Heroquest remake by Hasbro - The BIG discussion thread

[Kurgan]

As for the Barbarian Quest Pack, it's an interesting choice, but they'll either need to just release it as is and let people mess with it, or do a difficulty revamp and quest tweak. Perhaps they figured some people had heard of it but never got to play it, and thought perhaps it would be less work to revamp it for NA rules than ATOH or WOM. It does have a nice even number of quests. And for those who only care about getting more miniatures, it has the most (and a little more variety in terms of new tiles and cards, making the pile of "new stuff" more appealing at least on the surface).

I guess they can whip all this stuff up on computers while we wait if they want to, but as others have pointed out, it's the lack of information that is hurting them the most, since we don't view them as this infallible enterprise of imagination who won't screw things up. Yes, we want to know how the sausage is made!

And finally, until it's actually shipping out and we can see what's in there, who can say...

[iKarith]

Delays in shipping to backers. Standard for all crowdfunded things, especially in the year 2020 won. Still hoping for backers to get it by end of year I guess? You don't develop addons for a one-and-done release, so that further suggests retail's happening. I think Leatherface79 and others who think this was intended to be one and done, but Hasbro was floored by the desire for this thing and has had to shift gears in the middle of the worst time and worst timeline …

I'm repeating myself a bit here but when it does ship finally … I plan to collect scans of the new edition for the Inn (won't be able to make any myself until after a retail release), but I don't think we can post them until some time after the new edition goes out of print. Not the way we're doing it right now, anyway. Still, while it's new is the best time to get scans, so we'll hold on to them for the future.

Since Hasbro's looking to release some/all of the expansions … we'll have to be careful about how we handle porting expansions. We don't want anything we do to be confused with anything they might do.

I don't wanna get too far out in the weeds on that, but I think we have to make sure that however we do that doesn't compete with Hasbro's commercial releases. It's their game and they've got a right to sell and profit from it.

[Kurgan]

I guess I don't truly understand the "crowd funded" part. They claimed if they got $1 million they'd release it. They lack the money to produce this or be open with regular updates?

I thought Hasbro had a lot of money, I guess I misjudged them, unless they're having a small third party (understaffed?) company do it all for them and just distributing it after it's finished. Maybe they need to sell more GI Joe dolls and transformers puzzles in order to afford it?

If 3.6 million $ isn't enough to make a board game I'm not sure how much they really need... are they waiting until they have enough money to mass produce it at walmart before they can create the products to give to their backers?

Or do they lack the line workers to put the stuff into the boxes and onto the trucks/boats/planes? Is it because of Covid? Then just say it's because of covid...

It would just be good to know what the problem actually is, rather than yeah sorry more info soon. I can't blame the actors saying those lines, but I do blame the PR department. Think of the message this sends to potential backers of future products. Hey, give us your money, it'll be delayed and you don't deserve an explanation though.

Lesson learned (?), from now I'll avoid backing such projects if this is business as usual. Dec 21st is the first day of winter.

[Blayze]

After yesterday's honestly-impressive letdown, I've been through all the sites on the list I made (minus the Australian and Canadian storefront pages I'd purged). The only one with a changed date is the Canadian distribution site, UniversalDist. That site's release date changed from the first of November to the 15th of January, with its Order Due Date also changing from the first of October to the 25th of October.

This brings Canada closer to Australia's estimated release date of February. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, I've learned this change took place on or before the third of October, not long after I made the list. I'm waiting to hear back from someone on Twitter from Texas who claims multiple stores are opening pre-orders up (could be for either retail or reselling of backer copies) and giving it a release date of the fifth of November, which I haven't seen so far at all.

[Edge]

…I guess they can whip all this stuff up on computers while we wait if they want to, but as others have pointed out, it's the lack of information that is hurting them the most, since we don't view them as this infallible enterprise of imagination who won't screw things up. Yes, we want to know how the sausage is made!

And finally, until it's actually shipping out and we can see what's in there, who can say...

