A few years ago I had written a
blog post about introducing my son and his friends to a favorite board game of mine from the 1990s: HeroQuest. Just recently his same friend came over to visit again and after playing FIFA 16 on the PS3 for a while, my son's friend asked if we could play HeroQuest again.
I thought it was great that they were interested in playing a board game again. Over the past few months my son seems to have withdrawn from playing board games with me as much as he used to. I wasn't sure if he'd just become bored of them, or if there was some animosity against board games since his favorite after school is playing soccer and he just wasn't getting enough of that... anyway, I was glad that the two of them enjoyed the game enough in the past to make the suggestion and actually decide to come and play.
I had a rough idea of where we had left off and found some notes that I had written about it. We were working our way through the Barbarian's Quest Pack when everyone in the party had been killed off. A few games before that was the biggest blow to the group, or more specifically, to my son, when the elf character that he had played through about 15 quests had been killed off. Even after playing through so many quests, they still hadn't figured out how to play well as a team and often would have a lone character roaming around opening doors without any backup close enough to keep them from getting overwhelmed.
To help improve morale, I decided to give a random treasure from the Artifacts deck to each character. The luck of the draw fortunately turned out to be a great mix of cards for the group - including two spell scrolls, the snowshoes of speed (great for these icy adventures), and the wizard's staff. They boys seem to have matured a bit in their strategy also, keeping their group of heroes close together. They are still only half way through the quest, since our guests had to leave before the game was finished, but we have recorded their progress in the quest so that they can jump right back into it next time we have a chance... and hopefully this time all 4 characters will survive to get to the next level.
With that in mind, I got looking around online for some of the old expansions. Although some that I found on eBay.com were reasonably priced, there were still several that were way out there... such as the Barbarian's Quest Pack listed at $395.00, or the individually offered cardboard pieces from the Elf Quest pack priced at $8.99 per piece. While I was looking around online, I came across a website listing
25 reasons that HeroQuest was the best game of the 90s. It also mentioned the possibility of a 25th anniversary set coming out, but unfortunately it looks like it isn't happening... at least not any time soon. Here's the comment from the KickStarter page: "Heroquest 25th Anniversary (Canceled) is the subject of an intellectual property dispute and is currently unavailable."
Fortunately, for those who have are interested in playing some of these rare sets, there are some options to find expansions online in the form of PDF copies and fan-written quests, and more... there is even at least one computer game version that I've come across. Amazingly, even the Hasbro website has some PDF files for this classic game too!
http://www.hasbro.com/en-us/search?q=heroquesthttp://www.heroscribe.org/markmiller/downloads.htmhttp://www.heroscribe.org --- By the way, if you check out that site, be sure to watch out for ants.
http://members.quicknet.nl/lm.broers/hquest.htm