I remember the t.v. commercial and getting super excited for HQ game system exclaiming " look pop they made a board game out of Gauntlet!" Gauntlet and Gauntlet II were my favorite arcade games in the mid eighties, my twin brother and I paid a fortune in coin playing them nearly single handedly reviving the sagging industry. Gauntlet is basically HQ with the now standard fantasy trope characters of Warrior, Elf, Dwarf {late edit it is the Valkyrie in gauntlet not the dwarf} and Wizard that Tolkien himself established permanently in his genre building world of fantasy long ago, except with real time combat and respawning monsters instead of turn based combat. All are basic dungeon crawlers with simple mechanics for attacking, magic, opening doors and chest and searching for secret doors, or as we would later call them Dungeons&Dragons lite. I grew up in the era when high fantasy merchandise was at the zenith of its popularity and owned much of it.
We begged dad for HeroQuest receiving it for Christmas with our Cheshire grins at the age of 12. It quickly became our favorite board game replacing Fireball Island, Ghostbusters or Dark Tower as the ultimate board game. As our 13th birthday came a month later, the hunt for the expansion packs advertised on the flyer in the boxed set soon began. A quick trip to the Kmart store and we now owned Kellar's Keep and Return of the Witchlord as well. No long after we decided one for each of us (more figs!) was the way to go so bought one more of each at a Shopko store. DarkWorld and Battlemasters joined the games collection.
A few years went by and one day I was perusing a board game shop in the mall looking for Dungeons & Dragons stuff and stumbled upon the new HQ elf and barbarian quest packs. They had a dozen of each on the shelf if you can imagine that! Again we bought one of each for both of us. I bought a Gamesworkshop skeleton army boxed set at the same store to use with HeroQuest, starting my first figure modeling and painting and the eventual spending of several hundred dollars over the years as I went down the Warhammer rabbit hole. I had only done some model cars, tanks and planes by that point. We never considered painting the HeroQuest figures up until that point as it was a board game to us rather than hobby models. I wouldn't paint any HeroQuest figures until years later when our well used original set got conscripted into my fledgling Warhammer armies. The majority of my HQ collection remains unpainted.
We often looked for new HQ products and eventually found Advanced HeroQuest and AHQ Terror in the Dark, but no rumor of anything else for years. Somehow Warhammer quest skipped notice even though when I was in high school I spent a good deal of time and money at the hobby shop buying Advanced Dungeons&Dragons 2nd edition Ravenloft setting material for years and they must have had it. In college we heard rumors about released only in Europe HQ stuff but the fledgling Internet wouldn't finally show me Against the Ogre Horde, the only one I knew about until many years later, and I resigned myself to never owning it. By now I had amassed a formidable board game collection and became the caretaker/owner of my twin brother's HQ stuff as well when he married and moved into a tiny college apartment.
With the advent of Amazon and EBay, I began looking for rare old board games to buy to replace some from our youth or that we'd wished we had. HeroQuest was still in the back of my mind. I began purchasing more HeroQuest and Battlemasters sets for dirt cheap ($20 US or so back then) to bolster my Warhammer stuff because the sharp increase in Games Workshop model prices had begun long ago and I found it a convenient way to collect compatible plastic figures. Many years went by with only the occasional fantasy dungeon foray of any kind with a few friends as I mostly collected and read fantasy materials rather than played any actual fantasy games besides computer games in those days.
I started to notice the drastic increase in game prices online HeroQuest and Battlemasters sets jumped from $20 to $50 or more plus shipping so I finally decided I must have the European expansion before it became forever out of reach. I then find out there are actually two more!! Wizards of Morcar and an adventure design kit. Now I was thunderstruck with a passioned mania only rivaled by toad and his motor car and had to get them by any means. At this point websites about HQ were nonexistent or I remained ignorant of them and the pdfs, tile scans, and remolded figures were probably not dreamt of yet. Soon enough I finally landed Against the Ogre Horde at auction, and kept my eye out for the others.
Eventually I got a Wizards of Morcar as well and finally stumbled on this site or others like it and learned about the differences between European HQ and American HQ so I then decided to get UK versions of Kellar's Keep, Return of the Witch Lord and HeroQuest Advanced Quest the Dark Company. I now consider my HeroQuest game collection complete although I would love to own the sticker album or design kit, they appear very hard to find and extremely pricy for what it is. I did buy the computer game, NES game and the three HQ novels for cheap easily enough.
Now 27 years later after I first saw HeroQuest, I plot a massive Chistmas gift of HeroQuest, expansions, and DarkWorld games for my twin brother and his boys who are nearly as old as we were (9 and 12) when introduced to HeroQuest. I bought another Against the Ogre Horde and am looking for a final copy of Morcar for my twin brother and maybe a design kit for me. I really appreciate the scans here and stuff to verify materials, but I have collector' blood and must own an actual copy.
I just recently found out that DarkWorld had Europe only releases as well, bought Village of Fear and I am on the hunt for Dragon's gate.
