TSEUQUEST - Just analyzing it as a board game

[HispaZargon]

Hi everyone,

Spanish versions of TseuQuesT board game are finally a reality and are being delivered and available at shops in Spain. Hopefully it will be also available in other languages some time in the future (maybe at the end of this year, according to what is told in media, but not confirmed), so I have opened this thread to discuss about this new board game, rather based and inspired in our beloved classic HeroQuest.

TseuQuesT_Contents_LR.jpg

If you want to check what this game box contains, you can find the full list on this other thread.

Finally I would like to clarify that I never backed the crowdfunding campaign HeroQuest 25th Anniversary nor commented anything about it because I was not interested on this product at the time, but I am aware about all the controversy linked with this project and the development failures around it, however that is not the topic I would like to discuss here.

Fortunatelly, I already own a copy of this new dungeon crawler and I think it has cool things inside, even without having it checked too much nor played, and even being a board game conceptually designed 10 years ago, so please, let's just focus the discussion in the game rules, artworks, components, story, etc. I really think worth it for anyone interested in this game.

[HispaZargon]

Just to inform you that seems there are news about the English version of TseuQuesT game.

In the following video, this man from Australia declares that he is checking the English components for GameZone company, so it looks the English version of the game is incoming for anyone interested:

https://youtu.be/Nl9RXJl9v8s?si=_A37XoH7IV-z3XJJ

[HispaZargon]

Just to inform to all those interested in the TseuQuesT soap opera about some recent news around the worst topic of this game:

According to what is being said on social media in Spain, past week the trial in Spain against GameZone, the company that owns TseuQuesT, has ended (or at least seems to).

As far as I have been able to find out, the company and the Association of Affected People that sued GameZone have finally reached an agreement, so GameZone has not been convicted by the Spanish justice system since the crime of fraud has not been proven in any case.

GameZone has therefore committed to delivering the games that were pending delivery and thus fulfill its part. I imagine that at some point GameZone will issue an official statement in the coming weeks. As said, just to inform about what is being said in Spain these days about this topic.

Spanish newspaper El Diario de Sevilla has posted an article explaining many details here:

https://www.diariodesevilla.es/juzgado_ ... 92951.html

Edited: Just the day after this post was published an official update by GameZone in their website explaining that the games of the backers were being delivered:

https://tseuquest.com/la-rueda-gira-las ... -continuan

[Kurgan]

Pros: Inspired by the 1990 game (I guess I didn't bother to think whether it was more based on the North American or European rules... being based out of spain I would suspect the latter), but with many fan homebrew ideas incorporated. You can read the PDF of the rules in English online to get a sense of what's going on. Resin + metal gives a deluxe experience and presentation. It seems like you could more or less play this already with a modern HQ set, though there are a few weird new elements like "barrel dice" (more options). Cards have little dials to track numerical points which is neat.

Cons: They had to rename everything due to the legal agreements with Hasbro (having snapped up their IPs again; though to be fair you can pretty much tell what everything was originally supposed to be, like many of the commercial HQ spinoff mods out there created by fans).

Have to assemble a TON of miniatures. While the characters are in faction colors (red for heroes, white for undead, greenskins, etc), the furniture is plain white (meaning you're expected to paint it, at the very least you'd probably want to spray paint it some other colors like brown for wood and gray for stone, as was done in Avalon Hill's HeroQuest).

Isn't yet available outside of Spain. Despite promises, it has been more than a decade of waiting for release, and very poor communication between developer and the public.

Expensive. While the price on the crowd funded version (far too late to get one now) was 110 Euro, it was something like 300+ Euro for all of the various features. Buying the figures separately from GameZone is possible, but you wouldn't get any of the cardboard and it would be still very expensive, and require assembly and painting.

The art style isn't for everyone, but as some have pointed out, it was originally intended for a 2014 release, so it's now got a "retro" look which some find very appealing. The amount of work required to get it "table ready" is immense, but it seems designed as a "deluxe" experience for fans, and definitely aimed at adult hobbyist/collectors who happen to be hardcore fans rather than (as the original HQ was, and AH's First Light is) as an entry point for beginners to the world of fantasy tabletop adventure gaming.

I need to re-read through the PDF to see what kinds of ideas in there I like and might use in regular HeroQuest. That's another possible con... if you already have Hasbro's new HeroQuest, why would you buy this? If you disliked the name changes and old IP transformation, this is even more of that. If you disliked the unpainted furniture, you've got even more of that now. The spiral bound quest booklet is pretty fancy (even better than it being stitched with thread as in AH's version). The sheer amount of heroic character options is great. Even though it's just one thing, it feels like several expansions in one box. The epic scale of it reminds me of OrcQuest. Now that box is absurdly large and heavy, and probably terrible for unboxing/reboxing for play time. When you open it up (based on the unboxings we've seen so far) it's just a big pile of labeled baggies, so you're going to spend like an hour sorting everything out, and many more hours assembling and painting. Will those resin minis reinforced with metal be durable for multi-session table play with a mixed group (kids and adults)? Are the extra options (the two "edges" that are like critical success and critical fail, to put it in D&D terms; meaning 2 new outcomes for single rolls and multiple combinations when rolling 2 or more dice) on the barrel dice worth ditching the nostalgia shape for a new one?