Hero Quest: Return of Zargon

Since my Sunday gaming group is waiting for after Christmas to kick off our upcoming campaign, Hardarian Blackleaf, Ale, Mr. Wizard Nickelbane III, and Elfin John continued their Quest ™ to become Heroes ™.     The story was thin but the cardstock terrain was thick as… well… cardstock.     And so the smiting commenced!

We ran through a couple more pretty generic quests this week – find a good wizard then go kill the evil one.   Considered we played Are You the Traitor? beforehand (which features a good/evil wizard mechanic) I suppose there was a theme running throughout the evening.

At this point the party is getting pretty well equipped.   The one oddness to the game is that it follows the D&D trope of “the wizard can’t use cool equipment.”   So while the dwarf, elf, and barbarian all have shields, helms, and armor (the barbarian even has artifact armor) and good weapons, the wizard is stuck with a weak magic cloak he found and a pointy stick (read: quarterstaff).   He’s been collecting some interesting magic items, but he’s still the weak link of the party and will crumple if the monsters get to him.

Camp is still the name of the game.   Moondog has been the best Zargon of the group hands down.   Among his achievements is composing the soundtrack known as “march of the mummy.”   We always know when a mummy is coming at us.

Moondog missed this week, so I tried to add my own twist this weekend with moonwalking, “Thriller”-singing chaos warriors (and completely silent zombies, just ’cause).   Unfortunately I fell short of Moondog’s greatness.

There are only five more quests left, but we’re taking our time.   Hero Quest is a fun game to play for nostalgic reasons and we don’t want to take it too seriously or risk getting burnt out.   But as a occasional diversion it’s still two thumbs up.