by Our legendary member Kurgan, performed time ago an insane two-part live interview with Christopher Nadeau, better known as "Encarmine" in social media, performed during GenCon 2023 event in Indianapolis. At the time of interview, Chris was the Project Leader of HeroQuest remake's products.
The interview with Chris Nadeau can be found in Kurgan's YouTube channel XSC3-HeroQuestFans (Part 1/2 here, Part 2/2 here), however, he gave me permission to transcript it on this post for eternity, especially because of the bad audio... anyway of course I encourage you to watch the full video if you are interested in listening to Chris.
On behalf of all members of Ye Olde Inn, Thanks a lot to Kurgan for generating this great valuable piece of history!
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INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTOPHER NADEAU "ENCARMINE" by our Ye Olde Inn member Kurgan, performed the 3rd/4th of August 2023 for his YouTube channel, @HeroQuestFans
IMPORTANT REMARK: The interview is so long that it has been splited in two subsequent posts.
PART 1 of 2 (3rd August 2023)
- Kurgan from HeroQuestFans (K): We've got Chris Nadeau of Avalon Hill, big Hero Quest guy at GenCon! Thank you all right.
Christopher Nadeau "Encarmine" (CN): Yeah, absolutely, thanks for sitting down and talking to me.
K: Thanks for giving us your time. So I've got a bunch of questions to ask you, some of these... but wanted to get your insight.
CN: I will do my absolute best.
K: Okay so Blaze asks: what didn't make the cut for Rise of the Dread Moon that you wish had, and why is it not the Sir Ragnar Mini?
CN: First part of the question, we concepted the mechanics for centuries. We wanted to see if we could generate monsters that could open doors, and see what that would do in terms of the complexity of Zargon's strategy.. wasn't quite ready for prime time, turns Zargon a little O.P. [overpowered] in ways that made some of the play tests a little complicated, but it was a great idea, I like the theme of it. I'm not going to give up on it quite yet. The question about Sir Ragnar is... what was it again?
K: No, no.
CN: Oh, you mean in terms of the miniature like we did we not make a sculpt?
K: The character is there...
CN: Yeah, so spoiler: Sir Ragnar is in Rise of the Dread Moon. I really, I guess got hung up on this idea that in the European text that it was referenced that he was a traitor, (Kurgan: Yes) and it felt like it was a narrative that had some depth and some potential, and kind of this story of Mage of the Mirror and Elethorn not feeling complete in The Mage of the Mirror, and this idea that Sir Ragnar was out there, and what was he doing and what was he up to? gave me just a really good narrative tool to like connect the dots back to Zargon in a very direct way. It made a lot of thematic sense to kind of make him a reoccurring character, that he was like this liaison to the evil and the nefarious machinations of what's happening in Elethorn, so I wanted to bring him back in that way, but we had a lot of conversations about like what makes the cut in terms of a card/chit/token versus a sculpt, and where were players going to find the most value out of what's inside the box, and so I know a lot of the fans were like "Well where's my Sir Ragnar sculpt? Where's my figure?" and what we ultimately came up with was that the The Dread Wraith/Dread Specter kind of thing was going to give Zargons more opportunity to introduce more character, more of homebrew, more potential, more versions of something new than essentially just another Dread Warrior, which is ultimately what Sir Ragnar is at this point, kind of bending his knee to Zargon. He's essentially like a themed Dread Warrior in a way, and so that's a much easier proxy, it's a much easier thing for kind of other ways of kind of incorporating that in than having this really unique double base Dread Specter concept that's going to let them kind of do more mechanics, new spells and abilities things like that, so like at the end of the day we felt like that's probably going to get more value, than like Dread Warrior with no helmet on, and does that mean we won't make Sir Ragnar at some point? No, but in our kind of where are we going, where are we taking him, and when we have to make the difficult decisions of what we can put in the box, you know, it made more sense to us to give Zargon something they could do a little bit more with, than a Sir Ragnar.
K: I want to say that I completely understand. I'm on your side with this. As far as using your imagination and just taking one piece to represent many different characters, is something we've always done, but I think it was more people were hoping that this is like the perfect excuse since he's on the box as a character that you could have just shoehorned him in, which you did with the Knight in a way, which I thought was really cool. I think a lot of people were wanting that Guardian Knight and that can lead into another question: was it a toss-up between the two or was it kind of it...
CN: With respect to the Guardian Knights and Sir Ragnar?
K: Yeah.
CN: No, definitely, not. It was very early in the process that we decided to solve the Commander of the Guardian Knight Hero Collection issue, that the Guardian Knight was gonna be the playable character in Rise of the Dread Moon. That was an absolute very early this is what we're doing, no question. We want to make sure those fans feel like, in a way, they can be completists, have all that opportunity, and have all, and that was why we also decided that, we were not going to make any modifications to the Guardian Knight in Rise of the Dread Moon. He was going to play mechanically rule wise the exact same as the one that was released as a like a promotional item in the beginning.
K: And now, the scalpers...
CN: Yeah, well that was part of it too. It separates the sculpt, so if you have the original one, you can still feel like I really have a treasure here with the Commander of the Guardian Knight. It's a different sculpt, that ambiguity of the helmet is like a fun play that also allowed us to put other stuff in the box, instead of doing the male/female kind of comparison, so we kind of made it kind of gender ambiguous by putting the helmet on. It was a good kind of test of what we could do there, so yeah that answered a few questions for us, right?
K: Okay... no spoilers already, but the way the end of Rise of the Dread Moon shows Sir Ragnar it's like there could be another thing, it's like the trial of Sir Ragnar is this.