This is a good point. There really are a lot of struggles unique to this year, and I think it may be true that they were overwhelmed by the success of the Pulse campaign. While I can understand that, it’s definitely true that they nearly quadrupled their stated goal a year ago, so, y’know, they’ve had time to adjust and respond to that success. If they don’t have the right people working on it, they should add more and better people.

What your quote really made me realize, though, is that at this point, all that really matters is the final quality of the game. If he sculpts and durability of the miniatures are great, the rules and lore are great, and everything really feels top-tier quality, I believe most backers will forgive the communication issues – as long as that does start improving – and would back another Pulse with less nervousness next time. I think we’d allow them the goodwill. If the final product fails to deliver, I suspect it will not only lead this core audience to swear off future Hasbro HeroQuest, but also pretty much everything Avalon Hill and Hasbro ever do. I believe at least some of the people on the team understand both the potential profit and potential risk of getting HeroQuest right, so I’m still optimistic. I hope we get to find out soon.

Also, Blayze, thanks for all that sleuthing. I hope we do get it in time for Christmas, though. They shouldn’t have said “very, very soon” if they don’t think we’ll have it for the holidays.

[Kurgan]

The rants, must hold back... the rants! First they led us to believe it would ship by the end of October (earlier than expected, I was thinking at least November), now we're back to Q4 2021 again, or speculating about early 2022 for the original backers?

They shouldn't really be at all surprised, I mean we started already with those "tiers" already in place. If anything they should have been shocked they didn't meant the $4 million mark and had to rely upon Joe getting on his hands and knees and begging outside the Hasbro castle gates for his "Dragon pack" to be released (that part was my imagination, but supposedly he begged to get it done).

Back when many of us were asking about fundraisers of this kind, we were told that raising $3 million for some obscure fantasy miniatures was no big deal, that Reaper Bones does it all the time. At the time I was skeptical they would get the money they were asking for in such a short time frame. They ALMOST made the second tier. So this would seem like business as usual, right? Why would they do all this if they thought nobody was really interested? It's not like this was something unprecedented. It wasn't portrayed as some vanity print to order project that only a handful of people were going to get, it was a "big deal" right alongside all their other stuff. They weren't going to invent something that had never been done before, just reprint an old game with some new mostly generic designs that they'd already put up for the world to see. The text seemed more or less what we'd seen before, just formatted a little differently. This wasn't a brand new translation of some obscure ancient text...

They can afford to employ a guy to role-play a weird quasi parody of Zargon as bad grampa on twitter, but not to just give us something more than a screenshot of a prototype we've already seen with or without paint. Believe it or not, some of us actually care about THE GAME, rather than a bag of miniatures. I can order those from Reaper right now if I want to much faster. Sure they'll be gray and white rather than red or green, but still. We want to know what you've done with the gameplay, the mechanics, and the world (such as it is).

The whole reason I supported this project at all is because I had, at one time, good faith that they were really and truly going to reproduce, more or less how we remembered it, a classic game that is nowadays a vintage collector's item. I never needed it, I have a copy of classic HeroQuest to play anytime I want to already, and in fact a friend of mine who had my old set is willing to send it back to me, so I technically have two! I can live without a remake, I really can. But if it's worthy of the name I was willing to support it with actual money.

To be clear, I'm not cancelling me order. In fact, I plan to forfeit my right to a refund by participating in the unboxing project for the BENEFIT of other fans who may or may not get screwed over by this deal. Of course if they do decided to officially delay the product (hard to do that when all they've done is say "Fall 2021" and "very soon"). All we want is information, if that can be had another, easier way, then so be it. I'd rather a company that was up front, because I don't simply trust them implicitly. That's not how this works. This is a business transaction. I'm not a little child writing letters to Santy Claus here.

How hard is it really to have weekly (or even daily) reasonable updates? The lack of information allows the gap to be filled with negative speculation (it must be so bad they can't even say it?), and surely that's not what they want. Something as understandable as "we had to close the factory because of covid" or "the plastic we need is stuck on a dock in China" would go a long way to calming people down. Video games have post-mortems. "Oh that happened because one day the heatsink in our server melted and we lost a bunch of files" or "so and so quit at the last minute due to a family tragedy" stuff isn't fun to hear but goes a long way to explaining why the things are the way they are.

