The Quest Continues

Needing to fill a couple of hours the other day had Arabiansquire and myself pulling out the Heroquest again to get on with the next quest "Lair of the Orc Warlord".

A nice little adventure that only takes up half the board, but the rooms are stuffed with monsters (even though it's only Quest 3) and the adventurers didn't have it all their own way. This quest saw the first piece of special equipment being found ( a staff which allows diagonal attacks) and the first real personality opponent. It was quite amusing to see the wide eyes on the other side of the table as the Orc Warlord ULAG attacked with the most dice and didn't die as easily as the other monsters!

The wee lad actually looked at his spell cards halfway through this level and began to try and work some of them into the game, which was a nice progression. He was soon muttering about the "stupid elf in the way" when he required line of sight, so we may see a bit more planning his moves next game so that he can try and bring his various elements into play a bit more (without the wizard getting pasted!). Good fun.

HeroQuest - Back to Basics

Last weekend Arabiansquire and I went back to basic gaming and dug out our copy of the classic MG Games/GW boardgame HeroQuest. Now alot is made about "Songs Of Blades and Heroes" being a gateway game for kids & dads to play, and it is. But for us it was our first simplified game of HeroQuest that caught the wee lad's imagination. Going through doors, reviewing monsters, dungeon scenery. He still lists this as his favourite game and has played it so often himself I found he knows the monster stats off by heart even though the box hasn't been off the shelf in any capacity several months - "Goblins move 10 spaces, Daddy!" as I looked for the stat.

Well so far we've come through a variety of house rules and simplifications. From just using a single (non-magic) adventurer, biasing combat towards the player, or adding in extra places to pick up healing potions. But having played quite a few games of Songs of... and other wargames I thought it was time to start from the beginning again with a full party and magic rules on a campaign. We skipped the first introductory quest "The Maze", which is very space and dull in the UK edition (although I believe the US version was a bit more action packed for some reason with a quest called ") and went onto Q2 "The Rescue Of Sir Ragnar". nothing too challenging really here.

Arabian Squire was so confident that he almost immediately split the party into two groups to search for the knight - Barbarian & Dwarf and Elf & Mage. This almost proved fatal for the poor Elf who fell foul to a 3 skull attack roll from an Orc, but thankfully the Mage still had his cure wound spell to save the day. If nothing else it proved that although the monsters die quite easily in this game they do have the capabilities to hurt you on their attack. Hopefully next quest we'll see a bit more magic as well as the wee lad starts to get used to it. it'll also be interesting to see what he spends his Gold Coins on between quests. I'll have to get on and get some colour on some more characters.