lack of sales, I imagine. I picked up most of the hero packs for cheap in the big white metal switch, evidence that gamers back then didn't know how good they had it!

 Overread wrote:
Honestly it would be odd for GW to do multiple articles and a video on a classic game format that's over 20 years old that even oldies can't play because they lost/sold/never bought it at the time and all the new customers don't even have a hope of playing.

That is unless its one of those cases where lower level staff are pushing for it and management say there's no interest; so lower level staff do a bunch of stuff like this to generate talk, hype and see if they get enough "engagement scores" and such to use as a justification to the management to say "here people were interested; they were talking; they do want the product - lets do it"


Even if that means a reprint will be over a year away.

Honestly the game sucks and it’s all nostalgia. It’s a basic dungeon crawler that took more to set up than to play. Game design has moved on.

Zenithfleet wrote:
>"they rereleased HeroQuest with the exact same rules"

Just a note for anyone unaware: The current rerelease of HeroQuest has the exact same rules as the old North American edition. The rules were different in original original HeroQuest, the UK edition. And that had two editions itself. (I believe Australia only got the revised 2nd edition of the UK version. Non-English-speaking countries often got a translation of the UK 1st edition, but not the revised version.)

If your evil wizard / GM was called Morcar and the first quest in your questbook was 'The Maze', you had the UK 1st edition.

If your evil wizard was called Morcar and the first quest in your questbook was 'The Trial', you had the UK 2nd edition.

If your evil wizard was called Zargon, you had the North American edition, which fiddled with quite a lot of rules and quests. Mostly unnecessary overcomplication in my opinion ... but they did add some nifty Chaos Spells.

 Hellebore wrote:


I actually think if you combined the GMless aspect of WHQ with the set up of HQ you'd get an even more fun game. HQ doesn't really give the GM enough to do, so allowing htem to be a hero instead vs the game would be good.

I think there's a companion app for the modern rerelease of HQ that does a passable job of automating the monsters and telling you what's in the next room, but I play boardgames to get away from screens ...

Ah, all the copies I have are Morcar/Trial ones. Good times.

The WHQ system of using card decks as the GM works really well and in a way makes the game feel very PvE sandboxy despite the actual gameplay, because there's no meta intelligence competing against you. It's really interesting the psychology difference between the two.

The core mechanics of HQ were pretty solid, it's more the campaign and GM mechanics that they needed to improve, as it's limited to a single board set up with limited configurations. They also needed to bring Mind Points into the game a lot more so that the Wizard's skewed stats were not as much of a handicap. And for more depth in general.

But those dice allowed so many interesting rules ideas and options. The gear system was easy. All in all, a nice breezy system that could have easily had a more satisfying campaign and layout system applied over the top without needing to change the core mechanics.

Ancient Otter wrote:I remember reading back in the day in WD a Chaos Dwarf and a Dark Elf set adventures were were planned [for Warhammer Quest], wonder why they weren't released.

As I recall, the promised but never released WHQ expansions were for Skaven and Chaos Dwarfs, not Dark Elves.

They did publish a kind of mini-expansion for the Skaven in White Dwarf. It's more in-depth than usual for a WD article and appears to have been salvaged from the unfinished expansion. It even came with cards for three special characters and an objective room.

The only thing that ever surfaced from the Chaos Dwarf expansion was a mysterious cardboard floor tile of an anvil/forge room, with no dungeon card or explanation to go with it, making it useless unless you homebrewed something.

Some of the random bonus rooms published in White Dwarf might have been originally intended for those expansions (like the Sewer, which feels very Skavenesque).

Hellebore wrote:
The WHQ system of using card decks as the GM works really well and in a way makes the game feel very PvE sandboxy despite the actual gameplay, because there's no meta intelligence competing against you. It's really interesting the psychology difference between the two.

The core mechanics of HQ were pretty solid, it's more the campaign and GM mechanics that they needed to improve, as it's limited to a single board set up with limited configurations. They also needed to bring Mind Points into the game a lot more so that the Wizard's skewed stats were not as much of a handicap. And for more depth in general.

But those dice allowed so many interesting rules ideas and options. The gear system was easy. All in all, a nice breezy system that could have easily had a more satisfying campaign and layout system applied over the top without needing to change the core mechanics.

I agree about the WHQ card system (in fact I've made heaps of custom cards so we don't have to roll on those tables in the Roleplay Book). It often feels like the game is conspiring against us even though it's pure randomness. We had one adventure where we found nothing but empty corridor after empty corridor for miles, reached a dead end, awkwardly turned around ... and suddenly set off a trap and a horde of Beastmen jumped us while we were still rearranging our formation. Obviously a well-planned ambush.

I'm not so sure about HQ's single board being a problem, though. Actually, I think it offers more possibilities than the separate floor tiles of WHQ and other games like it. A huge amount of setups are possible just by changing the doors and the blocked squares, without sprawling everywhere and going off the edges of the table. You can also use overlay tiles to cover up the lines on the board to change the shape of the rooms. More importantly, because each quest is pre-planned, the paths can interconnect to offer multiple routes to the objective. A well-made HQ map feels like a real place that exists for its own sake and that you're exploring, rather than a theme park ride that has been summoned into being just so the players can go through it. (A bit like the levels in N64 Goldeneye.)

