by I was excited to find this website. I was reorganizing my garage the other day and found an old Hero Quest set. If memory serves, Hero Quest came out in the States sometime in '91. I bought mine during the summer of '92 while on home leave to the States. At the time I was teaching at an American school in Saudi Arabia for the Saudi Aramco Oil Company.
Since we didn't have internet or satellite TV at the time, both having been deemed "immoral" by the matawah, the religious police; board games were quite popular in the expatriate community. There were a the time, some 10,000 American civilians in Saudi Arabia. Most of us lived in the corporate town of Dhahran which is in the Eastern province of Saudi Arabia, about an hour's drive across the causeway from the Emirate of Bahrain.
Since I was also a huge 15 mm. miniatures buff (mostly for Napoleonic war gaming), it didn't take me long to paint up the figures.
The wizard of course, did not come with a plume. I added this using a bit of packing foam because I thought the figure needed a bit more panache. The original paint job was a bit faded after so many years, so after cleaning them off, I also touched them up.
Although Dungeons and Dragons was quite big back then, Hero Quest had the advantage of being a simple ready to play game. The rules were much more easy to learn than D & D and the use of figurines (even unpainted ones) with game board tiles and furniture really made the game come alive.
My gaming group disbanded a few years later ... a casualty of attrition from friends moving away and increasingly sophisticated computer games like Diablo which was released by Blizzard in '96. I eventually put my Hero Quest game set away and soon forgot about it. My game somehow stayed with me for the next 23 years through 10 different moves that included 1 other foreign country and 5 states.
Since I now teach in a rural area of Nevada and have noticed that some of my high school students have been playing fantasy card games during lunch, I've given some thought to starting up a Hero Quest club at school as an extracurricular activity. Since I'm also currently on summer break, I've begun designing some additional modules for the game.
I recently bought a set of eighteen 25 mm. goblins through Amazon. This was the first time I've ever worked with hard plastic figurines and I was really quite impressed with the quality of these figurines.
I look forward to exploring this site and picking up tips for creating new modules. It's a pity that Milton Bradley stopped making this game. Even in today's world of video games, I still think there's a place for board games.
Regards,
David
