Rank the [x]HQ Covers!

A little something fun to talk about.

There's five big box releases in the GW Heroquest lineage now. How do you rank their covers?

Heroquest (1989)


Advanced Heroquest (1989)


Warhammer Quest (1995)


WHQ: Silver Tower (2016)


WHQ: Shadows Over Hammerhal (2017)

1. HeroQuest
2. Warhammer Quest. It is a close second, but the artwork does not have the charm of the WHFRP 2nd ed book.
3. Advance HeroQuest

The others have the AoS style that I dislike. I don't want Space Marines in my WHQ.

I don't really like any of them other than the original.

But I will say that advanced heroquest is the worst. The proportions on that barbarian are on ludicrous speed.

The original is by far the best. But to be complete....
1 - the original, still great
5 - surprisingly likable
4 - not bad and clearly channeling the original
3 - I just don't like this guy's look
2 - this is horrid

The more Dino de-Laurentis the better. I pretty much rank them in chronological order.

You need to keep a certain amount of absurdity in your gaming. Taking it seriously isn't good for you.

these are all terrible.

Nothing even comes close to the way the cover of STEEL DRIVER gets my heart pacing and makes me hold my bible a little tighter. This guy is ALL MAN

I like the softly glowing golden armor of the Age of Sigmar, but all of these covers are too busy with details.

My preferences:
1. Silver Tower, for the rich colors and those ominous eyes in the background.
2. Hammerhal, for more rich colors and a sense of heat to the overall picture. I like that strange blue lantern in the foreground.
3. Heroguest, which is fairly generic except the Conan wannabe really stands out.
4. I don't really like the cover of Warhammer Quest, with the daft-looking elf, the Gandalf ripoff, and the odd white glow to everything, but it is better than...
5. Advanced Heroquest has an ugly cover. The barbarian looks really stupid. The dwarf is so short that I am guessing that he is a dwarf dwarf, or else a foot stool. And the overall color palette seems to be inspired by shit.

It must have been GWs "brown" era. XD

Also, the elf on the original warhammer quest seems to be suffering from some congenital birth defect, or is just really constipated.

I think I'm leaning...

1) Heroquest - You can feel the Basil Poledouris 'Anvil of Crom' drums pounding in the deep chambers. This may be the best Sword and Sorcery (despite the elf and dwarf) cover in gaming.

2) Silver Tower - A very close second. I too like the colors and feel that as a solitary figure a Stormcast Eternal can make for an intriguing and heroic character. An army of them I'm less plussed on, but this single guy armoured up and attempting to keep the twisted, perverse denizens of the Silver Tower at bay strikes a positive chord with me.

3) Advanced Heroquest - Probably because this is the title I've played the most. Yeah, it's sort of goofy, but the greenskins have that playful, yet lethal vibe that seems to be lost in current GW.

4) Hammerhal - This begins the covers I actively don't care for. For some reason, this seems more muddled to me than Silver Tower even though there's a lot of similarities despite the color palette switch. I guess I feel this Stormcast doesn't inspire me as much, nor can I tell who the other heroes are. Particularly, in the upper left. As a read nerd, I know that Fleetmaster is suppose to be the hero in this instance, but he looks about as evil as the khorne and tzeentch guys around him. Plus, the varied enemies doesn't give this scene the sense of localized setting as much as the HeroQuest or Silver Tower covers do.

5) WarhammerQuest - I never liked this one.

I must have gazed at that HQ cover for hours as a kid - one thing that I kept coming back to was that the wizard is the one stuck fighting the most enemies, including the chaos sorceror and a warrior - so he's pretty much fucked unless the elf comes to his help - why is he backing the dwarf against a lone greenskin anyways? He's about to be flanked by a mummy. That white-haired elf always raised a bunch of questions too.

A fun idea.

#5 AHQ - I always hated this cover. The orc looks more like it's doing a dad dance than attacking: that sword and shield look almost incidental compared to him getting his big ol' green ass down to the beat. And the Barbarian looks constipated. What's going on in the background is too much of a mess to decipher. The style doesn't so much look "fantastic" as "vastly unrealistic".

#4 WHQ - Lack of action. The barbarian in this one looks like a prog rock fan who's taken far too many drugs and started collecting fake replica axes from his favourite album covers. "Careful with that axe, Eugene".

#3 Silver Tower - I like this cover well enough. There's just something about it which looks subtly wrong. It lacks motion and feels more like a photoshoot than a moment of action. And the colour balance is slightly off, with the brass in the middle attracting the eye a little too much.

#2 HQ - Okay, so it's an iconic cover. And I'm not sure I can think of a box cover in all of gaming that captures the sense of motion better. There's lots of lovely detail to feast your eye on. But I can't have it #1 simply because I've never liked the loincloth look on barbarians. I mean, really, it's just stupid. When you've plundered the hoards of dragons and the crowns of kings enough to buy a hundred suits of magic armour, who still goes to war in their underpants?

#1 Shadows over Hammerhal - I admit I haven't seen this cover before, because I'm not interest in picking up any more of this line. But I genuinely love the cover. The red-brown background offsets the brass on the main figure nicely rather than jarring the eye. And I like the fact it's meant to be static rather than mid-combat: the craning neck and outstretched lantern hint at exploration of the dark unknown, of the peril that's just been unwittingly uncovered. And the there's enough detail in the background to make you want to look further without overloading the senses.

Here endeth fantasy art 101.