This is a series of posts where I play 100 boardgames.
Game: Heroquest
Designer: Stephen Baker
Year: 1989/2020
Country: U.K.
Publisher: Milton Bradley & Games Workshop / Avalon Hill
Everybody’s seen the video about how HeroQuest is the best game ever made, right? And it’s all true, every word of it. I first played HeroQuest as a child, in the Finnish edition. I even made my own rules for new custom characters, but I never managed to play the campaign to completion. Now, mere three decades later, I did, playing the Game Master role of Zargon for a group of friends.
HeroQuest is a dungeon crawler, a precursor to modern games like Descent and Gloomhaven. There’s a story campaign consisting of 14 quests, each involving four heroes going into a dungeon. There’s a big game board which can be modified for each quest by changing the location of doors and piles of rubble.
Perhaps the greatest thing about Heroquest is that it comes with cool plastic dungeon furniture. It’s not particularly relevant to gameplay beyond limiting where you can go in a room, but it’s fun to play around with. The toy value is high. When we finished the 14th and last quest on the campaign, one player complained that it had used too little furniture.
The design is rudimentary and the challenge level low. A lot of the niceties in modern boardgames are simply not there and you can just fuck around on the gameboard for extended periods of time. This is part of the enjoyment of the game, and why it felt so fun particularly the first few times. You simply didn’t have to take it quite as seriously as a game like Imperial Assault. You’ll do fine even if you split the party and trigger half the monsters by opening doors too early.
Like the viral video linked above shows, the interesting question to ask about Heroquest is: “Why is this a good game?” It’s gameplay is dated, yet there has been a reissue with new expansions going beyond what was originally published in 1989. Why did we stick with it?
I feel it had something to do with the way one of the last quests we played went. By coincidence, the barbarian kept opening doors and stepping into hallways so that a skeleton appeared immediately in front of his face. The more it happened, the funnier it was. It was silly, and we didn’t have to take it seriously because the skeleton is no threat.
Each game in existence has a design space that you can explore. Some classic games like Go are simple, yet seemingly inexhaustible in how much there is to learn. Heroquest is the rare game where after completing the campaign you feel that you have scouted every last corner of what’s possible within. There are no more secrets or surprises. Every emergent phenomena has been found. There’s something interesting in that, making it possible to know the game in a way that’s not possible with many others.