WHQ tends to generate fairly linear dungeons. It's more of a dungeon bash than a dungeon exploration. You might run into the occasional T-junction with different rooms in either direction, but you know that whichever way you go you'll draw the next Event card from the deck. If you go left and meet an Ogre, you would have met him if you went right too, which feels a bit weird.

Interestingly, I think Stephen Baker's original design for HeroQuest had separate dungeon tiles that you connected together ... but the playtest audience (preteen boys mostly) found that too confusing, what with the need to find the correct tiles that matched the map from a jumble of tiles, plus the sheer strangeness of not having a conventional board like other board games.

A lot of things that seem like flaws were actually refinements to suit the target mass-market audience. I recall Baker saying in an interview that they knew they'd hit the right level of simplicity vs complexity when they could simply leave the prototype HeroQuest box in a roomful of kids without telling them anything about how to play the game, leave for an hour, and come back to find the kids engrossed in playing it.

The North American edition was revamped by a different team (though they kept in touch with Baker) and seems to have aimed at a slightly older, slightly geekier demographic.

Mind Points should definitely have seen more use. I don't really find the Wizard to be handicapped, though. In fact I find him to be the most fun of all the heroes to use, since you're always on the edge of death and have to think carefully about when to use your spells. Unfortunately if your first experience of UK HeroQuest is 'The Trial', the Wizard can earn himself a bad reputation, since that's the 'introductory game' that doesn't use the spell rules ...

In terms of the campaign, UK HeroQuest had the awkward problem of initially assuming that the hero players would compete with each other for gold and equipment rewards. The quests in the base game were designed with this in mind. If the Elf goes racing off on his own looking for treasure, he'll have a dangerous and thrilling time. It's especially obvious in the 1st edition, where 'The Maze' encourages the heroes to compete. But if all four heroes stick together, the UK base game quests are a bit too easy. By the time the expansions came out it was clear that a lot of players were cooperating like well-drilled soldiers. That's probably why the expansions are harder and throw scads of monsters at you.

The North American edition enforced cooperation from the get-go, removing rules that let heroes attack each other and so on, but it had to bump up the difficulty of the base game quests to balance it out.

The biggest issue I had with HQ was the 'doorway problem'. Every time you opened the door to a new room, you'd lay out all this interesting furniture and all these monsters, ready for an exciting battle ... and then the heroes would inevitably stand outside the door with the Barbarian at the front, and fight the monsters one at a time instead of actually charging in for a multiplayer brawl like the game assumed they would. Tactically sound, but boring for both sides.

Whoops, there I go again ...

I am sort of amazed that GW haven't properly managed a continuing line of co-op dungeon crawler. Blackstone Fortress was the closest they got - and even though that seemed to do really well they gave up on it, no new edition or such.

These sort of games clearly sell and expansions could just be repackaging exiting minis with new rules and cards. I guess while for most board game companies such a game would a golden goose, for GW the opportunity cost of not focusing instead on the core lines is greater.

I'm finding this all fascinating, as my own dungeon crawler is ideally co-op or solo play, but all the playtest sessions involve me controlling the baddies.

deano2099 wrote:
I am sort of amazed that GW haven't properly managed a continuing line of co-op dungeon crawler.

I don't know why GW doesn't re-release one of their older games every year.

As for Blackstone Fortress: without searching, find it for sale on Warhammer.com. They've buried it. Same for Cursed City.

Cursed City is still under AOS on the website, but Blackstone has to be searched...hmmm.

Zenithfleet wrote:


As I recall, the promised but never released WHQ expansions were for Skaven and Chaos Dwarfs, not Dark Elves.

They did publish a kind of mini-expansion for the Skaven in White Dwarf. It's more in-depth than usual for a WD article and appears to have been salvaged from the unfinished expansion. It even came with cards for three special characters and an objective room.

The only thing that ever surfaced from the Chaos Dwarf expansion was a mysterious cardboard floor tile of an anvil/forge room, with no dungeon card or explanation to go with it, making it useless unless you homebrewed something.

Some of the random bonus rooms published in White Dwarf might have been originally intended for those expansions (like the Sewer, which feels very Skavenesque).

Cheers, I could hazily remember them mentioned at the end of a WHQ designers notes article on WD, not sure why I had it in my head about the Dark Elves. Andy Chambers was mentioned as working on the CD one, not sure about the Skaven.

I doubt they will, but I'd love it if they reissued those plastics.

Flying Frog Productions' Shadows of Brimstone is the nearest thing to a modern Warhammer Quest, with cards equating to floor tiles, encounter and treasure cards and random events on the journey back to town. Weird Western theming is the cherry on top!

Not Dungeon Saga Origins by Mantic or even the Hero Quest re-release?

 mattl wrote:
Not Dungeon Saga Origins by Mantic or even the Hero Quest re-release?

Not even close. Shadows of Brimstone is a reskin, but otherwise 95% WHQ mechanically. Dungeon Saga is a barely modernized Heroquest and like HQ it is very fun, but stupidly light and dull.