Flashback Friday - Heroscape - Love it or Hate it? Do You Still Play It?

HEROSCAPE IS DEAD.
LONG LIVE HEROSCAPE.

While I don't get to play very often anymore, I horde my collection and hope to create a hex casket to lie in before my wife sets it ablaze.

I was never far removed from gaming in my entire life, though I certainly took a pause during graduate school. The only gaming I had during those lean years was, wait for it... Star Wars Epic Duels.

Once Heroscape hit the market, and I had found steady employment, I was quick to purchase a copy. With the first wave? I was quick to catch the completionist bug. Much of my attraction to the system was; a) it was already painted to decent/fair table top gaming standards and b) had no blind purchases.

Once I entered the tournament scene and faced stiff competition, I realized the "need" to expand my collection even more. I bought multiples. Of everything. No regrets.

Informal play, tournament play, 1 vs 1, multi-player. Against friends, enemies, frenemies, gamers, non-gamers, children, grognards, lovers... God Damn. I love it all.

I've had less praise for the game's final efforts, it's distribution headache, or it's failed efforts with Marvel (I really wanted to see that 2nd wave hit the market), but warts and all - Heroscape is great. A great gateway game for war-gaming, but also a great game in general.

And I still don't know what to make of the MtG re-implentation.

And while I'm at it, I'm here on the new F:AT because of Heroscape. I met Pete through his adoration of Heroscape, and that brought me to this site.

I've bought and sold my huge collection thrice. Have been considering selling it again, since I have not touched a single tile in a year.

I like the game a lot. I find the hero aspect of it more compelling than unit gathering. So, superheroscape is a fine ideal that was never realized enough in an official capacity.

I really really liked arena of the Planeswalkers. That was the pinnacle of the design for me, since it fixed a few things I had niggling uncertainty about regarding the game, and the added card play was smart and well implemented. As a former very heavy magic player, the magic theme helped a lot. Throwing that onto a game I already enjoyed was Christmas in July.

Speaking of theme, I too, didn't enjoy the disparate Hodge podge of stuff thrown around. I'd rather deal with a more concentrated theme. Yet, once it reached it's end, you could build your own fairly solid theme if you didn't want cowboys versus bone aliens. But samurai versus dinosaurs was still fun too once I pulled the stick out of my butt.

I don't know why I don't play any of the three iterations more. I enjoy them a lot, and glean bone fide fun from the experience from setting up the board to tearing it all down again.

But for some reason, I just can't seem to get it played. *Heavy sigh*

I definitely always bite off more than I can chew with terrain. I found the ideal sweet spot for a collector that plays a lot, but not for so fine who only wants to play casually.

I have the obligatory plastic tub of Heroscape.

Much like the rest of my approach to this hobby, my interest & exploration has been backwards, starting with Summoner Wars and becoming intrigued by its ancestor, curious as to what "angel's share" might have been lost in Colby's distillation of the system into a card game on a grid.

I acquired most of my set during a math-trade-fueled purge a few years ago, a final hurrah where I unsubscribed from all Youtube tastemakers and unloaded shelves of light/middle weight Euro toads into the secondary market. To me, cashing in a bunch of bland, toothless Kickstarter designs for this giant container of plastic and conflict felt like a coup.

Unfortunately, I picked this up when my teenager was on the cusp of... teenager-ing & developing inscrutable personality quirks that, ironically, steered him more toward spreadsheet games and MOBAs. Fortunately, I'm also honorary "cool Uncle" to an honorary family member who loves games with minis, loves Legos, and started his board game fascination with Summoner Wars, a gift from yours truly when he was probably around 8 years old. We've had a lot of fun with Heroscape and I'm fairly certain this kid will inherit the game soon, sometime before the magic of terrain construction & toy battles melts away under the weight & ubiquity of video gaming.

Heroscape is my favorite game. All the depth of a wargame with none of the rules-creep masquerading as depth but is actually just complexity. I always have a map setup and while my daughter and I don't play it as much as we used to, we still play quite a bit. I am also involved in the C3V and C3G, two customs groups currently active still making custom figures for Heroscape. (C3V does customs that fit in with the official figures. C3G does superhero customs.)

