Dark Company - Complete Checklist

[Kurgan]

There are duplicates of some of the furniture, so technically no. If you ignore the "board crossing" doors until they actually enter that edge corridor to cross over, you should have enough doors.

Is it perfectly setup? No. But if you need a reason to hoard sets of classic heroquest I guess... but that never stopped us before. It's like the "when you run out of monsters" thing. You won't be returning to those rooms you've already cleared out and searched for everything, so you pick up the table or treasure chest and you move it to the new room that needs it that you just entered.

[steeltekki]

I'm just trying to catch up with years of Heroquest neglect. I was having trouble wrapping my head around the advanced content and this checklist is a big help. So thanks for putting it together

[steeltekki]

hmm, can someone help me see if I made a mistake?

I'm counting 4 fireplaces, not 3
* 1 in the second (light green) area
* 2 in the third (light brown) area
* 1 in the ninth (yellow/green) area

I'm counting 8 double block tiles, not 10
* 1 on the starting board
* 4 on the second board
* 1 on the third board
* 2 on the final board

[Kurgan]

While it's still ridiculous and you'll have to fudge things (you can play with just one game system set + a bunch of mercenary proxies and a little imagination!) nevertheless there's some good news...

Mage of the Mirror remake will include SOME extra furniture:

2 "door bases" to insert cardboard into (intended for the "mirrors")
4 Portcullis doors
1 Iron entrance door
1 Wooden exit door
1 Tomb
1 Fireplace
1 Weapons Rack
1 Alchemist's Bench
2 Bookshelves
3 Treasure chests
1 Throne
(no extra torture rack, tables, cupboard or sorcerer's table).

Plus three extra double blocked square tiles (and even a new spiral staircase not that we needed one!).


Mage of the Mirror offers extra single block squares (6), pit traps (4), secret doors (4) ... (the EU edition saw no difference between blocked squares and fallen rock piles... you'll have plenty of skull tiles).

And Frozen Horror adds extra single block squares (6) (doubling as skulls as before).

It's all a big laugh, but if some people put their sets together to make some diabolical true 4 board setup with multiple zargon's and all the heroes taking their own path (in reality the board only changes over when all four heroes move over and the only way to get "lost" would be to use pass through rock spell to move to another section ahead of schedule)... that would be a sight to behold! 3d Printing the extra pieces would also be a cheaper way to do it.

When you play this for real, you clear the board once all surviving heroes cross over (they exit one at a time until all have exited, then you clear the board and start afresh). It's amazing to think how complex this adventure is and so it's no wonder that a few errors were made (duplicate furniture within the same section in a couple of cases) so no shame in imagining. The problem of one hero using pass through rock and wandering into the maze on his own, having to cross over through a different door could easily be resolved by Morcar/Zargon just placing him with the party again when the board "resets" to the new configuration. It's much easier viewing the color coded version to imagine how it all works (nothing against phoenix and his re-creation via the NA questbook conventions). There's also potentially no limit to the number of monsters IF the Heroes keep crossing back through the doors and refreshing the board to fight previously abandoned/killed monsters once again. There's no special reward for defeating them, but it could go on forever until the targeted bad guys are destroyed and the quest comes to an end...

[wallydubbs]

The only issue I see with it is if the heroes decide the split up, albeit not the wisest move I don't really want to limit the hero's options.
Who's really gonna split up in a 4-man group?

However, upon playing the insane difficulty of Frozen Horror I found the best chances for the heroes to be successful was to add in a 5th Hero. The Female Barbarian does make it playable. Although this goes against the rule book it evens out the damage ratio.

Well if some play Dark Company sequentially after Frozen Horror and Made of the Mirror, you CAN add additional heroes to this quest and the sheer size and length of it makes it playable.
In the event of such a game, splitting up isn't as dangerous. So for my group, yeah I'd give the heroes that option.

I get it if you want to play it the old fashioned way, but as Zargon we have the options to tweak the rules and manage Dark Company a little differently and be a bit broader with the board.

