![]() ![]() Modern dungeoncrawlers try to tell more complex stories, offer greater tactical gameplay, provide stronger detailing of classes and equipment. But I warned them, they weren’t really ready to fight it. They are all straightforward missions, some to the point of stupidity (again, the good kind of stupidity) such as the first one where my kids sussed out after turn one that the BBEG was in the central room. It’s such a smart concept, I can think of only one other recent example of this format and that was the Iron Kingdoms dungeoncrawler a few years ago. no dungeon tiles) and it’s all defined by placing doors and the occasional blocking stone. I absolutely adore that the entire dungeon is on the board (i.e. The scenarios also tend to walk that line between lean and fully featured. You earn gold that you can spend between missions to buy new stuff but it’s still all very basic, very easy to grasp upgrades. There’s just enough variance between the character classes to matter and the one-shot spells give the Wizard and Elf some high stakes choices to make. Wandering monsters can appear while you are searching for treasure and as the mission goes on, their frequency increases. Yet, despite its simplicity, it’s also comprehensive. It’s not like the monsters have tons of options other than “run up and fight” anyway. But these days, Zargon can be run with an app on your phone, and it works pretty well even if the AI is practically non-existent. Zargon is the enemy wizard controlling the show, and back in the day that was almost always the kid that owned the game, right? They got a little booklet with the 14 scenarios that showed where to place monsters, all the lovely 3D furniture that is one of the game’s hallmarks, and what events happen in each room. Sure, there are four elements’ worth of spells and a handful of magic items but it never gets more complicated. The combat is the beloved skulls n’ shields thing, and if I am not mistaken this is the first game to have that. Or if there aren’t any adversaries for a secret door, treasure or traps. You roll dice to move, maybe you open a door and reveal a new room, and if there’s a monster you fight them. Stupid like Ramones- back to basics, poppy, and without pretense. In fact, It’s what I call with all the fondness I can muster a “stupid” game. This is not a game rife with fancy mechanisms, cleverness, elegance, or sophistication. The primary element left behind its utter simplicity. However, there are some things about this design are striking – and, unfortunately, they are the things that the cloners have largely left behind. The folks at the Hasbro press desk never responded directly but then I got a shipping notice out of nowhere and suddenly I had it in hand.Īfter several games- a couple solo using the app and around half a campaign with my kids and a rotating group of their friends- I’m prepared to state that Heroquest is most definitely not the greatest dungeoncrawl of all time and I do think that the hushed whispers of admiration and middle-aged nods of fond reminiscence are nostalgic exaggerations. I thought I’d ask for a review copy to sort of check in with it from a new perspective and really to see how my kids would take to it. I wasn’t overly stoked by its reappearance as a crowdfunded Hasbro Plus campaign under the venerable Avalon Hill imprint and didn’t back it- I felt like it was grossly overpriced and positioned outside of the accessibility that was one of its greatest assets. ![]() Co-produced by Milton Bradley and Games Workshop, there’s a lot of folks out there with fond memories of playing it in their formative years and in fact many contemporary games in this genre feel like attempts to simulate Heroquest.Īgain, with full disclosure here, I thought it was kind of boring and simplistic. The seminal Stephen Baker dungeoncrawler wasn’t one of the first attempts at condensing RPG gaming concepts into a board game (we’re going back to things like Sorceror’s Cave and of course Dungeon! for that) but it was the first game that brought a “DM-driven” concept to a mainstream design. To be honest, I don’t have that much nostalgia for Heroquest and although I had a friend that was absolutely obsessed with it to the point where he had a notebook full of homebrew rules and campaign material for it, I didn’t actually play it all that much – I was much more of a Space Hulker back in those days.
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