Love this game and agree that should a Kickstarter ever be launched, it will be record-setting. But, like almost everyone else here, my giant collection of terrain and figures (I pretty much have everything except some of the later D&D branded expansions. Got the first Planeswalkers game, but never played it. Life, kids growing up, moving houses, yadda yadda. But of all the games I own, this one still has some of the most epic, hilarious, FUN gaming sessions I've ever had. The gameplay is simple enough that there can be occasions where a sole remaining grut can topple Deathwalker-9000 and become legendary and still spoken of in hushed tones.

Heroscape is a game that probably needs to be left at a game cafe or game store with a good game library. It just needs to be available for people to see it and hold it and build stuff with it, even if they don't know how to play. It's so easy to learn that you could start playing a game five minutes after starting.

Along these lines, one idea I have had is to just set up a table with a medium-sized board, and just let it be a perpetual battle, almost kind of like how Small World has constant decline and emergence of new races. Do the same with Heroscape and just let anyone grab a squad or two and start playing in the middle of any ongoing game. When your squad goes out, grab another and emerge from the sidelines. Let someone also dynamically alter or add to the terrain as well as the game progresses. Turn that grass into snow. The lake freezes over. The mountain turns to a volcano.

And yes to anyone who wants to write some fun retrospective articles on the game, but I'd actually be more interested in speculative suggestions about rebooting or re-invigorating the game into today's modern board game environment. Not so much rules updating, but just what it would take to get this game back into conversation and people wanting to play it. Probably not, but would Heroscape be a good Twitch boardgame? Is there a way to make it so? Etc.

I see today that they are rebooting Star Wars Epic Duels (it's how I discovered this website) so I wonder if UnMatched will steal all the Heroscape oxygen that might have been created. But maybe it'll be the fuel that re-ignites interest in Heroscape.

Dark Piranha wrote: Love this game and agree that should a Kickstarter ever be launched, it will be record-setting. But, like almost everyone else here, my giant collection of terrain and figures (I pretty much have everything except some of the later D&D branded expansions. Got the first Planeswalkers game, but never played it. Life, kids growing up, moving houses, yadda yadda. But of all the games I own, this one still has some of the most epic, hilarious, FUN gaming sessions I've ever had. The gameplay is simple enough that there can be occasions where a sole remaining grut can topple Deathwalker-9000 and become legendary and still spoken of in hushed tones.

Heroscape is a game that probably needs to be left at a game cafe or game store with a good game library. It just needs to be available for people to see it and hold it and build stuff with it, even if they don't know how to play. It's so easy to learn that you could start playing a game five minutes after starting.

Along these lines, one idea I have had is to just set up a table with a medium-sized board, and just let it be a perpetual battle, almost kind of like how Small World has constant decline and emergence of new races. Do the same with Heroscape and just let anyone grab a squad or two and start playing in the middle of any ongoing game. When your squad goes out, grab another and emerge from the sidelines. Let someone also dynamically alter or add to the terrain as well as the game progresses. Turn that grass into snow. The lake freezes over. The mountain turns to a volcano.

And yes to anyone who wants to write some fun retrospective articles on the game, but I'd actually be more interested in speculative suggestions about rebooting or re-invigorating the game into today's modern board game environment. Not so much rules updating, but just what it would take to get this game back into conversation and people wanting to play it. Probably not, but would Heroscape be a good Twitch boardgame? Is there a way to make it so? Etc.

I see today that they are rebooting Star Wars Epic Duels (it's how I discovered this website) so I wonder if UnMatched will steal all the Heroscape oxygen that might have been created. But maybe it'll be the fuel that re-ignites interest in Heroscape.

Welcome aboard sir!

I think Heroscape is still as relevant as just about any other game its age. The cognoscenti aren't playing it often, but it has a loyal following, an organized play scene and new content coming out of homebrew channels. It may have the best legs in the business in the long run, still getting attention in 2035 just because of its accessibility and the huge amount of copies in the wild.

That said I'd love to see a reboot too, and I think a more careful attention to the line could make it more successful. Hasbro doesn't license much, but they might choose to give it another run in-house. Time will tell.

Nice opening post. Looking forward to hearing more from you.

Just randomly chanced upon this Kickstarter project tonight. It's not Heroscape-related, but it looks like they are definitely basing their interlocking template on the Heroscape pattern. And even though these are flat, non-hard plastic pieces they are still ridiculously expensive, so I don't even want to imagine what an actual attempt at making HS tiles would cost. But minis wargame Kickstarter backers apparently are undaunted by ridiculous price tags, so maybe it would fly...

www.kickstarter.com/projects/1890786242/...in-tiles/description