Passing the Torch

For my sixth birthday, my dad bought me a present that ended up shaping my entire life: HeroQuest, a fantasy adventure board game designed by ex-Games Workshop designer Stephen Baker, after he moved to Milton Bradley. I’m not sure what it was that prompted him to get it for me. I certainly don’t remember being heavily into fantasy stories, although I did have a lot of love for board games. Maybe he saw the now-legendary TV advert and decided that it seemed like the sort of thing his bookish child with a massive imagination would love. I should probably just ask him.

I fell in love with HeroQuest immediately. It was a window into a world of fantasy and magic, orcs and elves. I was a strong reader for my age, and I devoured the entire box. I remember poring over the rules, gazing at the moody black-and-white illustrations and feeling my imagination sizzle and pop with ideas. Going through the cards one at a time, studying them, committing them to memory.

Unfortunately, none of my friends were really into the idea. I lived on a housing estate in a tiny village on the Norfolk coast, and had maybe half a dozen friends of varying ages. They mostly enjoyed riding around on their bikes and playing football; then there was Daniel, who was obsessed with Transformers, and Matthew who was big into his Commodore 64, but even they drew the line at this epic, sprawling board game with all its components and reams of text. My dad played a few grudging games with me, but only under duress. So mostly, I played the game alone, controlling all of the heroes while also taking on the role of the evil overlord Morcar (never Zargon, you Philistines).

It might have been a bit unusual, but it gave me the opportunity to let my imagination run wild, and experiment with the game. When I was clearing out a load of old paperwork a few years ago, I found a whole pile of yellowed papers covered in my messy pre-teen scrawl. Rules for new traps, new characters, new enemies.

HeroQuest introduced me to fantasy adventure games, but it also introduced me to the joys of game design. In a very real way, it shaped my life, my career and my family.

Our daughter Lily turned six a couple of weeks ago. As you can imagine, being raised by a pair of board game designers has had an impact on her. She’s been playing games for years, and has her own steadily expanding game shelf. And there, stacked alongside wonderful family games like My First Stone Age, The Magic Labyrinth and Outfoxed!, you’ll find my 33-year-old copy of HeroQuest.

It’s seen better days. The cover is held together with tape, half of the figures are missing (having been subsumed into various hobby projects years later) and some of the booklets’ pages have slipped their staples, but it still holds a sense of wonder and excitement. I know this, because a few months ago I set it up on the coffee table, and ran Lily through her very first dungeon adventure.

I ignored most of the rules, and ran it more as a roleplaying game. I set up the board for the first scenario, read out the introduction, and asked her what she wanted to do. After a couple of turns sneaking around a corridor and listening at doors, she opened one, and met some goblins. After a brief battle, she utterly rejected the premise of the game by saying she wanted to ask them why they were fighting. Before long, she’d resolved to help them fix up this dank, slimy dungeon so they could be happier. (HeroQuest’s famed 3D furniture was put to great use when her character pushed a table into a corner, then stood on it so she could fix a hole in the ceiling and stop murky water dripping in.)

She had fun, and it was fascinating to see how she engaged with it, but this game was clearly not offering the experience she wanted. I decided that instead of doing this again, I’d pick up a roleplaying game that’s aimed at kids her age and let her go on a helpful, imaginative romp around a slightly less grim fantasy setting. HeroQuest went back onto the shelf, and she hasn’t asked to play it again since.

Then, a few weeks ago, Sophie and I were using Hero Forge to put together some characters for an upcoming game, and Lily wanted to have a go. I sat with her and helped her look through all the options, and gave her free rein to pick what she wanted.

The result was a character she named Zaccato.

Zaccato is a turtle-person who mixes snappy business attire with feather-trimmed pauldrons and bunny slippers. She wields a massive spiked flail, keeps a crossbow at her belt, and carries a rather hefty shield.

I bought an STL without hesitation. Zaccato was sent to a local friend with a 3D printer, and we picked her up a few days later. Lily was thrilled to be able to hold a figure she’d designed. We had a busy few weeks, during which Zaccato sat untouched on the shelf.

Then, this weekend, while we were having a walk, Lily asked out of nowhere if she could play a game with her. Who was I to argue?

After a short discussion to see what sort of game she wanted to play, where I gave her various options, Lily decided that she wanted Zaccato to “fight baddies”, and she wanted to play “the game with the monsters”.