[Kurgan]

It doesn't matter if the heroes split up, because they cannot access those other areas of the board without exiting the quest through the side door .. which is no different than if the heroes are leaving the quest (down the stairway or out the exit door). They don't instantly teleport to another board (requiring you to own four copies of the game system) but instead wait for the others to come. If one hero (and there is only one opportunity for this, since the Wand of Magic doesn't exist in the EU rules, neither do spell scrolls) uses "Pass Through Rock" to enter into another section away from the others, then yes, he may be wandering around for a little bit but whatever exit door he leaves from, he will simply "teleport" with the others when they appear on the new board (resetting the current one). The system really does work.

The only "problem" is that people will find themselves re-using furniture. It's merely an aesthetic thing though.

But good news for you people wanting to duplicate things perfectly... the Rise of the Dread Moon expansion contains yet more extra furniture for you to use:

1 exit door
1 entrance door (if you've bought all the remake expansions thus far you would have 5 each of these, for a total of 10 extra closed doors!)
1 Table
1 Cupboard
1 Sorcerer's Table
2 door bases (insert cardboard mirrors into them, but like the MOTM ones, could be used to print and insert doorways!)

And:
2 elf statues
1 "magical bathtub" (? we don't quite know what this is, guesses are that it's some kind of watery/ghostly tomb, or a magical mirror similar to Galadrial's watery basin from LOTR)

We already covered the MOTM remake furniture extras:

2 "door bases" to insert cardboard into (intended for the "mirrors")
4 Portcullis doors
1 Iron entrance door
1 Wooden exit door
1 Tomb
1 Fireplace
1 Weapons Rack
1 Alchemist's Bench
2 Bookshelves
3 Treasure chests
1 Throne

[Kurgan]

Once again "the Dark Company" (1992, included with "Advanced Quest/Master Edition") is widely misunderstood.

The original quest (which was intended as an EU exclusive) was only ever meant to be played with the core game system plus the 12 red Mercenary figures (with 3 of each type of weapon available) to be used as "dark warrior" monsters.You don't really even need that many of these as you never face more than 5 of them at a time. The entire board doesn't need to be setup all at once to play these... the heroes are traveling through a small "slice" if you will of each board before they cross over and "reset."

The whole idea of playing a board game and NEVER re-using assets is pretty silly. It's an exercise in sheer ostentatious wealth, similar to throwing away your dice and unwrapping a new package every time you roll (maybe if you are running a busy casino and worried about fraud, you'd swap them out every hour?).

It's like the people who say they want to play Monopoly with REAL CASH. Okay, that's kind of an awesome one-off idea, but is it really worth the trouble for most people?

Yes, there are a few errors, like a repeated Fireplace or Weapons rack, but the quest kind of fixes itself. Those pieces of furniture don't do anything, they're just taking up space in mostly empty rooms.

Even if you are playing this with Phoenix's "NA conversion" (which frankly is probably a bigger source of confusion since it's rather hard to read without the color coding found in the original "poster") with a group of overladen heroes who have played the other North American expansions, there should be no need except for the small number of collectors/hoarders who happen to have multiple opened copies of the game who just want some excuse to create a spectacle on the floor (who has a table big enough for four simultaneous boards, never mind reaching across or running around the table to set everything) that was not actually intended by the designers of the adventure in the first place...

Don't get me wrong, it would be a "sight to behold" but the cheapest and easiest way would simply be to either print a bunch of stuff for a $100+ (more likely) to find three friends who have HeroQuest so you can put your sets together for this "once in a lifetime" event, which again, was not intended by the designers of the quest.

You don't ACTUALLY need any extra pieces or boards to run the quest as intended. Does it suck? Some say it does, but then you can mod it to your liking, including doing away with "duplicate" furniture.

[jace]

you could also print out enlarged map icons and paste them to card, foam, or mdf, and when you need duplicate furniture you take what you need and replace it with the created tile. it also helps with seeing the board, and not knocking over book shelves and cupboard.