HeroQuest ⚔
Gather a group of adventurers and get ready to practice your best evil wizard voice!
I love Dungeons & Dragons (D&D).
If you’ve never had the chance to play it before then essentially it’s a role-playing game where one person takes on the role of Dungeon Master (DM) who prepares an adventure for the rest of the players to go on and try to achieve together.
Unlike traditional board games that often have linear paths, actions and goals, in D&D there is a lot more freedom. You can choose how where to go, what to do and how to best achieve your goals. Don’t want to just run in and attack of cave full of goblins? Why not try sneaking in? Or disguising yourself as one of them? Or smoking them out? Or distracting them with a lovely ballad about stinky goblins? It’s up to you!
In this sense it’s the ultimate game of communication as you have to talk through strategies with your team in order to overcome challenges and communicate what you’d like to do to clearly to the DM.
However, if you’ve ever played D&D you’ll know it can take a lot of time. I think the first time I played it I spent HOURS alone just preparing my character before we even started playing the game! Then when I decided to run a campaign I spent even more time preparing adventures for the group I was playing with.
So this can be a pretty overwhelming barrier for people, especially if you have kids.
Enter HeroQuest! A stripped down, simplified game which has similarities to Dungeons & Dragons, with a focus on exploration and combat.
You won’t have as much freedom playing HeroQuest as you would D&D, but it does have pre-made adventures and a simple combat system that’s easy to learn.
Also, you’ll need to be able to communicate clearly with your team in order to overcome challenges, so it fits perfectly as our last recommendation for our series on communication.
Overview
Age: 10+ years
Players: 2-5 (with one person playing the Gamemaster)
Duration: ~90 mins
If you’re a child of the 80s or 90s then HeroQuest might be look a little familiar to you.
That’s because it was originally released in 1989. Recently HeroQuest was re-released in 2021 after a successful crowdfunding campaign to revive the series was run by Hasbro.
There are 14 sequential gameplay sessions in the game called quests and expansions are available.
How to Play
To play the game, one person takes on the role of the evil wizard Zargon, the gamemaster running the adventure.
This player will receive the quest book, create the world and control any enemies the players encounter along the way. If you’re a parent you’ll want to take on this role (at least for the first few games) to help guide the adventure for your children.
You’ll be setting up the rooms as player enter them and controlling the enemies!
The other players will choose from four different heroes, a barbarian, wizard, elf or dwarf. Each hero has different stats and abilities.
The barbarian is the most straightforward and is recommended for younger players, whereas the wizard has a lot of different spells to choose from and can be a little more complicated to play.
Each adventurer will get a character sheet to fill out, and a figurine to place on the map.
When the game begins adventurers explore the different rooms available to them, choosing from a set of actions to take each turn (e.g., move, look for treasure, disable traps, or attack).
Players will encounter enemies and traps, all controlled by the gamemaster while trying to complete the goal for the current quest.
Click here to download the full rules if you fancy a more in-depth overview. Otherwise this video provides a great overview of how to play in just 15 minutes.
How to use this game
Tell the story
There’s no need to come up with your own script as HeroQuest provides you with a story to read out at the beginning of each quest. Here’s a quick excerpt from the start of the Quest Book…
The fire burns warmly, but casts little light into Mentor’s study. The flickering shadows only hint at the vast number of books and scrolls that fill the many shelves. Slowly Mentor walks over to the fire.
“Well, my friends, your training is complete. You are not yet Heroes, you have yet to prove yourselves. But first, let me tell you of Zargon…”
Learning Points
HeroQuest is primarily a cooperative game, you either win or lose each quest as a team. With this in mind, there are a lot of chances to practice communication with your team.
Sharing strategies
Sharing strategies will be the most common way in which communication is practiced in this game. Each character has their own strengths and weaknesses, and making sure they’re working together as a team is important to completing each quest. It’s easy for one player to dominate, especially if they’re a good communicator so encourage each player to take turns communicating what they think they should do next as a team.
Accepting loss
Your characters can be knocked out in a quest. If that happens it can be pretty devastating as you have to sit out the adventure on the sidelines. It doesn’t mean you’re out of the game though! If a player does get knocked out, still encourage them to share ideas and strategies with the rest of the team so they’re still part of the game and practicing communication.
Balancing cooperation and competition
I mentioned earlier that HeroQuest is a cooperative game. Saying that though, the designer of the game, Stephen Baker, did explain in an interview that it is designed for some competition as well. There is a bit of a race to find treasure, as the first hero to search for treasure in different rooms may be rewarded with gold coins. These coins can be used to buy weapons in between quests.
So with this in mind, it’s important to encourage good communication between players to make sure one player isn’t just taking all the treasure!
Creating a new hobby
One other really cool thing with HeroQuest is that it is like a toy box as it comes with miniatures (highly detailed small models)! There are heroes, orcs, goblins, skeletons, furniture and many more (a total of 65 pieces!). There is a large community that loves painting miniatures. As parents, it is not easy to get your kids off the screens. Why not creating a new hobby with your children, where you will always get cool miniatures out of it, and you will easily see improvements over time.
Sharing the role of Zargon
After a few quests, your children might be keen to try taking on the role of Zargon and running a quest. This is a great opportunity for them to really practice their communication skills as they will be running the show! Not only do they get to put on their best evil wizard voice, they need to clearly communicate to players what’s happening in the game. Make sure to encourage your child if they decide to take on this role and go easy on them if they make a few mistakes.
Where to get it
HeroQuest is widely available. It is a little more pricier than the previous games we’ve recommended, but it does include 14 quests which if each quest takes 90 minutes that will give you at least 21 hours of play time (which is pretty good value!).
You can find HeroQuest at your local game stores or at larger stores where you might be able to price match (e.g., I’ve seen JB-Hifi have it on sale for AU$167).
Before you go
We hope you enjoyed our fifth game recommendation in the communication series!
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Until next time, game and learn with HeroQuest!
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