Overview & How to Play

HeroQuest asks you, you bold team of adventurers, to eventually defeat the scourge of the land: the evil sorcerer Zargon. Zargon is played by one of your friends behind a Game Master screen.

The rest of you control Fellowship of Ring sounding characters: there’s a mighty Barbarian, a Wizard with spells, a trap-disarming Dwarf, and then a jack-of-all-trades Elf.

After your group has finished filling out their individual player sheets, you jump into a quest book, with opening narrative and a set goal. For example, the first mission has you killing Verag, a foul gargoyle lurking in the catacombs.

Actual gameplay is dirt simple: all you do is roll to move, then do another simple action, like attacking, searching for loot, disarming a trap, or other scenario specific stuff. When moving, everything is covered by a fog of war, meaning that players won’t quite know what the scenario has in store for them. Like, even going through a door will reveal the Chaos Knights and treasure chests on the other side!

Zargon, aka probably the friend who owns the game, will be doing all the bookkeeping with a predetermined scenario booklet, that will spawn furniture, monsters, and sinister traps. After all of the heroes take their turns, Zargon gets the chance to move and attack with each of his monsters.

That’s basically it! There’s gonna be some flavor text, but mostly the heroes and Zargon go back and forth among each other, until the heroes all die, or the objective is completed.

Pros

The biggest beauty of HeroQuest is probably all of the ridiculous 3D minis. Utterly mind-blowing even by today’s standards- with 3D treasure chests, weapon racks, and dozens of miniatures for monsters. Even doors have a ‘open’ and ‘closed’ miniature which is greatly appreciated.

HeroQuest is also one of the easiest role-playing experiences to ever start- if you’re not playing as Zargon, you can basically learn to play as you go. It’s just rolling dice, moving around, killing the bad guys, and collecting loot. The player boards help explain this too. Playing Zargon is zero stress too, where the back of the Game Master screen defines everything, and setup is dirt easy by games only starting with a lone staircase and door on the map.

Zargon’s world is pretty compelling, starting from a decent hook for the story, injected with plenty of NPCs and types of monsters on the journey. You’ll see Orcs, Chaos Warriors, Skeletons, Zombies… yeah this is high fantasy to its utter core.

You feel like you’re living out some amazing tale with the insane variety of the 14 quests, with their objectives sometimes being completely different. Some will ask for boss monster takedowns, others will be to escape, or even to find magical artifacts. Each scenario slowly unravels itself as heroes explore the map, causing a great sense of wonder as furniture spawns on the board for rooms to look nothing like each other.

There’s even upgrades in between quests that are fun to pursue, like grabbing new Broadswords that provide extra attack dice, or Shields for extra defensive bonuses. This provides a great incentive for players to continue diving, then spending money, to get stronger as their heroes become more grizzled.

HeroQuest wraps up to an extremely accessible dungeon crawl, where even players have set roles, as the Barbarians just yells and rushes in, while maybe the Wizard is handling his earth and wind spells. It’s just a quick, hassle free jump to defeat the forces of evil.

HeroQuest’s Obsoletion

Some of the mechanics are really starting to show their age though. The main one would be combat, with it being purely dice chucking standard attacks. Some turns can just feel like an utter fest of rolling with the heroes rolling once, then the bad guys rolling once. This can keep happening until one side dies.

There’s also a very concerning Wandering Monster loot card, that is extremely frustrating for heroes to find, when in fact they were trying to get loot and then a random Orc jumps outta nowhere, and says “Hello!” So then the heroes have to pause their thoughts and take some turns to down this random spawn. The Wandering Monster just tends to slow down the pace of the game, never really providing much of an interesting obstacle to the main party.

Plus, for all of its story HeroQuest is touting, it can feel like there’s not enough flavor at many times. There’s probably only a handful of narration prompts at most per scenario, leading to a lot of dry spells of flavor.

But hey, while it never strictly says it, HeroQuest probably wants you to be adding in your own ingredients to its lean frame. There’s clearly defined characters, easy rules, and preset maps with objectives, so just sprinkle in your own role-playing and rule bending as you go along. This could be a fantastic entry point to this type of fantastical role-playing genre, especially for a Game Master, where if the group doesn’t feel like inventing exposition/roleplaying at certain times, there’s never any pressure to, as HeroQuest flows on its own. No preparation required whatsoever for a decent story.

If we compare this artifact that is Heroquest, to the modern dungeon crawler of Gloomhaven, it really is like comparing apples and oranges. Gloomhaven has euro-inspired combat with cards, where the goal is often to kill all the enemies and play efficiently. HeroQuest is more of this cross between roleplaying and a semi-coop game where the map is shrouded in mystery, and often times you’re encouraged to not kill some enemies but instead tactfully not explore some doors. You’re not gonna get Gloomhaven’s crazy status conditions, combos, and intricate monster abilities in HeroQuest, whereas instead you may be thinking about a clue that Mentor gave you, or being crammed into narrow hallways and rolling dice to jump over pit traps.

Final Thoughts

HeroQuest is really a fun look into how older games, even shaky with balance and combat mechanisms, still provided so much fun and flavor. Those looking for a serious balanced game should really pass on this relic of a game. But if you want an action packed but simple experience of bursting down 3D doors with all sorts of minis, running through narrow corridors to banish the darkness that is Zargon, HeroQuest might have charmed you already.