CN: Of course, right? That was the final. We absolutely had the conversations of does the jail wagon make it all the way back to the Realm, right? There's a lot of opportunity there... I know a lot of the fans were kind of pointed with like "Hey they teased this turns of Sir Ragnar that insinuates that they were going to make a sculpt", but that actually doesn't work that way. We'll do turns on characters because we want to include them into essentially our canon, our trademarks, our brand, all that stuff. We had to make those turns to basically put them on the front of the box, and that doesn't necessarily mean in our process, formulaically, that it yields a minute a miniature sculpt to anything like that, but it's necessary for our documentation and our world building to create that material and that's what we shared with the Community.
K: Kind of like in the comic book world how they have to make the cover like just to establish that...
CN: Yeah, that's just it. If they have a comic book artist working in Marvel, they're working on new Black Panther there's a new suit, somebody is going to provide that comic book artist with turns of that new suit as reference material to do the power book cover, right? what we shared were essentially the turns that established that costuming and then the comic book artist would in theory create the dynamic energy poses, that you think on the front of a cover letter, so that doesn't, it is a scoring step in doing something like a sculpt, but it is not like it does not say definitively that's turning into a skull. I think those probably people who just said "oh if I see these turns it must mean there's a sculpt on the way".
K: An element of wishful thinking in there and I think with the Haslab campaign saying the version of this character or whatever set that in a lot of people's minds and I understand that like you turn the box around it doesn't show a Sir Ragnar miniature it's like "well why would you guys try to fool us during the production and then you..." because people come to it later they look at the box and they say "okay he's not there thematically, he's there but as an actual plastic, he isn't but he could be in the future".
CN: It's not an attempt to kind of fool the community, we know the communities endeared to Sir Ragnar just being a named character in the lore, right? For like the super fans a lot of you guys had objects into that European narrative, so we knew when we did that, it was going to create just a lot of conversation within the community "hey what do they mean? sir Ragnar's a traitor, that's not true, oh wait bro you haven't read the European one, you don't understand this has been a thing for 30 years, right?" We just wanted the conversation in the community to do all the buzz and debate and do that was kind of the idea, right? Sort of like teasing the beginning of Rise of the Dread Moon, we knew dropping that bomb in a way was just gonna let the fans get engaged and that was really the effort at that point like we knew it would be like conversation within conversation within the community of like "who is Sir Ragnar? what do you mean he's a traitor? what are you talking about?" I mean anybody that's played HeroQuest is probably made it three quests in, and therefore no Sir Ragnar is, so it was an opportunity to kind of get everybody engaged, chatting, talking.
K: So you're starting the conversation, not ending it. I think is the key because a lot of people I think for whatever reason they want like the definitive, like closing the door, this is the canonical like explanation, as opposed to saying "well and now on that cliffhanger you're gonna make your own story" or "you're going to fill in the details, why did he do it you know?"
CN: I agree 100%. The reality of how we've designed Hero Quest, in this kind of new era of Hero Quest, is a lot of open-ended storytelling and that's because if the game inherently is kind of structured around the idea that fans can introduce their own mechanics, their own homebrew, their own narration. A gentleman earlier today showed me that he had created custom cards for every one of his kids, and that is what endears these kids to play Hero Quest is like they can see themselves in the game quite literally? That is why we all love the game as when we were kids is that we made it our own, so to give a really tight super structured linear narrative flies in the face of what fans actually do with the game, so by design we make sure the narrative has gaps, it doesn't dot the eyes and cross the t's in some places, so that fans can fill in the blanks. I know I get it like I want to know how the story ends sometimes, I want somebody to tell me, but for so many players they want the opportunity to do that themselves, so I think there's enough substance in depth in the material that we're sharing out, than for fans who just want to read it out loud and move on to the next Quest. It's there and for the fans that want to build their own stories and tell their own tales and add a degree of light role play into their experience, it's the platform to do that.
K: It's really helpful, it's really useful because I think that question gets asked over and over again. It's more like some people are wanting. I'm thinking back to the Dave Morris novels, where it's like he gives a presentation of like the Hero Quest World, but even in that case he's giving a narrative and then the second part of the novel is a Choose Your Own Adventure and then the third part of the novel is a Quest, so it's still like these prototypes, these archetypes of characters could be anything. This is just maybe one possible adventure they had, it's not the one and only story.
CN: I have been ultimately having talked to Stephen Baker a couple times about this specific topic. The direction of making Hero Quest in the beginning, back in the late 80s, was to provide that degree of like role play. People may have been intimidated by the kind of golden era of role play. Dungeons and Dragons was really starting to hit its stride at that point and kind of working its way into like the Zeitgeist but it could have been intimidating for many people who are like.
K: It definitely was for me. I saw Hero Quest and It was like "oh I get that, that's easy".
CN: Exactly, so for people like "I'm not gonna sit down at a table and abstractly attempt to tell the campfire story with my friends" it was a leap for many people, but to put down what looked like a traditional board, what looked like traditional dice, but the theme matched up with the cool stuff that was going on in the world and played into some of the things that I think for us led us into things like the high fantasy, admiration for Dungeons and Dragons and Lord of the Rings, and things like that. Hero Quest provided that and it was trying to factor in this idea of it's still kind of want to make it my own, I still want to role play a little bit and the degree in which I do that is kind of up to me, I could do a lot of it, I could do a little, my friend can make all his Zargon choices and voice or he could not, right? I could just say I want to roll my dice and keep going, or I can say I want to swing my broadsword and crack it over that orc skull, it was completely up to the your friends what you ended up doing.
