HeroScape
At first glance, one would scoff at the notion that this child’s game (8 & Up) could possibly compare to the staggering awesomeness (and stinking geekliness) that Warhammer and WH40k commands. There’s no painting or assembly involved! You don’t have to buy codex after codex after codex to know whether or not your opponent is cheating! And you don’t get to boast craftsman’s hands when you present your lifelike laser-scarred post apocalyptic terrain pieces.
It’s true. HeroScape looks and plays more like a ‘board game’ than a ‘hobby,’ but therein lay the appeal, and the DANGER…
Premise: 2/5
Great warriors from throughout the multiverse have been ripped from their time streams and planets, gathered together by the Valkyrie of Valhalla. It seems that the Valkyrie have found magical wellsprings that give them super powers and immortality; which has caused a massive “world” war to erupt. Your army, composed of an assortment of troops from countless genres and dimensions, fight in battles based on this new priceless resource and the upheaval its arrival has caused.
Yeah yeah, fine concept for a kid’s game, but what the hell does that mean to us? I’ll tell you son, it means you get to compose an army of Vikings, gunslingers, battle mechs, and ninjas, that’s what. You heard me. Robots and ninjas and zombies, all in the same game.
Games Workshop thought they were cool manhandling both the Fantasy and Sci-Fi genres with Warhammer, but you couldn’t mix the two up. I mean you could, but you’ll probably be considered ‘the nerd’ of all your nerdy friends. There are stories of guys using proxy armies of different units with different miniatures and Muscle Men and Ninja Turtles and actually finding someone at the Hobby Shop to dick around with for a minute, but all the other gamers there look at them like they ‘don’t take the hobby seriously’ and their opponent does the pee-pee dance looking around at all the ‘real games’ they could be playing. So it’s not a common thing. In HeroScape, you can bank on having both dragons and ED-209′s in your army every time and that’s how it’s SUPPOSED to be.
Gameplay: 3/5
Remarkably similar to its G.W. predecessor. However, there’s a higher occurrence of units with more than 1 wound. There’s still a lot of “1 shot kills,” but there’s also more guys with Health, which is kept track of with beads or counters on that unit’s specific statistic card (which has all that unit’s relevant data).
The game primarily uses a d20 for generating numbers for all its “special effects,” and combat is determined by using a number of custom attack dice or defense dice (red and blue d6′s with either a hit or a miss on them, like the custom dice from the old Hero Quest game).
Line of sight is weird, as each stat card has a silhouette of the units it represents, with red areas (valid target areas) and a green spot somewhere (the ‘eyes’). If the green part of the attacker can “see” the red part of the defender, it’s a valid ranged attack, but you determine this by crouching down at the table and actually trying to “see” from the unit’s perspective. Crazy on bigger play areas, but kinda cool.
Also unlike Warhammer, vertical movement is actually considered very seriously. As I’ll discus below, terrain is quite uniform, so you can “count” movement up vertical spaces. There’s rules for cover and climbing and falling and jumping down and all that, but its a bit more ‘strategic’ (I’d hate to say ‘realistic’) than WH or WH40k.
All in all, when it comes down to cappin’ fools and rollin’ dice, it plays out like a simpler version of Warhammer. No armor or saves, unless that particular unit has special rules for avoiding damage (which will probably involve rolling X or more on that miscellaneous d20).
Setup: 1/5
This is where HeroScape dies an ignoble death. Setup for the prefab missions is so tedious that unless you have a map laid out before your pals come over, you probably aren’t going to play. While a ‘small’ map (using only 1 basic set worth of terrain) could take an hour or more to build, the game itself will be past its apex in half or less as much time.
The terrain. That’s the secret weapon. No, we can’t pretend to be master artisans with our little glass bottles of paint that hold 3 ounces for $20.00. No, we can’t say “That crazy starship wreckage started out as an egg carton and the packaging for a PS2 controller.” But, what we can do, is resurrect our primal desire for architecture. Yeah baby, you know what I’m talking about. Lego mania.
