Saturday, March 14, 2009

Minis roundup #3: Heroscape

Finally, Heroscape.

Heroscape is a game that brings minis into an entirely new dimension... literally. This is a great game, and I'll tell you why. First off, the most striking feature of Heroscape is that instead of a flimsy paper map or homemade cardboard terrain, Heroscape has plastic hex tiles that can stack and interlock to form complete 3D terrain. You can also have walls, rivers, glaciers, trees, roads, bridges, even a castle.

Apart from the scenery, though, is the game any good? Short answer, yes. Heroscape doesn't try for anything too fancy, and scores with its intuitive, straightforward rules that barely need to be taught. Unit stats and abilities are printed on cards. This is so much better than being on the figs (less worry about wear and tear) or in the rulebook (no need to look things up in an expensive, overwhelming codex). Having special cards allows each unit to have unique, explicit special abilities, spicing up the game experience while keeping the core rules simple.

The funny thing about Heroscape is that it's made by Hasbro and is supposed to be a mass market toy, meaning it's found in Toys R' Us, not in Neutral Grounds. Unfortunately, this wasn't really marketed in the Philippines, so most pepople here haven't even heard of it. And since it was released in 2004, this makes it pretty scarce. The Master Set (read: starter) is incredibly good value. The booster packs have roughly the same MSRP cost per fig compared to Clix and Dreamblade, but they're not random. If you just want orcs, go ahead and buy the box with orcs in it.

It's probably a little to early for me to say this for sure -- but I think that Heroscape is the best prepainted minis game around.

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