K: I gotta say when I'm Zargon, which is most of the time, I really appreciate that when I have a new player in our group, and they just do something wild that I wasn't expecting it's like "oh great, that Knight is going to throw away a shield and just go off on his own looking for Treasure", it's like that's his character, that's what he wants to do, it's like, that's great.
CN: That's why we thought Betrayal was a great fit into the portfolio as well. In fact I just Avalon Bill and I just came back from the live stream on Gen Con, who was actually talking about this very thing that for us Betrayal is that game where if you're a gamer, or you've got a few gamers in the crew, but you have other friends who don't necessarily identify as gamers, or they're almost coming over for the Friday that game night for the first time, it's one of those games that you can put in front of them and like their degree of comfort and role play and engagement in strategy gaming can be all over the place and yet you can find some commonality and play in that game and I reference in the stream it's just like Hero Quest, that same thing, you could be a super fan of high fantasy and find a lot of value, Hero Quest sit down with someone who's never played a strategy game in their lives and the only thing they've ever played is Monopoly and somehow be able to sit down and play that game together, there's something just beautiful about that accessibility kind of logic, and that's a lot of what our kind of North Star is on Avalon Hill.
K: I'm gonna have to try that game before I go home this time.
CN: Absolutely, it's a lot of fun and if you're really into like cinematic horror and things like that, like every trope, every archetype, it's so funny to do it.
K: Oh that's the best.
CN: Yep, and I find because of that and the fact that like in the core game is like 50 different haunts that people create their own moment, so that's a lot of the conversation at Gen Con, people come up they say I love Betrayal, like my friend, and we were playing this we this haunt triggered like I had this friend over, it was their first time with we talk about, it's been like 20 years now like it's just really beautiful, little moments that come up that endear people to that game, the same way that happened to the Hero Quest.
K: That's great, well. Let's get back to questions here, all right. So I missed this completely until someone told me about it uh SteveRS2000 says that at the end of Into the Northlands, in the companion app there's a little survey that says like "did you like the animal companion?" I didn't even know about that, so he's asking: "are there going to be other surveys and were the results good? Are there going to be other animal friends popping up in other quests?".
CN: Yeah, so when we started, when we uploaded Into the Northlands into the app we had the very same conversation at that point. The Discord had been several months old, we were finding really good fan engagement through social media with the community and we were collecting a lot of data, and it was clumsy though, it was in it very analog, how we were kind of pulling screen grabs down from discords, having meetings about like "hey we saw this five times", like that kind of thing, so when we talked back with the app team about it, they look "we can put a survey into the app" like super easy, it will look great because this Into the Northlands thing is going to introduce a couple mechanics. We would love to see how people respond to that and if they kind of enjoy that engagement and want more of a formal way of providing that material, so we threw the survey in it. It got good results, a lot of people answered it and it just became another tool in the toolbox of like how we collect the data on what the fans want, we'll just continue to do that where we can.
K: Okay, so that makes me think all right I need to go in there and do it now because, well and I think, I just had this momentary flash, and I think a few other people did too. It was like okay we're panicking like usual, is okay, but if you guys are only looking at the companion app, you're missing out on all the people who take one look at it and go. I like being Zargon, I don't need this and you're maybe going to get a skew to view based on just what a few people are looking at, because if you look at my app data, you're gonna go this guy is just like messing around, he's not even finishing Quests most of the time, I mean there was like three times I had a pretty good experience with it but most of the time I'm just not giving useful data yeah.
CN: It's not a dev tool, right? Just like I said, like the Discord server does function as an input device for us, and even though you think of Hasbro, and you think of big giant toy and game corporation like a lot of process, and you know that kind of thing the irony is when we get good feedback on something, like the Discord we have a meeting about it, so it's funny to think about for fans at least maybe that it's like "oh my God if I throw all this down on the Discord" suddenly there're 10 people in the Avalon Hill team sitting in a meeting room talking about what I said on a Discord, and debating what we want to do with that commentary. That is a real thing and that's actually something we've kind of pride ourselves on we promise everybody we wanted to be engaged with the community, and we wanted to make these games you know kind of buy us for us and I kind of promised last year I said look like if the fans are willing to work with us we'll work for them, and like things like Rise of the Dread Moon is an example of that, we got to a point where we said "look we're collecting a lot of good data, we're hearing a lot of feedback, we're pushing out a lot of reissues of old Quest Packs, but what we're not doing right now is capitalizing on some of the good ideas the community has, the things they want to see so fine we're gonna pivot, we're gonna stop what we're doing for a moment, we're gonna issue a new Quest Pack that's never been done before, that doesn't mean that we've given up on making sure that fans get all the Quest Packs that they wanted growing up". It just means I'm mixing up the line plan, so that we can do right by the fans and the things they want, and get that out to them and we'll just keep doing it as long as the fans keep buying it.
K: Nice and I really like the whole Alchemy mechanic in Rise of the Dread Moon, and obviously I wasn't the first one to come up with it. Other people had similar systems before, but I thought it was really cool that something that I kind of do anyway is now official, or at least something that can be used.
CN: Yeah, again it's taking good feedback, really play testing through it making sure it's got, it thematically holds together cohesively, and like I said we'll keep doing it, the fans can keep throwing the feedback our way and we'll keep analyzing the material. We'll keep making the games and keep Hero Quest around for a long time.
K: Excellent. I should probably move a little faster through this... So Wizards of Morcar, the Dwarf Quest Pack, the Wizard Quest Pack... are they coming?
CN: [Laughs] I can either confirm nor deny of course, right? At the end of the day, if there was any question of whether or not. Avalon Hill has the rights of those, we absolutely do, right? They are definitely within our scope of possibility, fans are just gonna have to wait and say.
