Ye Olde Inn

Greetings, I am totally new here. I played AHQ as a teen and loved it, I also have Heroquest coming to me (in the mail now!) soon. From what I can gather from these forums it looks like people very much prefer the game-system from HQ over AHQ. Is this correct? Is it strictly a complexity issue?

I myself don't know but WELCOME & BIENVENIDOS! Beware of the dangers in this forum. It's like a black hole and will suck you in. That's what it did to me at least.

Hi, and welcome to the forum

I haven't played AHQ, but what I've heard , HQ is way better

I haven't tried AHQ. I guess it's the awesomeness of HQ that makes me think there cannot be a better game, so why waste my time?
Besides, it's a design thing. AHQ tiles and cards and thingies look awful to me and these eyes of mine.

I have both games, but I havent learned the AHQ rules yet. I believe the simple rules from HQ is what makes it more popular. The extra minis and tiles where why I bought ahq, but I might try the game as it was meant someday.

Interesting... well as I get older and wiser, I am also getting stupider and lazier hah... a simple ruleset does sound very appealing, though I LOVED AHQ as a teen. I'm thinking it might also be easier to get my gaming group (mostly 40k and Infinity players) to try HQ if it is that much easier to pick up.

I think there are several reasons HQ is more popular than AHQ.

* Simple ruleset in HQ

* More minis in HQ - AHQ suffers a little too much under Greed Workshop philosophy of "Buy moar minis!"

* But mostly I think HQ was simply more widespread during it's initial release. It was marketed as a board-game, not a miniature game which meant families bought it, not just "nerds".
I can't remember ever even seeing AHQ in toy stores here in Denmark. No one I knew had AHQ.
So while HQ may objectively be the better game, I think most prefer HQ simply because they haven't really tried AHQ.

* Also... This IS a dedicated Hero Quest forum after all, with AHQ as a sub forum under "other games". No surprise most people who frequent this page prefer HQ

AHQ was just less of a game, in total. You got one type of enemy miniature, and then a sheet of oval "bosses" that were simply lame. The actual rules were very cumbersome compared to those of HQ. The game was also much less common, especially in the US.

I think the main difference between HQ and AHQ are not the rules. It is their quests. In HQ you have a bunch of interesting quests to play, and a lot more with the expansions. They are so many that if you play all of them, you have learned so many things that easily you can create your own. In AHQ the quests that comes with the box are terrible. I believe they’ve made them so simple because they want to encourage the players to create their own, or to show that it is very easy to have fun even with simple quests. Of course the problem is that no one teaches you how to create interesting quests.

Other things that does not add anything to fun, is the initiative, the sentries, the doors that can be opened from monsters, the traps which are tokens that GM can use at will and not placed on the board like HQ for a reason, the death zones (the only thing I like and HQ does not have is the critical hits and the fumbles). I can’t understand why they’ve put all these. The combat isn’t more interesting than HQ’s. Even the tiles have no meaning… Who said that in HQ you can’t create very different dungeons by adding blocks or putting extra tiles on the board?

Of course a very experienced GM can create excellent quests in AHQ, like HQ’s. And the rules are not a problem, they just slowing you some seconds... It’s better than WHQ, so for me is the second best boardgame ever.

By the other hand, HQ has narrow rooms and one-square-width corridor for more tactical battles. With narrow rooms even the furniture adds to the tactics of the battles. Another plus is that you can create quests so easily that you spend more time to create the story and less to put the rooms and the monsters. But the most of all is that its system is so well balanced that it’s very hard to bend. Also, with so many monsters you can create your own by saying “it should be strong like orc and not like chaos warrior, so it should have Attack 3”.

I could talk for hours for the goods of HQ but you’ll find soon. Welcome

Hah wow great answers. You know I do remember creating my own missions for AHQ but that was 20+ years ago. We would stay after school and play in a classroom. I also had collected most of the metal Skaven figures from Citadel back then... sadly I traded ALL of it for some Space Marines a few years later. Now I've got my hands on a partial complete AHQ box and I have a fully complete HQ on the way - I am very excited!

Any thoughts on the best approach for getting a new group started on one, either, or both of these games?