HQ2021 Missed opportunities

[Bareheaded Warrior]

Having the boss monsters in the quest book adds an extra element of mystery to them - having them on cards makes them more visible to the players and takes away that mystery. Trap cards are good, but I think that the reminder cards of all kinds should be in addition to the rulebook rather than instead of it. I do wonder if the monster cards were originally a way of randomising the wandering monster.

I don't think you are supposed to show the heroes the monster cards, they are supposed to be kept behind the screen with the quest book

I did wrestle back and forth with various approaches when deciding on a "layout" for my own HeroQuest Gold, between how many booklets, what goes on cards as opposed to rule book or quest book, what in each booklet and so on and eventually arrived at the decision to put Trap and Monster data onto cards exclusively (i.e. not in the rulebook) for a couple of reasons:

1) Reduce duplication - having the same information in more than one place just means extra effort to keep changes aligned

2) Modularity - Create Your Own Quests - From the very beginning creating your own quests with a big part of the HQ experience for many, if you choose to include new monsters and new traps from expansions in addition to those from the Game System in your own games (and why wouldn't you) then it would be a lot easier to just grab the cards that are needed, Pit of Darkness from AtOH, a spell set from WoM, the Spirit Riders from ROTWL, Rolling Boulder from Indiana Jones, sorry, Kellar's Keep rather than have to shuffle through all the relevant quest books when you need to check something, much easier just to add the expansion cards to a single expanded deck

This is something I really consider a waste of paper, resources and space. I see some people having hundreds of cards for named monsters, cards that they will probably use once in a lifetime or even less.
Sometimes you place such monsters and all you have to do is rolling the defence dice a couple of times because they're dead before you can use them.
Also I don't want a card of a special monster if the image on the card doesn't match the mini neither I want different cards featuring the same monster image.

Fair point, perhaps a compromise, you could have a generic Orc Boss icon, card with matching icon and stats and a distinct figure and then in the Quest Book for Lair of the Orc Warlord you could just note that Orc Boss symbol on the map represents "Ulag the Orc Warlord" and uses the Orc Boss figure and card, in KK "Ograk the Orc Captain" could use the same figure, icon and card but just note that he rolls an extra DD (not sure why he does but never mind)

That said for The Witch Lord you already have a generic figure and he is worth having a dedicated card as you can never keep him down for long!

[LucaRocks]

I think the biggest missed opportunity was not giving us another board yet. Rise was the perfect opportunity to give us a "town" board I think.

[Nlinindoll]

Having the boss monsters in the quest book adds an extra element of mystery to them - having them on cards makes them more visible to the players and takes away that mystery. Trap cards are good, but I think that the reminder cards of all kinds should be in addition to the rulebook rather than instead of it. I do wonder if the monster cards were originally a way of randomising the wandering monster.

I don't think you are supposed to show the heroes the monster cards, they are supposed to be kept behind the screen with the quest book

Rules as written, page 7 of ‘21 edition: “ Spread out the eight monster cards and put them faceup near the gameboard so that the hero players can easily refer to them. Al the information on these cards can also be found in the monster chart on the Game Master's screen.” So they are intended to be a hero reference.

[Kurgan]

Yeah, plus in this edition Zargon already has all of the monster stuff on his GM screen, so he doesn't actually need the cards to hand (except in a few rare cases where he's supposed to draw one at random per quest notes in various expansions). They are for hero player reference, absolutely. Some GMs like to hide this stuff from the players and only reveal this except the first time you encounter each monster, but that's entirely homebrew.

[Bareheaded Warrior]

I wasn't aware that HQ2021 changed the Monster Reference Cards from being an EWP resource to a general player resource (potentially another unnecessary change...in an edition that defaulted to keeping things the same...), in which case I'm not sure whether that means that generic boss monsters cards for "Orc Warlord", "Orc Shaman", "Chaos Sorcerer" is a bad idea as it might ruin the surprise of the Boss's stats, or that sharing the Monster Cards is a bad idea as it might ruin the surprise especially when the Boss monster is a standard Gargoyle, like Verag for example!

[cornixt]

The monster cards being face up for all the hero players was in the old US rulebook. It was only the European rules that had them as EW usage.

[Bareheaded Warrior]

That makes sense as I am still and was originally a UK player... even though I did stray into the NA ruleset for a period.

One of the big missed opportunities for me (both in the sense that it was missed by AH but also by me in my original post) was to do something that could not have been done in the originals, due to technology constraints, but is now something of a standard, a living rulebook.

Back in day, the only practical way to provide "rule clarifications" (I use the term in inverted commas as many of the entries under that title are either not clear, are less clear than the original, or are changes and not clarifications to a rule that was already clear) was to include them in your next publication, generally an expansion, which is fine as that was the best you could do at the time. That said for me labelling something as a "rule clarification" in an expansion is a statement of intent that it is a clarification of an existing rule and is therefore intended to be applied across the board and is NOT quest/expansion specific but that could have been resolved though clearer text.

That is not the case in this day and age, and producing and maintaining a living rulebook would, for me, definitely be a better approach and reduce confusion by keeping the actual, latest rules in an online living rulebook and quest related stuff in the quest book (and would improve the quality of the rules and drive people to their website, which cannot be considered anything but a plus all round).

[carthoz]

Iconography
A standard feature of all "modern" board games (for inspiration see Mice and Mystics - 2012) is the use of visual icons to simplify play, adding even some basic iconography would have made a massive difference, for example:

For me, the missing iconography is clearly the part I totally don't get. They even didn't come up with icons for the different sets to tell your cards apart. This is the corporate mother of MAGIC THE GATHERING! There is literally icons for EVERYTHING on those cards! Now I even more than ever before need a list to tell which cards aren't used for a vanilla base game session. Or base game with just one expansion. Why?!

[Kurgan]

Looking at the copyright year helps but I get what you're saying.

[cornixt]

I don't think there is really a need for it in a coop board game. It's not like any of the cards will expire for future competitive play events, you just buy the expansion and add it in. I don't think anyone really thought about removing cards from the game in the future, but in that case you'd also be removing models, tiles, and furniture too, so you'd need a list anyway.