K: Okay. I knew you were gonna say that, but thank you for putting that on the record. So Jace asks "I am getting a card for the Beastmaster".
CN: Yep, that is so true, we did promise a fair "we're gonna have to figure out where we slide that in at some point for Jace".
K: He's super creative, nightbird asks "when is the blind Captain coming out? When are we gonna make nightbird as an actual playable miniature?"
CN: We'll just have to see how much of a kind of thin favorite, that character grows into being based on their placement in a couple of the lore videos now that they're canon. It's hard to deny they exist in the world, it's just where's the right place, we're gonna eventually put them, but we'll see how that goes.
K: All right, excellent. ga3680 says "we love how you're both paying homage to the historical expansions, both American and European, as well as releasing brand new ones. If and when you get around to Wizards of Morcar, will you be looking to increase it to a 10 Quest campaign, like most of the others many things?"
CN: Yep, so again wait and see on what we do, when we do it, how we do it, if we do it, but I want to make sure if we do Wizards of Morcar that it's right, it feels like it's a good quality product, that it feels like it's got the right level of completion. I think a couple of those Quest Packs, a couple other things that we haven't quite done yet, different levels of how many classes were in them quality of those Quests. Where they can even complete expansions at that point, that's a lot of really good conversation around those, those decisions have to be made, but that's all T.B.D. [To Be Determined]
K: Right, and I wish. I was more in touch with like the European Hero Quest fans because I'm really familiar with the American side of things and how like broken a lot of people thought Frozen Horror was, but they still wanted it Mage of the Mirror, you made the tweaks and everything, but I don't know what the opinion is on the European packs and like was there a lot of negativity whereas there were a lot of fan fixes for some of the things, or did people just want it the same preserved, you know?
CN: I mean there's a few that we've kind of zeroed-in on a few places, I think I know there's some other YouTube influencers like Amalgamash who the sanctity of 10 body point ogres was a thing, but does it really make for good game play? When you're just sitting there, punching the punching bag over, and over, and over, and nobody's moving? they're just rolling dice, turn after turn, after turn... trying to just drill down on a bunch of body points, is that so fun?
K: But surely that last ogre should be 10, right? I kind of agree with him on that one.
CN: Yep, the level of difficulty I know with Frozen Horror... hugs are hard, they're dangerous, very dangerous hugs, but that's why we kind of introduced that kind of alternative mechanic to dealing with smaller tables of players, so we'll just continue to analyze the things that are are they good, even though they might be original mechanics, are they good mechanics? do they make for a fun game at the end of the day? We want it to be fun even if it's nostalgic, but it's broken, is that something we should fix, you know? We've got the possibility and I get that there's a community out there that's like "yeah don't touch the thing, leave it exactly as is" but there's also a whole community of new fans, and potential new fans, that we want them to have a good time too because the more people that play, the longer we're going to keep running Hero Quest.
K: It's very true and I suppose there's always the fallback position of the hardcores like me can always just play it the way we know is best and the new people are gonna find out what they like best, your way, our way, or some new way homebrew. Very good... "any possibility of a standalone monster or an dice pack?" Okay, so Ribby I think is commenting on the Hero Collections, I think covertnerd said this too, "are we going to start getting other little packs that are not necessarily Heroes, but other things we could use?"
CN: Well, anybody who's at the convention this week... there's some pretty beautiful dice that are being given away every time somebody buys that, so it's a good test and learn to understand what people find value in, so kind of bringing that out at the Con is actually an opportunity for us to kind of collect that perspective and that's why it's here this weekend, that's the experiment we're kind of fighting with it to see how fans are endeared to something like that.
K: Those new dice are carved very deeply, I think that was one of the complaints I had with the Haslab dice is they were kind of the quality of them weren't very good, I mean they look good, but when you look closely you'd see there was little imperfections, but these look very clear, very sharp, and they've got some interesting colors, so I know not everybody collects dice, I mean you got to have good ones in the box, but that'll definitely appeal to some people, I'm not sure about the dice rolling scroll or whatever, but I guess I see other people at some other tables using similar devices.
CN: Yep, that is an element that you tend to see in some individuals who buy very premium dice and again this was kind of like a little bit of a test and learn a little bit of our own kind of survey. We can have some conversation afterwards when people see it and people hold it and people play with it. If it's something they want to see more often and that's kind of what we're doing here.
K: I like that, rather than just waiting "well what do you want?" well "here's the product what do you think?"
CN: Again that's why we're kind of giving it out for free when people come and buy Hero Quest at the booth because we just want to get it out there, get into people's hands and have conversations with them on the other side once they get a chance to play with them.
K: Yeah, thank you for doing that. I'll definitely have to do some videos on that when I get the chance. All right, so we already got that question, so with the Dwarf and Wizard Packs you guys have all the draft notes, and your own ideas, and everything, but are you going to be using the basis of those unreleased Quest Packs, that hardly anybody knows about? or are you just going to take the concept and do something completely new? or not sure yet?
CN: I think because those were unreleased, I don't personally consider them canon, right? That's something that the super fans have, and do to themselves in a way because they didn't kind of have anything else over the line...
K: ... imagined what they could have been.
CN: Exactly. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's real, or final, or play tested for that matter, right? A lot of the times the draft rules like that are usually not play testing, and that means the balance could be way off. It means like there just could be a lot of incomplete stuff, or in a way mechanically it kind of goes nowhere, or it doesn't offer anything new, right? it was just more off.
K: Kind of like... maybe I'm wrong on this, like Stephen Baker's original drafts for Hero Quest, like we don't have those and if we got them would we just go "oh, well this was a work in progress this wasn't the final".
