Ye Olde Inn

Goefonos later found this YouTube link of a Hero Quest unboxing. The brown sprue clearly enough shows two of each kind of rat at 8:06, 8:28, and 8:44.

With the cost involved for tooling molds, I'm surprised they didn't standardize the furniture and the rats. Do you have photos of the rats? How bizarre.

I am not new to this furnitures differences.
The heavier ones come from the standard sets (both European and NA versions).
The lighter are instead included in the "Advanced Quest" sets.
I guess they were on a budget and tried to drastically reduce the costs of production. So they recycled the Man at Arms from the WoM pack and for the furnitures they saved on plastic reducing the tickness of the inside part.
The exterior part of the furniture is the same but the bottom is not. The doors stands are also shorter.
As for the rats, I didn't notice any differences, there are 2 pieces of both types in the standard releases already for a total of 4 rats (2 for each type).
Also note that the sprues are of 3 types too... UK, USA and Advanced Quest.

some more pics:

and more...

LOL. Wow. Now I need to look at my rats and furniture!

The main cost factor in plastic casting is the production of the moulds (even more so in the days before rapid prototyping). It's far more complicated than the silicone moulds for pewter or resin models. Plastic molds are made of steel, have to fit 110% and have to be mirror-polished.
It's very improbable that MB introduced new forms to cut costs because of low sales or such. Rather it was the high popularity of HQ that had the original moulds worn down or made a second production unit necessary, so they had to make new moulds anyway and used the opportunity to optimize them to save resources.

Big Bene wrote:The main cost factor in plastic casting is the production of the moulds (even more so in the days before rapid prototyping). It's far more complicated than the silicone molds for pewter or resin models. Plastic molds are made of steel, have to fit 110% and have to be mirror-poished.
It's very improbable that MB introduced new forms to save costs because of low sales or such. Rather it was the high popuarity of HQ that had the original moulds worn down or made a second production unit necessary, so they had to make new moulds anyway and used the opportnity to optimize them to save resources.

True. Proof of that should be the vast differences in detail depth from one batch to the next. The skeletons are the best example of that. Some are very crisp, others look almost like made from cheese.

Hi everybody, coming back to the furniture plastic topic, let me tell you my point of view, trying to provide some light:

I owned an Spanish Advanced Quest version of HeroQuest some years ago. This version was titled in Spanish as "HeroQuest, Edición Renovada y Ampliada" which roughly means in English "HeroQuest, Extended & Renovated Edition".

At that time, I remember me comparing the plastic parts of the Advanced Quest furniture with the original game ones, which I still own, and I remember to study their differences. Honestly, I prefer the original ones due to they where the ones I owned when I was a child and because they appeared to be more solid or stronger than the Advanced ones BUT, I remember one good detail about the Advanced furniture plastic parts: They fit better with the cardboard parts than the originals.

Then, I don't think that the plastic design and moulding changes of the Advanced furniture were mainly motivated by production costings, maybe yes, but attending to the title in Spanish of the Advanced Quest edition, which suggests that this edition intended to renovate the original one, and how well its furniture plastic parts fit with the cardboard ones, those changes seems to have been also (or only) implemented as a product design improvement.

In addition, I also remember that miniatures were also different between both versions. Some examples: I remember that mummies where a little bit taller in Advanced than original mummies, chaos warlock is more inclinated in backwards direction than original one and also has a little blind hole at the back of the helmet, Gargoyle whip is slightly shorter, skeletons relative position to their base is also modified between both versions, etc. And, in general, all of the Advanced Quest ones seem to have more sculpt definition too than the originals and better positions at their bases which I think that contribute to reduce clashes with adjacent miniatures in the board.

Therefore, if my memory works well (please, could anybody check if my different feelings about cardboard fit between versions are correct?), in my opinion I think all those minor design changes had a combined motivation, not only cost-reducing.

I hope these words have been useful

Interesting, I didn't know about this before. It makes me want to look over the pieces I have. I am inclined to say they are the bigger/"thicker" ones (of course I don't have the sprues from 30+ years ago, so can't comment on those). I also never looked closely enough at the rats to see that there were two types!

To this day I still have not handled a real live Advanced Hero Quest, though I do have some Skaven figures, I'm pretty sure they are the Warhammer fantasy version (or possibly the Talisman version), rather than the one that came packed with that game (no peg holes for the "shields" and they're gray rather than off white... and only have one type of weapon, the "saw tooth" sword blade).