Game Night – Hero Quest

Last night was the first night in a while where we sat down and played a couple of quests in Hero Quest.  If you take a trip through the way-back machine back to 1989 you would have seen the Exxon Valdez spill it’s oil, the first live action Batman movie, and quite possibly commercials for a nerdy dungeon crawling game called Hero Quest.  Hero Quest is a 5 player game that consists of 4 Hero’s and a Dungeon Master named “Zargon”.  As a child I was fascinated with the idea of Hero Quest as it involved many detailed miniatures and some pretty neat artwork, at the time at least.  I would later learn that this game is responsible for pretty much all of the other games and hobbies I find interesting.  Hero Quest was created by Games-Workshop and published worldwide by Milton Bradley.  This games is very much influenced by the Warhammer Fantasy game that was created by Games-Workshop.

The basic premise of the game is for the 4 hero’s to work their way though 14 scenario’s and slowly build up their individual abilities and stats all while searching for traps, treasure, and secret doors.  Each scenario pretty much goes the same in the original 14 scenarios,  where you start on the stairs you kill some monsters and you head back to the stairs. The game itself is not very complicated as far as games go, and if the players stick together in the dungeons, it’s pretty hard to actually lose.

The game has many expansions that are heavily sought after as they are out of print and there are a lot of people, like myself, that have a loving nostalgia for it.  Last night, we went through 2 quests and finished up on quest 8, which leaves us over halfway through the original campaign.  Over all the years I’ve played Hero Quest, I’ve never actually played through all 14 quests with any group of people.  I’ve played the first 5 quests countless numbers of times, but never any more than that really.  Being able to play through to quest 8 has been a nice treat, even if the game is a simple dungeon crawl.  I’m hoping that over time we’ll be able to play further through, if only to just say we did it.

Since this game has come out, there have been a bunch of other games that have emulated and carried the same theme into their games, such as Warhammer Quest and Descent: Journey into the Dark.  Warhammer Quest falls into the same problem that Hero quest does, it’s out of print and expensive, where a complete copy of the base game fetches in excess of $150, far to much for a dungeon crawler in my opinion, but should the opportunity present itself, I would purchase a copy.  In the end, this is the definitive game in its genre, and even if it is a super simple dungeon crawl game it will always be good in my eyes.