K: Or it's like completely broken for that matter and Steve knew that and went in a different direction when he was creating the final product, right? Just because it was Steve's notebook doesn't necessarily mean it should make it all the way to retail, that's part of Steve's process, right? He probably had 15 different drafts, probably play tested it 500 times like he did wear a lot of decisions, a lot of conversations on the way along the way. Again, just because it was written down, I don't know if that necessarily means that we all want to see it as a product, but we want to do the things the fans want and we have a great vocal engaged community of super fans that we appreciate, but there is another lens like I said where it's like what's the right product for everybody you're looking at around us as Kurgan, and I look in two directions and there's about I don't know, 3.000 people around us as we sit here.
K: This is just the tip of the iceberg as far as gamers. Well, I think for me I would love to see like a little historical collection, like a little snapshot of a diary, like what were those conversations, like in 89, or 88, or whenever it was, but as opposed to saying like "Okay, well, here's Draft One in a box" yeah, I'm not sure if that would work.
CN: Yeah and poor Steve, it's so funny every time we have a conversation. He's trying to remember a random meeting that occurred 40 years ago, but I mean again it's a process, it's a team effort. You see it here coming to the booth like there's not one person working on Hero Quest, it takes about 14 of us just on the core team, never mind all the other support staff that we have at Hasbro to help Avalon Hill kind of get to the finish line, so it takes a village.
K: Well, I'm learning so much more about that. I don't think I ever really thought this but maybe I sort of assumed it's like someone has an idea for a game and it's like a lightning strike and they just write it all down, and it gets prototyped the next day, and then it's done, and it's really nothing like that at all.
CN: No, just going from initial concept to draft rules, to Alpha Testing, to Beta Testing, to like instructions testing... like a lot changes in that process and that takes a lot of people, a lot of input, a lot of discussion, and that's just rules, never mind narrative, where that narrative leads? does that make sense from like a IP world building kind of standpoint clusting out the product? making sure the components cost out to be the right price point that consumers are willing to pay? and it's an exercise in putting things, in taking things out, swapping things. That process goes on through the entire testing process. Something doesn't test well it comes out, something else goes in, right? something doesn't cost out that comes out, the rules change to accommodate it? that is just a process that starts very early and goes until the eleventh hour when we kind of force pencils down and a lot changes in that, so to that point of like the secret notebook of rules, I mean just Rise of the Dread Moon probably change... I don't know, seven or eight times, as a overall experience just in the process of making it, like I said in the beginning we had centuries they were hunting you through the streets of Elethorn, it was crazy, it was fun, it just didn't work.
K: Sure, great, so LucaRocks says "I doubt they will answer or maybe it's out of their wheelhouse, but what's up with the inconsistent presentation of previews for new products? we're hungry for new products, so there's no reason to be so hesitant with sharing information it'll be leaked out eventually anyway". I think his comment kind of goes back to the beginning of the changing strategy on dealing with the community and revealing products, so what would you say to?
CN: Yeah I see the other thing to know is Hasbro/Avalon Hill, which is the cosst where a manufacturing company is, but we have our own internal marketing and sales teams and then we also have all our external retailers and partners, just the way the business works, a lot of things change along that way, how we unveil exclusive reveals? who gets the content first? what retailers? what regions actually have product arrive in their distribution facilities? that's not all stuff Avalon Hill can control?
K: And a theory that there was a dart board and you throw it in whichever country hits it gets it.
CN: Yeah, unfortunately it doesn't work like that at all and it's very interesting. We're a global company and our process is when we go to toolstart and film on a product like a Hero Quest expansion it automatically triggers another team in Canada. They're based out of Montreal who does all the adaptations and translations for Hero Quest, and they receive all the English files and that automatically puts in the system we need a German one a French one like, so on and so forth, and they have to start their process of doing the adaptations and translations for each one of them that prioritization gets broken down again based on the orders that are coming in from the retailers. So, for example if France orders 60.000 units and Italy orders 10.000 units it might be a situation where France gets theirs first, or just by chance, as things move through the pipeline if for some reason there was something wrong with the French version and it has to get fixed, the Italy version jumps ahead of it and the factory line, so now when they do the run, the Italy one got done before the French one got put in boxes, put in pallets, put on trucks, put on ships shipped to that country because of some unforeseen circumstance you know something went wrong on the press, on the line something didn't print correctly, there was some crazy typo we had to fix because that actually happened, yeah absolutely it happens every day, and that might mean for some strange reason the Italy one is suddenly available two weeks before the French one and that's just how it plays out for a second reality is Avalon Hill being part of Hasbro, what we're gonna go after the big bets, right? and we only have so much staff, so much resources, we're going to make certain calls, but when we sit down with like this Diplomacy crow and you guys are like "look, we are die hard passionate fans for this thing, we are dying for this thing to come back" that creates a really good conversation back home and we're like "look, we might not get to Diplomacy for five years but what we can do is we can work with our partners at Renegade, get that thing out the door, get it back in everybody's hands, bring that game back to retail" and they're capable of doing low quantities, right? and low runs that we honestly probably can't get to in the grand scheme of prioritization and that's where the conversation went with Axis & Allies, Diplomacy acquire was like "let's call our buddies over at Renegade, let's make this happen, let's get that stuff back" we know the fans exist, right? they can get it out there in the method that we got it for that fan community, let's roll, right?
