Tabletophas never been my favorite place to play games. While my family played board games together when I was growing up, I would lie on a couch nearby, plugging away at GBA or DS games. That’s the way I preferred it — unless, of course, we were playing a game like Scene It? that was tailored to my interests. As I’ve grown up, I’ve come to appreciate tabletop games more, especially as I’ve studied video games as a medium and realized that many elements of game design are applicable regardless of whether the game is physical or virtual.
Heroscape Was The Rare Tabletop Game That Captured My Childhood Imagination
Heroscape was one of the few exceptions, the rare tabletop game to capture my childhood imagination. I was ten when the war game first launched, and it scratched an itch that no other tabletop games had, or have since. If you’re unfamiliar with the game, Heroscape has a simple but pretty brilliant concept. The original Master Set, Rise of the Valkyrie, came with a bunch of plastic figurines (each with their own illustrated stats card) and 85 pieces of terrain. These terrain pieces were formed from individual hexagonal tiles and could be linked together and stacked to build terrain. Mountains, rivers, chasms that can only be crossed at one point — you name it.
If you wanted to recreate Lord of the Rings’ Battle for Helm’s Deep, for example, you could build a steep hill, then position a castle at the bottom. You could stage a battle across two mountaintops. You could use the red magma tiles to build a lava flow separating each army into two weakened halves. If you may dream it, for the most part, you make it a reality.
This was both the appeal and challenge of playing Heroscape. Like a DM doing extensive preparation for a campaign, somebody had to care enough to sit down for hours at a time and work if you wanted to play on a cool map. The ceiling of possibility was really high, but if no one built something, there wasn’t really a game. If you ever wanted to play set-up-heavy games like Mouse Trap or 13 Dead End Drive as a kid, but got turned down because nobody wanted to spend that much time getting ready, well, Heroscape had that problem times ten.
Heroscape Is Coming Back To A World Where Building And Gaming Are Inseparable
But I think it may have a more receptive audience in 2024. Heroscape was discontinued in 2010, but is preparing for a relaunch next month via Renegade Game Studio. TheAge of Annihilation Master Set is currently available for pre-order, and will work seamlessly with pieces from the original run. It seems like the perfect tabletop game for a generation that has grown up on Minecraft, Roblox, Mario Maker, and Fortnite, all games that give you the tools to build anything you can imagine. Heroscape bridges the gap between toys like Lego, which allow for endless (if aimless) creativity, and goal-oriented RPGs, and I can see Gen Z and younger kids really going for it as a physical version of the video games they already love.
Then again, maybe not. Maybe Heroscape will always have a high barrier to entry because of the sheer work it takes to set up. But the D&D comparison applies here, too. The average person is much more used to participating in games that take some amount of preparation than they were 20 years ago. And Heroscape, more than most games, has obvious, tangible rewards if you put in the work.