The word "pre-order" should be toxic to any video game fan that is above 30, and I imagine something similar for board games. We pledgers bought a product. We didn't invest, we didn't bid, we didn't donate, and we didn't pre-order. We bought a product that we were promised, hence we are owed a refund if that product fails to materialize in a timely fashion or doesn't meet reasonable expectations of quality. I can't make that clear enough. As someone infamously pointed out, I have been very positive and optimistic, but lately I've been feeling more cynical and grumpy about the whole thing. Again, hopefully I'm wrong, but just in case I'm not, we have our plan.

For now, I'll stick to stuff I can buy when I know the supply is there and I can either take it home with me from the store, or will deliver in 3-7 business days.

[Leathaface79]

In reality, the original stated shipping was Fall 2021, which is 9/22 - 12/21. As long as they ship within those dates they are meeting the promise to the backers.

Last month's email stated they would begin shipping at the end of October, but they did not state everyone would get theirs's shipped in that time period, just that the shipments would start. If I had to guess, the US shipments will start soon fulfilling that statement. Followed by AUS and UK. I don't know if everyone is going to get theirs by the 12/21 Fall deadline.

I don't blame anyone for feeling upset or frustrated, Hasbro has used some pretty poor wording and has given zero information, the whole twitter/Zargon thing is a joke to be honest. Go back to before "Zargon" the comedian took over, the posts were shots of the figures, cards and they had hundreds of likes and many re-tweets and comments. "Zargon's" "I'm eating a Dread Burger for dinner" posts get 10 likes and the majority of the comments are people asking for information and the one guy that replies that "Hasbro doesn't give information on any of the other Haslab projects".

Saying "Very Soon" is not a time table you communicate with customers. An individual would immediately think a week or two, but Hasbro could mean a month or two. You leave open to interpretation and then frustration if the interpreted date is not hit.

It wouldn't be hard to say "Hey everyone, we extremely apologize but due to the massive shipping delays at the port of LA https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2021/10/04/shipping-containers-waiting-ports-los-angeles-long-beach/, we will probably be delayed in shipping everything out. We are working hard to get you the product as soon as possible and hopefully with giving all of the goals including the ones you didn't hit, is a small reward for your patience."

[Blayze]

The Canadian distributor site shows Heroquest under the "preorders due this week" header, and did when I found them before they changed their date. This indicates the problem is likely between Hasbro/Avalon Hill (or their contracted producer) and the distribution warehouses; certainly seems like the distributors don't have any stock.

After all, I can't see them wanting to sit on the stock; since even Canada's having problems despite its proximity to the US, either there's a logistical problem getting the product sent out, or the producer is having problems making the game or getting raw material, and the distributors' own orders for stock are being filled in country order.

(I'm guessing the game is produced either in the US or Canada, or somewhere where transport to those countries is easier than Australia, given the difference in each country's estimated retail dates).

Covid's the obvious culprit, but they chose not to bother blaming it on the stream. Since they chose not to actually present the one announcement they did have, they may have had nothing to show for it beyond the box art, but someone signed off on this "event"; either there was a corporate decision made to make only a token appearance, or Hasbro/Avalon Hill is having internal problems and they weren't prepared.

[cornixt]

Since they haven't pushed out a new date, I'm going to guess that the games are stuck on a cargo ship that is waiting to be unloaded (like so many goods these days) but no one knows when that will be. There is still a week to go before the "end of October" date passes.

It's truly bizarre that they aren't even addressing the retail release or any of the expansions. They had an audience ready to get fired up, and they give out nothing. It really shows that their plans for the game are still undecided or that they don't want to let anyone know their plans while doing a terrible job at hiding them.

[Kurgan]

I guess that's not much change from the beginning of this whole campaign, where we got that countdown kind of out of the blue...

I bet the general public still doesn't know this is happening. Certainly nobody in my personal circles (many of whom remember HQ) knew about it until I mentioned it to them. The entire pitch was basically made to Twitter...

This crowdfund project will run from September 22, 2020 to 11:59pm ET on November 6th, 2020. If successful, the project will begin shipping around Fall 2021.