[At this moment, a fan from Diplomacy board game community called Robert asked to participate a bit in the interview and have some exchange with Chris Nadeau, conversation which has been also transcripted as follows]
Robert from Diplomacy fans community (R): Now there's a lot of excitement behind the new release. I was at Origins when Thomas had a large turnout for Diplomacy, there I followed Thomas over to WBC in Seven Springs, most Diplomacy players we've had and like a number of years and four boards, three boards, four boards, so did a great job there as well, a lot of excitement about the product come, it's so super excited, you just can't help but feed of them like the key chains, the hats the t-shirts, little things are exciting for everybody.
CN: I know well, that's just it, so what happened was 100% that's all that's what started it here at Gen Con last year, walking over to Lucas Oil Field seeing you guys run the tournament and I was sitting there up in the bleachers watching you guys and I'm like we have to do this going back home, back to headquarters and being like look at Thomas, look what he's doing for this community, look at those fans, I was down there with you guys for a moment.
R: Oh, I know. It's rare to find a Thomas, right? I know, so super excited, it's a phenomenal well.
CN: I was down there and you guys were initiating another round and when you did somebody walked over the laptop, started the like chess clock, everybody went like cold silent, like no talking. I was like this is how passionate these fans are, like we gotta find a way to bring this back, so I mean that experience of being here last year and seeing that community play in Lucas Oil Field was like me racing back home to be like what are we doing to pull this off.
R: And that big wooden board, that's existence for close to 30 years. I was here in 98 when I won this Diplomacy tournament, it was still that same big wooden board, phenomenal colorization different types.
CN: I know he was so proud of this hand-built one-of-a-kind board that only comes out once a year for the final game of the tournament that is for our U.S Champion. It is amazing and I mean you've got a crew over here in the other corner of Hall C that run these Axis & Allies tournaments every single year, they got this beautiful little booth they built themselves, they are the first people in this Hall every day. I'm an early bird, I roll in here at like 7 A.M and unlock the doors to this booth, those guys are already here, they'll own there with their binders open weeding through who's I'm like again if that's the community of these games we have to be doing something for them, so like I said the relationship with like a partner like Renegade is allowing us to do that and I know the talk of the town today is the Heroscape news that Renegades got to bring Heroscape back, it's all part of that conversation, it's all part of that plan like at the end of the day.
K: I want you guys to get your game too.
CN: Well, again we promised last year at Gen Con we're bringing Heroscape back, right? Who's pushing the pencil and the logo on the bottom of the box doesn't matter as much as saying the fans are getting their game back.
R: I appreciate that. You guys have done a great job, Avalon Hill and Hasbro, putting attention where you can and where you can't do it yourself. Getting a partner like Renegade Games involved is great, we appreciate it, so I was here last year too and chatted with you a little bit, so I was on that final board last year too. My son ended up winning that final board but I just want to stop by and say thank you, you're appreciate the new games being put out the new versions.
CN: I super appreciate that, thank you, and again, that conversation of you coming to this booth afterwards, like I took that home one, I was like you gotta understand that crew is walking halfway across Indianapolis basically to come tell us how important this is, like if you don't think we're all circling the wagons when we get home and talking about that stuff, that's exactly what we did.
R: We'd still prefer to be in this fall but at least this year we're on the close end of this soil. We were in so many years, in the far end, right? There's like one tiny bathroom in there.
CN: So for all Kurgan's listeners, Gen Con is so sprawling, it's like a 25 minute walk from one end of the con to the other, through like six halls, five escalators underneath, four city streets to like find the other end of the convention.
K: He's not joking, this is my first time here and I thought I'd seen everything and then you told me about "oh, you've got to go even further" and it's like if there's even more and more.
R: Yeah and this year you could truly say Gen Con is back, I mean last year was a pretty good year but even for a Thursday this place is back and packed like it had been before Covid.
CN: Yeah and we hang out the Avalon Hill booth is in whole day. There's a huge sprawling hall, it's like I don't know, a solid three football fields long and a lot of the tables are set aside specifically for gamers to just buy their treasures, sit down with their friends and family and just crack open the boxes and play and that's what you actually see around the Avalon Hill booth, is just people kind of going off buying their favorite treasures, sitting down and just breaking open that stuff and playing, and it's such a great experience.
R: Well, I do appreciate last year I remember I told you about Tom was putting a lot of his own money in the past in the tournament and I do remember that you came down, you gave them a nice set that if he wanted to that he could sell to kind of get the money to keep going on with it, but then I know this year between Renegade Games and maybe yourself as well, or maybe through them, that he's had a little bit of a budget to then even do more than what he's done.
CN: Yeah, so actually for the core, the Kurgan's crew, what Robert's referring to is I had an open Mythic that was still mint in box, that I brought over to Thomas who runs the Diplomacy games here at Gen Con, knowing that Robert had mentioned that Thomas was funding the tournament for years by himself, I actually offered up the mint condition Mythic Hero Quest as an opportunity for him to auction off, sell on eBay, do something to help finance the Diplomacy work that the team had been doing over there and it was one more way to kind of unite the tribes a little bit, get another Mythic out there and help Thomas out with everything that he's been doing.
K: That's a cool gesture.
R: Yeah, so I appreciate everything, great.
CN: Thank you Robert.
R: I wanted to stop by and say "hey and thank you" again, and I appreciate everything that you guys been doing with your partners, and I can't tell you Thomas is even more excited than he's normal even, like I can't tell you. I get updates on my phone all the time, like "oh, look at these keyrings... oh, look at these stickers... oh, look at this." He created a Lego board all by himself that puts it on so I just played on the Lego board today with Lego pieces.
CN: Yeah, so when you the crew gets back together down there this week it's you should throw high fives to each other because it's you who brought Diplomacy back. Awesome, great seeing you, thank you Robert, take care.
