Board redo. How modular should it be?

[Maurice76]

Oh so with the full board you are supposed to layout all the doors, minis and props from the get go?
I was under the impression you only laid out the props once something came in a players visual area

No, the board was indeed laid out as the Heroes progressed through the dungeon. Anything on the board is only placed there once visible to the Heroes, not before.

However, with the standard board, the entire floorplan is already visible: you know where each room is and the size of each room. As soon as you place a door anywhere, the players immediately know the size of the room behind it because they're all visible and printed on the board. Also, the standard game board has a rectangular shape and restricts any map to within those confines.

With a modular approach, the players will not know. When they see a door, there's nothing yet behind it. It could be a small 2x2 room, a gigantic 10x10 room, or something in between - or perhaps not even a room, but another hallway. The actual board tile is only placed and revealed to the players once the door is opened. Also, the total shape of the dungeon can be anything (although dining room table size is usually practical as boundary ), from elongated to square.

[phoenixcinder]

I ended up going with the quadrants. I can easily use washers all around the outside to keep all the pieces together.


So looks like I am going to have to build another casing for this part of the game

[Spookyhappyfun]

Third...
Pass through rock and dungeon exploring

The original heroquest board gives you some orientation, even if you never played the quest before. You can use "pass through rock" and walk into the dark, being sure you don't accidentally leave the board.
Also in normal gameplay, you can actively search for a way into the middle room. Search the forum for reports where the wizard passes through rock directly into ragnar's cell, for example.

The game play with a modular board is different. As a player, without the quest map, you never know which direction is the right one. That adds some sense of mazeness that is sometimes missing in the original.
The other extreme is a map of Heroicmaps, that gives away a little bit too much (except if you print it and set it up peace by peace).

Some people get so excited by modular boards that they never want to play non-modular again, other people hate it.

That's not something I had considered and an interesting point.

I'm toying with the idea of going modular but maybe printing out a giant velcro mat with a grid on it and putting velcro on the back of each room tile so they can easily afix to the mat without having to worry about getting knocked around, and the grid on the mat will make it a bit easier to work out where to place the tiles and hallways and might also help with my 'pass through rock' question (that is, if they go outside the walls in a modular board, how do they know where they're going and how many spaces they can go).