Heroquest remake by Hasbro - The BIG discussion thread

[Davane]

Has anyone told Zargon that they've spelt FUTILE wrong? - with love, Morcar! xoxox

[cynthialee]

I will die on a blade rather than serve Zargon!
death to the forces of Chaos and Dread

[Thantos]

In my mind this is how I pictured it... the project was already done, everything was finished and finalized and everybody had moved on to other things, and they were just going to release a stream of info piecemeal as the fundraiser wound down to keep us entertained, maybe implying new things would be created if we kept pledging. That was what I was thinking more or less at the time. Even though they claimed "production" would begin last November when the thing ended. But "production" to me meant they are running the assembly lines... the liquid plastic is being poured into the molds... the cards are popping out of the printer and being cut, shrink wrapped and shoved into boxes... the tile sheets are being shoved in there... the boards are being printed and glued together... they're stapling and folding the instruction booklets... they're checking the dice to make sure all the faces are printed properly and tossing them into baggies... the assembled boxes are being shrink wrapped... they're slapping the shipping labels on there... the forklifts are stacking up the crates of boxes into the trucks...

As opposed to "let's finally start figuring out how to put this 100% digital stuff into the material world..." Are they in the prototyping stage or what?

Just weighing in on this with the miniatures design.
I have been running a miniatures company for 10 years now. We produce mainly for other companies, designing, 3D printing and mass casting their miniature ranges. I do consultation for miniatures companies on how to make their sculpts possible to produce in resin, metal or plastic. With the aim of avoiding production problems, reducing the amount of revisions a sculpt needs and basically saving companies having their pants taken down by Chinese manufacturers when it turns out actually their sculpts need 6 rounds of costly and time consuming revisions in order to be produced.

I haven't weighed in on the new HQ as I dont want to be a killjoy or anything for the folks excited for it. But with each new sculpt they release, im just getting more and more frustrated that these sculptors who Hasbro has rounded up, clearly dont know how to design good and PRODUCIBLE miniatures.

Many of the digital sculpts they showed on their kickstarter are not suitable for mass production. I expect to see some changes to the designs and some serious changes to the design in the case of some of them *orcs cough orcs*.

I didn't see it written what material the miniatures will be. But if they are expecting to go HIPS injection like the original HQ. There will be a LOT more design changes. As it stands, the designs would be far more possible to produce in PVC - the soft plastic which toy dinosaurs are made from. Im going to presume HIPS hard plastic, going forward with this post. But really i am a bit pessimistic and I think once hasbro realize these sculpts are far, far from HIPS suitable - they will go the PVC soft plastic route.

Having worked producing models from well over 200 miniatures sculptors over the last 10 years - I have not heard of any of these sculptors before and i do not know where they found them.
OK now i started writing and im getting keyboard-warrior carried away, so im going to review each of the miniature renders they posted and how they should be changed for effective HIPS injection production and to make a better mini on the tabletop.

Pretty much every model has serious undercuts which will need to be backfilled. This wont change the pose or design of the model much, but it will cause those areas to lose detail as they are filled with plastic.
Im presuming the models will be split into multiple parts. Half of them will need to be split into parts, some like the goblins will need to be 3-4 parts each model. Unless they redesign them a fair bit.
Have some scribbles.




I would review more, but I am falling into the pit od despair too deep. Sort it out, hasbro.

[Kurgan]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

But they've demonstrated multiple times (in promo videos) that they will be using a soft, flexible (rubbery) plastic, NOT the stiff "model kit" type plastic used by the original HQ miniatures (common to plastic board game miniatures in general in the late 80's). I'm no chemist and don't know the fancy terms for everything, but TO MY UNTRAINED EYE as a dude who buys plastic miniatures on occasion, that it looks like the (mostly chinese) produced plastic polymer that is used in Reaper Bones miniatures (not the "black" line which is stiffer plastic, like "toy dinosaurs" or "army men" you buy at the supermarket to keep the kids quiet or in the local dollar store toy aisle). Not the super bendy rubber used in the "fantasy creatures" tubes sold on amazon which don't take paint well and snap back into their crushed poses even after dunked in boiling water (Reaper recommends you do this process with their minis for swords and other bits that stick out and it works great, no primer required after cleaning out of the package).