(First sidebar! I want to be clear that I’m not pushing her into playing conflict-heavy games like this. I love how she approached HeroQuest, and we’re going to explore that with other games; I received our copy of Wanderhome a little while ago, and I reckon that’ll be a lovely way to try out a more gentle, co-operative type of narrative gaming. But for now, she wants to fight monsters, and that’s what I’m writing about.)

I was going to suggest trying HeroQuest again—the complexity is about right for someone her age, as long as I help her with the reading — but what she really seemed to enjoy was telling a heroic story at the table. With that in mind, on the way home from the walk we stopped into the office and I picked up my battered copy of Warhammer Quest.

If HeroQuest was the game that introduced me to tabletop fantasy adventures, Warhammer Quest was the game that made me fall in love with them. HeroQuest had led to Space Crusade, and that had let to Warhammer 40,000, but when I spied a piece in White Dwarf Magazine about an upcoming fantasy adventure game, my heart soared. Here was a game that offered the HeroQuest experience, but in so much more detail. The board was made of modular tiles! There were so many more enemies! You could play against the game instead of needing one player to control the enemies! It took me a while to save up for it, but I still have such vivid memories of lifting the lid for the first time and being utterly gobsmacked by the contents.

Of course, in the years since, I’ve played a lot of other games which have surpassed Warhammer Quest mechanically. In many ways it’s quite creaky, but the core idea — a co-operative game, endlessly replayable and expandable, with procedurally-generated dungeons and an ongoing campaign that let you see your characters grow in power and fame — wasn’t bested for a long time.

Suspecting those elements would really appeal to Lily, I wanted to rejig the rules a bit to make the actual gameplay a bit more palatable for her. Thankfully, this ain’t my first rodeo. I’ve designed a number of dungeon-crawler type games over the years, to the point that I felt confident enough to run a seminar on how to design a good one. While I was working for Games Workshop, I was even given the chance to design a modern follow-up in Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower. It had a very constrained brief, and I had to skip a lot of the stuff that I loved about the original, but it was still a great exercise in looking at which elements of the game were essential to the experience and which ones could be swapped out or omitted.

The first step in this little project was to make a hero card for Zaccato. I could have just told her to use one of the existing ones for her character and just ignore the illustration, but I wanted to make it as immersive as possible. I asked her what sort of hero she’d like to be — would she like to do lots of fighting up close, or be really tough, or use a bow and arrow, or use magic? She settled on “I want to shoot arrows, but also do magic”. Fair enough! I decided to use the Elf as the basis for her character card, but give her a couple of spells as well.

I grabbed a photo of the Elf hero card from Google Images, pasted it into Illustrator, then locked that layer and created a new one over the top. I sketched out the frames then copied all of the stats and text (with a few tweaks, of course). In hindsight, I needn’t have bothered with all the detail — but I’ll come back to that.

I managed to whip this up in about ten minutes while Lily ate her lunch and watched a bit of Bluey. By the time I’d printed it and stuck it to a card, she was raring to play, so we cleared the table and cracked open the box.

When she saw the contents, she wasn’t as awestruck as I remember being back in the mid nineties — but I could still see the excitement in her eyes as we pulled everything out and set it to one side. Soon we’d stacked up the floor tiles and created a big snowdrift of miniatures, and Lily was looking through them while I hastily gathered what we’d need for our first game.

My first tweak was in setting up the Dungeon Deck. In a game of Warhammer Quest, you gradually lay out the modular board one tile at a time, each new room or corridor determined by drawing from this deck, so the game is different every time. Normally, the deck has thirteen cards in total — twelve generic cards plus the Objective Room where the big finale happens, which is shuffled somewhere into the bottom half of the deck. I remembered a quest lasting 45 minutes to an hour, so I halved the deck to make something that would be more suitable for Lily’s attention span.

(Second sidebar! If you’ve read my other stories on here, you’ll know that I was diagnosed with pretty severe ADHD earlier this year. It’s a strongly hereditary condition, and from the moment I started recognising symptoms in myself, I started seeing them in Lily, too. We’re keeping an eye on her for now; we’ve spoken to her teacher, who seems to be really on the ball with neurodivergence, and we’re taking notes. But also, we’re trying out various things we’ve read online that help with ADHD in kids, and sure enough, they seem to be helping her. One tactic is limiting long, drawn-out tasks, which I why I mention it here. I wanted her to enjoy this, so I didn’t want it dragging on to the point where she starts getting restless and losing focus.)

