Dear Readers, welcome back! I hope you are doing well wherever you are.
I got to play HeroQuest last and this week, and I decided that today is my unboxing of the HeroQuest game.
It you remember, it’s billed as a game of “High Adventure in a World of Magic.”
The gameplay is fairly easy and the pieces are amazingly sturdy/beautifully done.
First to the game pieces:
As you can see here, there are a variety of furniture pieces, from an alchemist table to bookshelves to a cupboard. All the pieces are well-crafted and sturdy plastic or resin (I can’t tell).
The items at the bottom are doorways with 5 being closed.
The cards are all high-quality heavy glossed cardstock. They contain the hero and “bad guy” spell cards, treasure/trap cards, equipment cards, starting hero stat cards, action cards (quick rules for what a hero can do on a turn), and monster quick-reference cards. The character sheets are a large pad of regular paper sheets.
Speaking of character sheets, here are my party’s (I am GMing, of course) sheets after “Quest 2: The Rescue of Sir Ragnor.”
In addition, it comes with a number of cardboard tiles to represent blocked corridors, pit traps, monster hit points, stairs, and falling block squares. It also comes with two booklets: the main rule book and the quest book.
It also comes with a handy GM Screen for the GM (also referred to as Zargon, who is the evil sorcerer who leads the monsters).
I would show you the back, but there are spoilers there. Suffice it to say that there are good reference materials there.
Now we come to the meat of this unboxing! The miniatures!
As you can see it comes with a fair number of monster minis of various types: goblins, orcs, and abominations are green, skeletons, zombies, and mummies are in white, the dread warriors, the gargoyle, the dread sorcerer (who usually stands for something specific, be it a good guy or bad guy depending on the quest) are grey, and the heroes are in red.
You may also note that there are 8 dice. The two red dice are used, generally speaking, for movement for the heroes (monsters have a specific movement speed depending on their type). The white dice have three skulls, two white shields, and a black shield. I’ll go over gameplay another time, but these are generally used as combat dice, with the skulls being potential hits, the white shields as potential defence for heroes, and the one black shield as a possible defense for monsters. Don’t worry if this makes no sense, as I will explain it in my gameplay review.
Lastly, but certainly not least, is the game board, made of sturdy and thick cardboard. It folds neatly to fit in the box.
As you may suspect, The amount of board you actually use for any given quest changes. Some of the corridors and rooms may be blocked, or otherwise inaccessible. A hero generally won’t know until they come around the corner to look, as the game board is revealed as the players explore.
Here’s a picture of the back of the box:
Comparing this addition to the original edition that I played back in the ’90s, I am very impressed. The terrain pieces as well as the miniatures are of a much higher caliber than they used to be with the terrain being made of plastic as opposed to part plastic and part cardboard. You can automagine how frustrating keeping those from bending and getting broken was.
Of note, I also acquired the other expansion, Kellar’s Keep!
It, like “The Return of the Witch Lord” offers another 10 quests and a bunch of new terrain and more miniatures.
All in all, I feel that this product is an amazing recreation of the original game, made better. If I had to give a critique, there are some issues with errors in the quest booklet, like a missing door here, or a problem area there. Thankfully, there are websites dedicated to providing errata for this exact reason.
I highly recommend purchasing this game and it’s expansions. If you have a love of board games and gaming in general. It’s a lot of fun!
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