The original HQ miniatures were stiff. If you tried to "bend" the weapon, it would create a white "stress mark" on the plastic and pretty much stay in position (meaning you would need to use pressure to bend it back, possibly weakening and breaking it off in the process). These things bounce right back when you bend them with light pressure. Resin, (the popular kind used in 3d printed minis you can order online from indy sellers) in my experience doesn't bend... it just snaps clean off like a piece of glass.

I'm presuming the prototypes they're showing differ from the finished product only in the color of the plastic. Granted, the prototype dice are the wrong shape (they've shown us both resin 3d printed dice that are identical to the finished product based on the cgi trailer AND actual inscribed dice that are done on sharp cornered generic d6's next to regular generic red dice with white pips).

I presumed they weren't going back and forth on what materials to use, but just shoving out what was the quickest, but then I'm only guessing like everybody else since they haven't released much detailed info since last year.

And I don't know anything about mass production or shipping to multiple continents. I've never worked in a toy factory nor do I know anyone who does, but to me, if you gave me the STL files for the miniatures (granted, we're talking 3d printing and a few coats of spray paint vs. injection molding) they were using for these models, and the pdf, jpeg or png images of the tiles and cards, I could create an order within 24 hours, send it to BGM and have an individual set sent to me complete in less than a month (two weeks, tops, from time of order paid to delivery at my doorstep). That's just one set though. I'm sure there are challenges with mass production but I think that's what's throwing a lot of people off.

I know many of the Reaper bones miniatures are multi-part and either come unassembled (forcing you the buyer to glue them together) or come pre-glued (looks like with ordinary super glue).

Perhaps a better comparison would not be to the original Hero Quest sets and more to the various "Kickstart" bundles that Reaper releases? Without knowing for sure, I'd say they look almost like the same exact kind of thing. I don't picture them priming these things, because they're going to be in the regular colors (unless they plan to prime them in the red, green, brown, gray and yellowish white they promised we'd see!). How long do these things take to go from "funds raised" to "shipped to customers"?

Yes, we're also talking about cards, a board, tiles, character sheet pads, boxes, etc. but again, all of those things don't take that long to produce once they are designed. I'm guessing Avalon Hill/Hasbro already has the infrastructure to create these items. Are they building the factories and hiring the workers needed as we speak to create them? Hopefully they already had this stuff on hand, and the only thing slowing it down would be covid concerns which are dropping away each month as we speak with more adults being vaccinated.

Were the 3d designs the only things that existed? The card game and various other hints, imply that the designs (the image files, both models and 2d images) were already done. So all they'd have to do is "send them to the printers" unless they were doing last minute revisions... or it wasn't even created yet at the time.

The Quest books are just text and some symbols. Surely they have something at least as primitive as heroscribe to create a map. Testing takes a couple of days if you're playing them in real time with a group (no computer simulation). Again, apart from staffing issues, what's the hold-up? I wish I knew. We'll see if they make the deadline.

[cynthialee]

just a quik FYI on Reaper (Rubber) Bones

When you use the boiling water trick to get them closer to true, follow up with cold as you can get water
as soon as the mini is hot, hold it into position and run it under the cold water or dunk into a bowl of ice water
Continue to hold in position for about 30 seconds

Adding in the cold water flash cool helps to cement the mini in the right position.

[Kurgan]

Yes! And don't use spray primers, unless you want a gummy surface that takes forever to dry.

[iKarith]

I will die on a blade rather than serve Zargon!

Your terms are … acceptable.

[Shadzar]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frBD_z16TLI

This week the D&D YT channel is showing the same signs of "let's advertise as roleplaying" nonsense, as the changes to HeroQuest Twitter, dated the same June 7th as well, which can only prove that Wizards of the Coat is in fact the ones in charge of HeroQuest again and Avalon Hill as "Wizards Gaming and Digital" one of the 3 subdivisions of HASBRO.

Similar bad jokes about modern things from fictional characters that wouldn't know about them, etc. Possibly not the same lame girl doing it, but still the same department at WotC.


taking bets on if HQ orcs will be "evil" or not, or just misunderstood. But WotC logo will surely appear on the box and materials if/when product finally arrives.

[Shadzar]

I would review more, but I am falling into the pit od despair too deep. Sort it out, hasbro.

oh yes the minis will have to be multipart on sprues unless they are made by WizKids.

[Kurgan]

Uncle Zargon Wants You!