Knights of the Cardboard Castle

I’ve had my eye on the Heroscape set ever since Sean first got a hold of it for CarcaSean. This is after all a game that comes with 30 pre-painted plastic miniatures of varying sizes, a decent collection of plastic terrain pieces which can be used to build 3D maps of many different configurations and lots of dice to fight simulated battles with. True, it’s a game that is marketed by Hasbro as a toy and the various plastic components do have a kiddie feel, but there is something undeniably awesome about buying a complete miniatures game in a box. What’s more the entire thing only costs US$40 at list price which seems like a steal compared to the prices of many other games.

All of this doesn’t count for a whit of course if the gameplay isn’t any good, which was why I was anxious to play an actual session of it before ordering a copy of my own. The rules are simple. At the beginning of every round, each player secretly allocates his four order markers among the units that are under his command. Of these, three are numbered 1 to 3, signifying the sequence that the orders can be executed, while one is a dummy marker that is placed only to confuse opponents. During his turn, he then uncovers the earliest of his available markers and issues orders the appropriate unit. Once all players have exhausted all three of the real order markers, a new round starts.

Each unit in Heroscape comes with a card that lists its statistics and special abilities. Movement for example denotes how many hexes a figure may move during its turn, while Range tells you from how far away it can hit an enemy unit. During a fight the attacker rolls dice equal to its Attack rating while the defender rolls dice equal to its defense rating. Each skull result on the attacker’s roll gets canceled by a shield result on the defender’s roll and leftover skulls are taken as damage by the defender.

There are some small kinks of course. Since the battle takes place on a three-dimensional map, moving up costs a figure extra movement points while moving down more than a figure’s height all at once risks inflicting fall damage on it. In the same way, attacking from higher ground gives the attacker an advantage while the converse is true for attacking from lower ground. Attacks must also obey line of sight rules and I find it particularly amusing that the unit cards even come with little colored diagrams showing which parts of the figures make for legal targets.

The real variety comes in the special abilities that each unit possesses. The majestic dragon that is included in the standard set is able to use a fire attack power in order to hit everything in a straight line up to a distance of eight hexes. The dinosaur figure with an orc on its back can instantly devour any adjacent enemy figure. Since the rules call for taking turns to draft units into each player’s army until the point limit for the scenario has been reached, this means that a good Heroscape player needs to be aware of the capabilities of the different units available.

Our short session didn’t take much time at all but still went slower than I’d have expected for such a simple game because of the need to count the movement points needed to scale heights and because both the attacker and the defender need to roll dice during attacks. My wife complained that it was terribly random game and that the units were killed too easily. My own feeling is that it’s actually less random than a game like say, Battlelore, but because there are so few figures involved in a battle, even a small variation in luck has a huge effect on the game.

Overall, I have to say that I ended up liking Heroscape less than I expected to. Part of the problem is that I’m confused about what scale the battles in the game should be at. If the idea is to simulate small skirmishes between a handful of units for each side, I think it would need more complex rules to be interesting. The combat rules for a typical RPG like Dungeons & Dragons for example is a fair representation of the type of complexity that I think I would enjoy for combat on such a small scale. As it is, there are simply too few options and units go down far too quickly to be satisfying for a game that’s supposed to be about unique, personalized heroes.

On the other hand, if the intent is to capture the enjoyment of true miniature combat games like Warhammer, then you’d need many more figures and a much larger map to make the experience comparable. Even if someone were willing to buy enough stuff to make such battles possible, I’m not sure how the limited turn order system would translate to a larger scale format. This means that the niche Heroscape tries to fill is as a lighter weight, more affordable alternative. It can’t even lay exclusive claim for offering pre-painted miniatures when there are already better games doing the same.

Finally, the theme of Heroscape, or rather the lack of it annoys me. Obviously the idea is to be able to cram in units from all genres and eras so the designers can come up with anything that sounds cool without any restriction, but for me the current mishmash is irritating.  I feel that a good theme can help to carry the weight of a lackluster design which is why I can dig the idea of playing Heroscape Marvel if I could find it anywhere. At least this set is clearly meant as a self-contained game on a very small scale.

Basic Heroscape currently feels to me like a gateway game for miniatures gaming but if I really wanted to spend serious money and time on a miniatures game, I don’t see why I shouldn’t go straight for the grown-up versions. On the other hand, the set is cheap enough to buy just for the miniatures and terrain alone so that you use them with a better ruleset and who wouldn’t want a cheap dragon figure to use in a D&D campaign?