[Robert leaves the interview]
K: Oh, that was beautiful and that's what it's all about. Great, so moving forward, Lee of Covert Nerd says, well, he's asking the question you get a lot about well, "the other Mythic figures be released, so Mentor, Sir Ragnar..."
CN: Well, I've mentioned a few times at the con, people ask that question quite often, there are some figures in the Mythic that we specifically marked in the crowdfunding campaign as exclusive to the crowdfunding campaign, right? the Crypt of Perpetual Darkness Quest Pack, Sir Ragnar, the Witch Lord, there are some that we just in that instance, they will most likely not come back, right? there are other things in the Mythic that were not specifically marked as exclusive that have the potential to come back in some way, you know, and Intergalactic Patrick broke into my office and might have sent a video of a certain box that maybe he snuck a picture of in my office and maybe that's a hint of things to come.
K: So we'll just analyze that very carefully, well and I know there's the whole like collector versus mainstream fan debate, or whatever about all these things, but I think for me it's more like the concept of it like a Witch Lord figure, not necessarily that one.
CN: Again, the Guardian, that's a good example of it. We never wanted people who were able to get the Commander of the Guardian Knight to feel like their collectible lost value when Rise of the Dread Moon came out, so changing the sculpt, changing the art on the cards was a requirement to the process to make sure if someone held up a Commander of Guardian Knight they can still feel like they have this amazing collectible that is near and dear to them and has whatever value they apply to it, but that for fans who didn't get it, they can play the game the same way, same mechanic, same rules, it is a Guardian Knight. The scope's different, the artwork's different, but they can still play the game like anybody else.
K: As we know there're many Guardian Knights, so many possibilities, and I took that very literally. I was one of the lucky few who got that first Guardian Knight and I was trying to play The Frozen horror as written, I mean it had the remake hadn't come out yet and the Barbarian just kept getting killed, so it's like fine here's two Guardian Knights to help him out, let's see if he can do it and we had a great Quest and we played with three people who had never played Hero Quest before and we had a great time and a year later we're in Quest 10 now, so...
CN: Awesome, that's awesome news.
K: Lee asks also, and I feel like he kind of predicted some of the things that you guys would end up doing with the extra dice and the stand alone Hero releases, but his question I'm gonna kind of boil it down here, it's dealing with maybe the adjustments that are made, so I'm thinking of Rise of the Dread Moon, you gave us a Helmet that now says "it's made of metal" and we got the Handaxe that by the way "the Wizard can't use it", so is there ever going to be like a correction, like going back retroactively, and like fine tuning it in the Game System box, if I'm trying to make that make sense?
CN: Some kind of FAQ, kind of Errata, kind of thing?
K: Yeah, revised version 2.0.
CN: I guess it would come down to is that necessary for this level of fan community because, again Kurgan subscribers and fans of your material, we're talking about the hard course for the most part, right? is that really where the fans would want our attention to be, if I had to stop, if I walked on Monday and I said "okay, what are we doing for the next two months? do the fans want us to break down a hardcore FAQ, check the boxes a lot of everything we need to, or they want a new product? they want a new game? they want a new Hero Collection like?" that is a question. we have to ask ourselves every day where ultimately a pretty small team in the grand scheme of things of the Hasbro ecosystem, we have finite resources, where do the fans want our attention? do they want the new, or are those fans capable of being like "Oh I notice on this card they updated the terminology ever so slightly that I can probably waterfall that down to an earlier card to make sure this consistency in my game"? it's a rethorical question for the fans, but just sharing the insight as we prioritize the team, where do we want to put the effort? I would believe that the fans are like "yeah I got this, I know what it needs to be, I know what the right answer is, and even if I'm not sure I'm just gonna homebrew my zone stuff anyway".
K: Whether you meant to say it, or not, this is what works.
CN: Exactly. I want a new Quest Pack, I want a Ragnar miniature like, so I would believe that based on what I've heard, that's where they want our attention to be.
K: You don't object to all these fanarata, that's out there, saying like.
CN: Again, Hero Quest was originally designed and is still essentially structured on the idea of inserting yourself into the game and making it yours.
K: I like that, I think you use the term sandbox on the Discord...
CN: Yes, well, that's the whole logic of the IP and the game mechanic in general. If you're looking for a game that is so structured that every sidekick, every edge case is figured out, like the rules are so prescriptive that every little detail has been prescribed, and written out that the story is so tight and structured in a way that it's just easy mode, just blurting it out, this is not Hero Quest, right? there're plenty of other games here, they're right. Again I think people love Hero Quest because you do get to put your own stamp on it, you get to make it yours, so for us when fans are doing their own thing, that's why we kind of encourage it, right?
K: Yeah I really appreciate that. I really like for me that is what Hero Quest is all about and I know that like if you ask two Hero Quest fans about how the crossbow should work, you get two different answers, so I know there's a lot of people out there that think the way I use the crossbow is completely wrong, but I like the way I do it and when I play with somebody else, if they want to do it some other way, we just do it that way. I was kind of thinking back to your earlier comment about meetings and... you don't have to answer if you don't want to, but when I kind of jumped at Avalon Bill about the Courage (spell) rules was that a meeting was [Laughs] Okay this just fan took it too far, but I don't think I was the only one.
CN: I don't even remember how that played out. A lot of times I just... it's so funny to just almost troll Doug (Hopkins) on some of this stuff, like walk in the morning and be like "Doug, did you see what they said on Discord?" He's like "yeah, I saw all, right? I don't think I slept much last night, but my head's spinning, can we like not talk about this till lunch?", so unfortunately Doug's not here this week because he'd be another fun one to sit down with us.
