I recently had the good fortune to pick up a complete copy of HeroQuest for a measly $5.00 at my local thrift shop. That's right: 100% complete with every single card, miniature, door, dice, and piece of furniture in nearly pristine condition. Having heard of the game before (and considering buying it on eBay more than once), I was touched by what an amazing stroke of luck that was. Just to help pay my dues, I'll put the word out here: be sure to support your local thrift and charity shops, and often too. You never know quite what you're going to run into and you're probably getting good deals with the proceeds going towards a humanitarian cause.
Having gotten that out of the way, here's my story-- last weekend (about a week after buying the game), I got a group of friends together and we played through the first two quests. Based upon what I had read here in my research, I made the following modifications to the game to balance and smooth things over a bit: we used "The Maze" instead of "The Trial", each room may only be searched a total of once instead of once for each hero, and finally monsters defend with white shields instead of black shields. Overall, my group thought the game was a blast and they can't wait for more!
Unfortunately, we can't play for another two weeks due to some scheduling conflicts, but I've decided to use the gap to my advantage-- I'm going to attempt to power through all of the miniatures (heroes and monsters) needed for the quests 3 and 4 so that we will be able to play them with a fully painted compliment of miniatures! From there on, I'm going to attempt to always stay ahead of my group by painting whatever is needed for their next quest! It's a bit of an ambitious project, but at least it will force me to paint a bit each week.
Here's the results of my first painting session:
And here are some from my second session:
Here are all of my painted greenskins thus far:
By my count, the third and fourth scenarios will only require the addition of one chaos warrior, one fimir, and (of course) the four heroes. Once this is all over, I'll touch them up a bit, but this is a good way to develop some speed painting techniques, I suppose. I've only got a week to go so wish me luck gents!