Games Workshop is pretending not to be pissed about this one. Hasbro (that’s who engineered this vice) has cornered a neglected block of the model game industry. Ever since the Star Wars prequels and Bush’s ‘No Child Left Behind’ destruction of our nation’s intellect and ingenuity, actual Legos have blown ass. Now, gamers can rekindle that guilty pleasure by messin around with HeroScape’s interlocking hex terrain. The beauty is that you can rearrange the assortment of tiles into whatever maps you want and feel like you’ve built something. Not only that, but with each new expansion, they introduce some new crazy terrain pieces like trees or glaciers or bridges or castle walls. The ugly truth, however, is that you can’t buy terrain separately. You have to drop $39.99 apiece on new basic sets if you want to go crazy and fill your dining room table with an insane map.
Strategy: 4/5
It’s there man. Similar to G.W. games, army buying, who goes first, movement placement, and assessment of terrain are all huge factors in who will win. The combat and special abilities can throw things off the hook, but not often. Because units tend to die when they are hit, it all comes down to who makes the dumbest mistake and leaves themselves open. Not unlike chess. I’ve purchased almost all the unit types and familiarized myself with all their specs and stats, and can only see one or two unit types being broken (Marro Drones specifically: Marro in general usually multiply in water, but they’re easy to kill. The Drones get a chance for an extra turn for every other Marro on the board, or something like that, so… yeesh). For the most part, the game seems fairly balanced. Of course, I still need to play the actual game more instead of using them for my…
Cross-Addiction: 5/5
“Hello, my name is (unspeakable), and I’m a miniature-aholic.” There, I said it. You tell me I can buy 6 miniatures, already painted and scale for use in my d20 (or any other) campaigns, for a mere $12.00, then I kinda have to buy it. Will I ever use “colonial riflemen” or “soulborg cave marmosets” in a campaign? Probably not, but I simply cannot pass that opportunity up. It’s like what chicks go through when they see a sale on shoes, I imagine. Sure, the Dungeons & Dragons miniatures sell for roughly that amount, but WotC, being the asshats they are, sell you 5 miniatures you don’t want under the “collectable game” pretense they used for MtG. Sometimes that 6th miniature is gay too. And if you want a specific miniature, you’ll have to buy Ral-Partha or Reaper and drop something like $5-$8 on average for just one dude, and unless you enjoy painting (which I do, sans time involved), he’s going to be metallic gray through and through. With HeroScape, you can clearly see all the minis before you buy. It’s very honest and up front; it’s a bold marketing tactic, but it got my money time and time again.
I also confess to have bought 3 basic sets, and I’m holding myself back from buying a 4th and 5th just for terrain. It’s that bad man. I get the shakes when I saunter down the toy isle. I blew $40.00 on two sets of trees, and I don’t feel guilty at all. My gaming group knows I use them every damned time there’s an encounter in the woods (and as Furor will tell you, the ‘Forest of Monsters’ never lacks an encounter. Ever. They run down into dungeons because ‘it’s safer down there’). Could I have used beer cans or just drawn the trees on my map/marker board? Yeah; I’ve been doing that for years. But now I have TREES man. REAL fuckin TREES.
Anyway, there is a serious problem for guys like me, and I know plenty of others are out there. A guy all of us know (who we’ll refer to as ‘JK’) has the same miniature fetish, but he’s still trapped buying case after case of D&D miniatures. Poor bastard. He’s got a fistful of Dire Frogs just so he can have one Manticore. If only he’d open his mind a little. HeroScape lets you pick exactly how you’re being ripped off, and even throws in a few pieces of bonus terrain just to make you feel a little better about your self-destructive credit card abuse.
Fun-Factor: 4/5
If you can actually get folks to play HeroScape, it is a lot of fun. The wild combination of armies you can put together, the interaction of Relics and Nodes and special terrain pieces, all contribute to something that flirtingly skirts the line between strategy and chaos. The miniatures are pretty too. This rating is more like 3/5, +1 for being endless fun when the minis and terrain are used out of context for other table-top gaming purposes.
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