Ahh SDE. The game that got me back into board games.

[defttitan]

I think an artist friend of mine was telling me one night about how he and his son bonded over several hours while putting together the minis in this new Super Dungeon Explore.

That was enough for me to bite, and I ordered it.

I was hoping for a dungeon crawler like Hero Quest, I certainly liked the minis and the monsters. This game is not at all that though. As mentioned elsewhere, it's a board game trying to be a video game (gauntlet from arcade/NES) , and trying to do so with cute chibi-style over-the-top characters. The heroes battle through the dungeon as fast as possible trying to take out the spawn machines, and the DM uses his spawn machines to keep the dungeon full of monsters and take out the heroes. If too much blood is shed, or all the spawn machines are taken out, the boss pops.

The rules are complex as hell, and some mechanics are vague enough that there are many many versions of official Errata that came out from the game designers to address the various interpretations.
The minis, made by Cool Mini or Not, are fantastic. Assembly required for the core game early versions, but they are just so damn cute.

All in all though, fun game. I ended up buying a lot of the expansions and cut my teeth on painting minis with this game.

A theme like this, with rules as simple as HeroQuest, would go a long way!

[Goblin-King]

I played a heck of a lot of the very excellent 1st edition
Got bored with 2nd edition's rule bloat
Died when 3rd edition's kickstarter failed to deliver...

I think using the SDE components to make a HeroQuest-esque dungeon crawler would be relatively simple.
The SDE combat system is really nice and clean.
There's a high diversity of both monsters and heroes.

The only issue I see, is that the heroes explode with power with just a few pieces of loot.
Loot would need to be really really rare - or a system where the heroes were forced to discard loot occasionally.

[defttitan]

healing and potion abilities seemed to be a make or break mechanic also. The right heroes could exploit dice probability, . Likewise the wrong heroes without healing were doomed.

[Goblin-King]

with ~50 unique heroes to pick from, some are certain to be better and worse than others.
Even among the original 8 heroes, the Ember Mage and Royal Paladin were obvious strong picks.

[defttitan]

For sure! I really liked this game. I would like to bring it to the table more. Arcadia Quest, Sword & Sorcery, and Descent 2e took over, but I will always love the painted minis.