Today I'll tell you about a little find I made while helping a relative to clean up a garage. Here's what popped up:
Yes, it's a HeroQuest boardgame from 1989 designed by Stephen Baker and published by Milton Bradley & Games Workshop! And quess what, it also has the "Kellar's Keep" expansion inside! It's a translated version (Finnish) but that doesn't bother me at all.
At first, I didn't recognize it when the relative came to me asking if I needed any old boardgames. In the pile there where a couple of games, one of which caught my attention. "HeroQuest..." I thought, "why does it sound so familiar?"
Not before I had opened the lid to look inside did I realize that the booklets had "Games Workshop" written in the corner and the models were easily recognizable. At that moment I knew what I held in my hands, and now it's one of my most valued treasures!
The game itself is in very good condition. The cards, the board, the "furniture" and the models were all well kept, but the box itself had suffered a bit. As far as I'm aware there's nothing missing from the game, except for the "Mummy" and "Skeleton" monster cards which I could easily find on the web. Quite many of the character sheets were already used, but I photocopied a bank one to get many many new ones! Now let's take a closer look at the contains of the box...
The models! Here are the Dwarf and Elf hero models on the front, and behind them are some of the game's monsters: a Zombie, a Mummy, a Chaos Warrior, a Fimir, a Goblin, an Orc and the Gargoyle!
Quite many of them have a certain GW-ish look on them, don't you think? The Orcs, Goblins and the Chaos Warriors are the ones that strongly remind me of old GW models, as does the Fimir - they were a legal and playable Warhammer race at some point after all!
Some cards, the Chaos Warlock model and the game's special dice. The cards are in Finnish (as I told you earlier, this game is a translated version) but they're written in a very oldish-sounding Finnish that's actually a bit amusing, so I don't mind. It still fits the atmosphere of the game and the translations are very good!
As I mentioned a few sentences ago all the cards are still there and in good condition, except for the Mummy and Skeleton cards. The booklets are also well-kept and clean, so I could start studying the rules straight away!
This final pic is from the adventure booklet that contains the various missions of the basic "vanilla" game. What you're looking at now is the very first mission called "the Crucible", in which the players must seek out the tomb of a deceased wizard and return back to their Mentor alive. Of course, this map is meant for the eyes of the Games Master only as it advises him how to set up the board as the players advance through the rooms.
A very valuable and nice find, to me at least. We've already played through a couple of missions in a small group with me acting as the Games Master, and it's been a blast! When you set up actual plastic-and-cardboard furniture inside the drawn outlines of rooms and open doors finding funny-looking monsters to fight with your heroes the time just flows by. The game has a real adventure feeling that one couldn't hope to get from a video game, for example!
One grows to love his/her hero models. Naming them, designing a personal coat of arms and a motto, playing through various missions with them, purchasing gear and finding treasures really makes you feel like role-playing!
I hope everyone would still give boardgames a chance. They have something video games do not, and it's very similar to the feeling I get when playing Age of Sigmar or other tabletop games. I think it has something to do with the social and getting-to-grips-with aspect that these kinds of games posses. They are some real, actual fun!
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