K: I'd love to talk to him.
CN: But, you know, we take it all seriously.
K: Okay, so I mean I was gonna say we're very passionate sometimes, it doesn't always come out the way we intend it to, but I think he had a good answer because at the end it was just like "okay, well we can't agree, but you can do it however you want it's like, yeah", but I do think that there's two points here there's definitely a lot of people that want to, I guess for lack of a better term, honor the intention the what you guys wanted for the game, and there's also an acknowledgment, and Amalgamash says this all the time, and I'm right there with him about we can always fix it ourselves, but we still expect you guys to make your best effort and make the most playable game you can and I think you're doing that, you're not just like "oh, they can just fix it themselves let's just dash something off".
CN: Every time we do a reissue of, again, recognizing is it broken? is it fun? I like the first two questions that we ask ourselves and that leads into do you honor the original? do you? do we interpret this as potentially a flawed mechanic? is it a fun experience? those all just become like all these little scales of decision making, so if you almost picture it, I'm gonna date myself here like a graphic equalizer, I mean like amp the fun, fix the mechanic a little bit maybe it's not, we don't throw that out, but we tweak it. That tuning process is kind of the team getting together making those decisions and we always have the fans first in mind to that whole process. I unfortunately don't think we'll ever make everybody happy, but we'll do our absolute best to try to take all the comments, all the history, honor what everybody thinks they want that game to be, try to put it out the best thing we can, that means that there'll always be somebody that disagrees with us, so I'm just hoping that's a couple people and not a lot of people.
K: So, well I'm thinking of the role to move mechanic, I mean that's almost become an internet meme, it's like I gotta roll to move, what a dumb thing.
CN: And Keith's world to move, it's like a personal like trigger for him, that's why when we play test we had started to introduce the when there's not monsters present, you just move eight spaces. It just speeds up the play testing so much, that's why we snuck it into the rules as an alternate rule.
K: I gotta say though as much as at my table we try to do it, we always forget, so people end up rolling to move anyway, so it's so hard for us to break that nostalgic mechanic, but I think a lot of people are grateful that it's like you're almost giving them permission to say "yeah, this is a good way to play too".
CN: Yeah because a lot of times there are play testing will people will want to optimize before like opening a door for example, that can be very clumsy when you're doing roll the move, but if it's just a flat movement, the players just take a moment what's the order before we open the door, who's standing where,... it just cleans up the pace of the game very easily and get you right back into the fun.
K: That's why Zargon draws an event card on his turn when there's no monsters, right? Anyway... okay, very good, sorry conscious of your time here I'll try to go through these more quickly. Okay tile packs... we already talked about monster packs, furniture... well, I noticed you did have the new furniture in Mage of the Mirror and the new furniture at Rise of the Dread Moon, so these extras to speak... these bonus pieces that you're putting into the boxes.
CN: Well, that goes back to the conversation you asked about with some of the other ones about the incomplete nature of some of the Quest Packs. Mage didn't have quite the presence of Frozen Horror, right? we wanted to scale Mage to Frozen Horror and we...
K: Hardly review said the same thing like back in the 90s.
CN: So we had a few conversations and I was like look at this point, in the process for many players, they've kind of seen the same decorum for a while and the narrative is that where essentially on a different continent at this point, in a different land, in a different culture, yeah give them a visual cue to that narrative by giving them a new set of furniture and by doing that too for some of the Zargons who love just ramming the entire dungeon map full of Quests in their own homebrews. Now you have plenty of furniture to flesh out a very complex map and you got some variety, you can introduce some things here and there based on your own personal preferences, so we started that process, in Mage we had at that point already knew and we're already working on Rise, so based on what we did, we crossed it out essentially the first half of the furniture Mage, and we knew full well we were gonna finish the set through Rise, so by purchasing into both of them you came away with a new set of furniture.
K: We shouldn't discount the value of that because I was reading back and I think this again Amalgamash, I'm gonna name drop him, he did a video where it's like there were other tabletop introductory dungeon crawlers in a box games before Hero Quest, but one of the maybe unique features of Hero Quest was we finally had the 3D furniture to go with the 3D figures, the characters.
CN: Right before Mage we had released Frozen Horror, and in Frozen Horror there was a new character sheet pad and new dice, so you go through a lot of characters in that one, so for sure well part of it was "hey, if you're buying the system, then you just got a whole new set of character sheets and you just got new dice". A lot of people love their dice. We were talking about that earlier and at this point you've been resupplied with character sheets. Would we just put another set of dice and another character sheet at Mage? and I was like that feels kind of oerkill lame, like that's gonna get tired fast, and it's gonna be like "well, what am I going to do with these 8.000 character sheets", so that was part of the decision of like "let's mix it up, right? let's offer something different" and that led to this conversation around furniture.
K: And I suppose this must be a cost thing, why didn't you just go on Hasbro and say I just want a pad of character sheets and that's it.
CN: Well, again that turns into a whole nightmare around distribution and minimum quantities.
K: Big pallets of character sheets being shipped.
CN: Yeah, the order picking too like if we've talked a few times about, what are we capable of doing on something like Hasbro Pulse? could be all the cart certain things? and that becomes a whole logistical exercise for picking orders and distribution and boxing them. That's a lot of very technical problems that just still have to be figured out at some point.
K: All right. Well, several of these questions you've already answered. You can't say anything about Against the Ogre Horde, so that's no comment on that one, all right.
THE INTERVIEW CONTINUES IN NEXT POST.
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Links to many other relevant interviews about HeroQuest are compiled in thread.
