Hero Quest: Return of Zargon

ByDankelzahn
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Half the dungeon, post-smite.

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.

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Nostalgia Night: Hero Quest

ByDankelzahn
The Heroes(tm) begin their quest...
The Heroes(tm) on a Quest(tm)

While my role-playing group is between campaigns, we’re filling our weekly sessions with boardgames and one-shots.   Last week was a blast from the past: Hero Quest by Milton Bradley.   I couldn’t find the doors and a few figures were MIA (the elf in particular) and had to be proxied, but the old school charm remained.

Matt took on the role of the vile Zargon for the first two quests, leaving Chad, Wayne, and me to take on the mantles of the Elf (Elfen John), Wizard (Mr. Wizard), and Barbarian (Thud).   The Dwarf (Ale) was thrown in for good measure.   For the third and final game I took over behind the screen and Matt claimed the Dwarf.

We fully embraced the camp of the game, with “Zargon” reading the boxed text before each adventure with as much melodrama as could be mustered.   As casually as we treated the game, our role-playing roots came through and there were a few more descriptions than dictated by the adventure book as we stomped around the dungeon, hacking up orcs, goblins, and other minions of Chaos.

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Grind… MkII?

ByDankelzahn

Bellevue WA. June 30, 2009 – Privateer Press is pleased to announce Grind, an extreme combat sports board game for two players ages 14 and up releasing this October. In Grind players customize a team of steamjacks—10-ton, steam-powered mechanical robots—and battle to move a large, spiked ball into their opponent’s goal. The game comes with several highly detailed plastic components, including six Runner steamjack figures, four Crusher steamjack figures, 32 interchangeable weapon arms, two spiked pillars, and the Grinder ball. Also included are a full-color game board, 11 tokens, and custom dice.

I hardly ever played the initial Grind release – it just didn’t pique my interest enough.   If I was going to be getting my Warmachine miniatures out to play, I’d rather just play a game of Warmachine.   It wasn’t that the concept of Grind wasn’t interesting, but it seemed to be cobbled together from the existing Warmachine rules and so suffered from a rule system that wasn’t really designed to support it.

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A Night of Zombie Pirates

ByDankelzahn

Well, zombies and pirates I suppose.   Last weekend with our gamemaster out of town my gaming group decided to have a board game day instead.   We started out with a team Pirates game where Pat and I took on Wayne and Chad.   After that one of Chad and Wayne’s co-workers stopped by and we played a few games of Flying Frog’s Last Night on Earth.   The evening was a good lighthearted diversion from an otherwise intense role playing campaign and I wanted to take the opportunity to make note of some observations regarding the games we played.

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