HeroQuest with kids

[Kurgan]

Interesting! I assumed it was a homebrew. Back in the day we never needed licenses, we had our imagination, but that's cool.

[iKarith]

Obviously the solution for the little ones is HeroicaQuest!



I'm tempted to pull out my Heroica sets (I have most of them, and doubles of one or two) and pick up a couple baseplates (baseplates are expensive) and see what all I need to maybe rescue Sir Ragnar or something.

I want this. Where can I get it? Or a similar set with normal Lego minis?

I'm very sad to report that Lego Heroica sets and most of the Lego games are quite out of print now. MANY but not all of the sets are not too difficult to get on eBay in the United States at least for a fair price (actually not far off what they retailed for.) But Lego isn't making them anymore and they're going to start to get harder and harder to find with time.

The gameboard pieces are standard 2x2 one-stud, and very few of the parts are at alll specialized.

Except instead of normal dice, it has this rubber monster with six 2x2 stud sides and 2x2 flat plates with decals on it that provide for movement and simpllistic HQ-style combat. Just play with regular dice in my opinion, and it uses Lego microfigs instead of more traditional minifigs. BrickOwl has these (search for Heroica) from places all over everywhere. Mostly you're playing with a few heroes against a slightly different set of monsters (mostly goblins: warrior, guardian, general, king, but also a thief, a werewolf, zombies, etc.)

As I said, most of the sets are available on eBay and decently priced, but to make anything like HQ you're just going to need to buy a lot of 2x2 single stud plates and other lego bits, and a bunch of baseplates, even if you had all the sets. They just don't have anything nearly the size of a HQ board. And even with all sets combined, you'd be well short of HQ's 35 minis.

It wouldn't be too much more difficult to build a board for normal minifigs. Only, the ones you'd want to make HQ out of legos tend toward the more expensive. Like as in Reaper would be a better deal. But then, Reaper are made of bendy plastic, not lego.

[cornixt]

I think Lego are missing a huge amount of money that they would make if they sold dungeon crawl minifigs and sets. Lego is hugely popular among people who just like displaying it, you don't need to make it a game. People will buy it instead of buying miniatures just so that they can pose their characters and switch the equipment around. It put easy character customisation in reach of the gamer who doesn't want to paint.

[iKarith]

I think Lego are missing a huge amount of money that they would make if they sold dungeon crawl minifigs and sets. Lego is hugely popular among people who just like displaying it, you don't need to make it a game. People will buy it instead of buying miniatures just so that they can pose their characters and switch the equipment around. It put easy character customisation in reach of the gamer who doesn't want to paint.

Especially since they already have the Castle series and make minifigs of things that don't have sets … Start with a few basic class minifigs and expand the weapons choice a bit.

For HQ minis, we have skeletons, mummies, lots of zombies but I don't think one that fits a medieval sort of theme directly. Wouldn't be hard to get there. There's a gargoyle, evil knights, a skeleton knight which can be quickly turned into a necromancer… There's goblins, a couple options for orcs from castles and LotR if you don't mind the LotR movie look… There's a DC Killer Croc and Marvel Lizard minis that could be adapted to fill in for fimir… There's a lego barbarian. Lego's elves are either Christmas, a couple of rare/expensive LotR movie style options, and there might be a non-custom Link somewhere in Lego's lineup, but most of the ones I find are customs people made. Wizards in Lego tend to be Gandalf, Dumbledore, or Merlin types with pointy hats … but someone with the right color bits and a cape and staff might look rather like the HQ wizard. And there are LotR-ish dwarves, mostly with red beards and wearing brown.

Some of these are uncommon and expensive, but Lego basically makes everything we'd need in HQ as standard minifig-scale figures. You'd get a set of minis from reaper for less, though.

[Kurgan]

Yeah, and that's what we did back in the day before all the licensing. We didn't have star wars, trek, battlestar galactica, etc, we used space. We didn't have lotr or king arthur, we used castle. We didn't have peter pan (pirates of the caribbean was just an amusement park ride), we used pirate. Super heroes fighting in the Town (or in space!). Robinhood in the Forest, etc. Transformers or Gobots? That's easy enough with regular bricks (no mini-figs needed except for pilots and civilians). Mix and match, no franchise restrictions. Harry Potter didn't exist, but one of the first (if not the first) lego set I ever had was of a classroom and students (back when the figures had segmented octopus like limbs, as opposed to the mini-figures that caught on in the 80's). My younger siblings had duplo (legos too big for toddlers to swallow) which included a giant version of the "mini-figure" (his legs were one solid piece). The parts were semi-compatible.

As time goes on you pay more to have less to actually do with the sets, but I get it and why it continues. I've seen some Hero Quest lego sets put out there before. Would Hasbro actually license one (and make it so that more people had the lego set than the actual game)? Time will tell. If not there's always Tycho superblocks or a million knockoffs since the patents expired for the original bricks. I mean, they've always existed (we had some back in the day) but until fairly recently it was hard to find any that were actually compatible.

[Daedalus]

I believe mention of the Lego Ideas HeroQuest topic belongs in this thread at this point. (Love the Les Edwards homage in the Lego HQ update.)

[iKarith]

And since one can get the microfigs … it really is a question of can we arrange easy enough customization to make them into HQ microfigs? To make it not prohibitively expensive, I think we'd need microfig decals, a suggestion for cleanly applying them, and ideally to get Lego to sell us microfigs in a variety of colors without decoration. Heck, if we wanted to we could even make HQ dice using the lego game dice … but those are big and clunky so I'd sooner use standard D6 out of a Yahtzee or Farkle game if I had to, obviously along with a couple red d6 of course.