Heroquest Is Pretty Great

Back at Thanksgiving 2022, my brother recommended I read GAME WIZARDS by Jon Peterson, a business history of the early days of Dungeons & Dragons. It was an absolutely fascinating book, and I’ve talked about it many times on both my blog and my podcast . It’s honestly one of those books that I think every small businessperson should read, even small businesspeople who wouldn’t touch D&D with a thousand-foot pole. There’s a lot of valuable business lessons to be learned from the various self-inflicted misfortunes of TSR.

There was also quite a lot about related history. One of them was that for a while in the 1980s while TSR was at its peak, a lot of people tried to jump on the fantasy gaming bandwagon with varying degrees of success. One of them was Milton Bradley, which teamed up with Games Workshop to release a boardgame called HEROQUEST, which distilled down D&D into its dungeon-crawling essentials. It also tied in to Games Workshop’s Warhammer universe. The game did quite well, and numerous expansions were released through the late 80s and early to mid 90s, but eventually Milton Bradley stopped producing the game and it vanished into relative obscurity. Milton Bradley let the trademark lapse, and then someone else bought it, and it passed through a couple of other hands.

In 2020, Hasbro brought the trademark, and in 2021 they brought the game back via a crowdfunding campaign. Then in 2022, I heard about it for the first time via GAME WIZARDS.

In January 2023, I was sufficiently intrigued to pick up a copy of the core game via Amazon, since it happened to be on sale at the time.

It’s quite enjoyable. I would describe the game as D&D Lite. It’s boiled down into the essence of dungeon crawling (one of my favorite genres of both games and literature) without a lot of excess baggage. (Or the tedium of listening to someone describing their tiefling bard’s 15,000 word tragic backstory.) You have four characters with different abilities – the Barbarian, the Dwarf, the Elf, and the Wizard, and you lead them on various quests against the forces of the evil wizard Zargon. The game’s board is modular, and using the pieces of furniture included with the game, the board gets reconfigured into different dungeons.

A good selection of monsters come with the games – goblins, orcs, evil fish people, a variety of undead, and Dread Warriors, which are renamed from Chaos Warriors so Hasbro doesn’t get sued by the famously litigious Games Workshop. All the miniatures that come with the game are excellent and detailed, though they are unpainted (more on that below).

The handiest part of modern HEROQUEST is the companion app. Given the complexity of modern board games, quite a few of them now come with companion apps. HEROQUEST’s companion app essentially runs the monsters for you, which is quite useful, though you still need to keep track of quite a bit of information. Which you’ll want to do, since gold coins and various treasures are supposed to carry over between quests. The Barbarian looks formidable charging into battle bare-chested, but he’s actually more formidable once you get the poor guy some armor!

So I thoroughly enjoy the game. I came across it as a middle-aged adult, but if I had found it as a kid, I would have gone nuts over it. One the rare occasions I have a Saturday afternoon free, I’ll relax and run a dungeon. Each one of the dungeons only takes about an hour or so.

Now for an amusing aside:

Whenever I discuss HEROQUEST, a people invariably suggest I should get into miniature painting. Once I started reading about HEROQUEST, I discovered there is a large community dedicated to painting gaming miniatures, complete with YouTube channels devoted to the topic. It is very unlikely I will take this up as a hobby because I hate, hate painting. It is one of my least favorite homeowner chores, and I rather doubt it would enjoy it even more with tiny brushes.

Like, after I paint the porch this summer, that’s totally what I’ll want to do to relax – come inside and paint something else! But for fun! 🙂

-JM