Another fundamental change I made was that we were just going to use a single hero each. By default, the rules call for a full party of four heroes, and the game doesn’t scale to other player counts. I just decided we’d roughly halve the number of enemies in any encounters, and I’d fudge it where necessary.

When we filled in our Adventure Record Sheets, writing down our characters’ names and starting health totals, I got a chance to bring my secondary goal into play. Lily’s getting good at reading and writing, but again, she struggles to focus on it for any length of time, and that’s slowing down her progress. Knowing how my brain’s always responded to any kind of game, I wondered if they might do the same for her. Sure enough, within the first the minutes she was reading out the names of cards without prompting, and doing sums each time she rolled the dice. That was a serious proud dad moment.

When we got into the game itself, I was quickly reminded of how slow and grindy it could be, so I made a few more changes straight off the bat. By default, characters move up to 4 squares a turn. Just increasing that to six — so we could cross a corridor in one go — cut a lot of the dead air that I remember from my days of playing the game regularly. (And of which I was reminded when I downloaded the incredibly faithful app version a few years ago!)

The iconic Warhammer Quest stuff remained intact. We used the rules for exploration and Events exactly as written, and just as I’d suspected, Lily had a blast turning over a Dungeon Card to see which room we were entering, then turning over an Event Card to see what awaited us in there. I kept the combat mechanics more or less intact (roll to hit, then roll for damage) but added a bit more decision space by saying that on our turns we could each do two things — move, fight, cast a spell — and if we wanted we could do the same thing twice. It’s far from innovative, but it sped things up a lot, especially, when we got attacked by a swarm of giant bats early on. Using the standard rules, wherein a character can make one move and one attack, it might have taken four or five turns to kill them all, during which we’d have been doing nothing but rolling dice over and over again.

I also added a “critical hit” rule, where a hit roll of 6 meant you rolled an extra die for your damage. Obviously that doesn’t expand the decision space at all, but it did create some lovely moments of excitement. Finally, to mitigate the dull failure state (you rolled low, your turn is over) and introduce one more decision, I gave Lily a small stack of Luck tokens. I couldn’t remember exactly what they do in the rules as written, but I told her she could spend one of them after rolling the dice to roll it again. This gave her a bit more agency — she could decide whether an enemy was worth using a Luck token on when she rolled badly.

As I write this, we’ve played two games using these rules. Already, by the second, I could see she was getting a bit bored of seeing the same Event Cards turn up; I’d forgotten how small that deck is, and how little variety it has! From now on I imagine we’ll use the much larger Event Table in the Roleplay book, but it’ll be a shame not to be able to flip the cards…

I’m trying very hard to resist the temptation to do it, but I can feel the pull and I know I’m going to be spending some of my spare time creating some more content for this game. A more varied event deck, for a start. After that, I’d like to rework the Hero and Enemy cards so they don’t have anywhere near as many numbers on them, and the information is presented more clearly — I’d like Lily to be able to look at her card and an enemy card, and know what happens when she rolls the dice for an attack. Oh, and then I want to rework the character progression system, so it’s a bit more interesting. And if I’m dong that, I might as well go through the settlement events and turn that into a deck of cards as well…

This is going to be a slow-burn project. Mainly, I want to keep things interesting for Lily, so she can carry on enjoying the game and telling stories about her character. It’s already prompted some fascinating chats; the other day she spent a short car journey telling me facts about her character, such as:

• Her full name is Zaccato Sunjumper, because she can jump higher than the sun.
• This is important, because she comes from another galaxy, so she needs to be able to jump that high so she can get home.
• She doesn’t sleep, which is really useful because if they’re having a rest, she can keep watch for any monsters so they don’t get surprised.
• Her bunny slippers are actually magic. They give her energy and help her feel awake, which is important, because even though she doesn’t sleep, she’d still get tired if she didn’t have them.

I can’t wait to play with her again!

Phew. This has been a long piece, but I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it. I’m sure it won’t be the last thing I post about our games! If you’ve had a chance to share the games you loved as a child with your own kids, I’d love to hear about your experiences. Pop a comment below, and follow me if you’d like to see the next instalment!