Heroscape’s new box set costs $250, but it could kick-start the decades-old wargame

Beloved Miniature Wargame hero landscape is back with a new high profile crowdfunding project. Everything hinges on the success of a lavish $249.99 box bearing the name Heroscape: Age of Annihilation, which includes many customizable landscapes and five playable factions. It will only be produced if the campaign gets 8,000 pre-orders, but if successful, Hasbro’s Avalon Hill imprint plans to bring the franchise back to life with additional releases.

Avalon Hill is delighted with the success of its relaunch of HeroQuest, the classic dungeon crawling board game. Relaunched in a similar vein after a successful crowdfunding campaign, this game now includes several expansions and additional character classes. Chris Nadeau, Avalon Hill’s senior director of design and development, told Polygon that it’s new for once HeroQuest line found its footing hero landscape naturally became “the next target in the vault”.

First publication 2004, hero landscape is an asymmetric war game pitting warlords named Valkyrie against each other for control of the planet Valhalla. The game is very asymmetrical, with fictional factions from every nook and cranny of time and space. But the franchise is also known for its terrain — chunky, stackable plastic platforms that allow for dramatic landscapes. Dedicated fans hoard the tiles in massive quantities and roll them out to create expansive landscapes for their home games.

Other than the surprise announcement of HeroQuest, HeroScape has been teased by dedicated fans for some time – particularly via the recently established Avalon Hill Discord server.

“It wasn’t quite as cold frankly that HeroQuest had,” Nadeau said. “We know the community has kept playing the game. There have been conventions and tournaments that have never stopped in this community. They’ve stayed together as a community for years, and we wanted to make sure that if the game were to relaunch, we’d make sure their current collections, their current tournament meta, all that fully usable official material would be going forward.”

This new one HeroScape The offer is fully backward compatible with all previous sets. The terrain itself uses the exact same digital files for production, meaning all terrain ever made is future-proof. Even the rules, hero cards, and other game materials are designed to be compatible.

“It’s tailor-made so that the existing fanbase can jump right in and feel like they’re picking up right where they left off,” Nadeau said.

This new Collector’s Edition is more than twice the size of the original 2004 launch. It includes more than seventy heroes – 76 if all campaign stretch goals are met – plus 74 base terrain pieces and 68 new, modular wall tiles for creating structures on the map . The terrain will also feature a reissue of the coveted jungle terrain pieces, which are available on eBay for nearly $250 at the time of release.

“In terms of the miniatures included, going forward we wanted to have the ability to tell richer stories and build on top of the IP in a way that we as Avalon Hill are capable of storytelling with all the things that we do. So we introduced five completely new factions to the game [representing] new species, new planets, new factions, new powers never before seen in the game. So it’s not a reissue […] Everything in this set is brand new and that stems from the idea that we wanted to make fans feel like they were expanding their collection.”

New factions include the Dryan Lifeborne Order, a powerful group of magic users who can only field a limited number of very expensive units. There’s also the Nemesis War Brood, a group of insect fighters who implant armor and other technology directly into their exoskeletons. Finally, Avalon Hill adds the Clockwork Combine, a group of militant forest creatures. Think squirrels, skunks and possums flying in via aerial reconnaissance vehicles, with even more nimble jump troops marching forward onto the battlefield.

“One of them actually has a biped,” Nadeau said, “that has a Gatling gun mounted on it.”

Buried among these new factions are some fan favorites, including the Kyrie – a winged angel-like faction native to the planet Valhalla. The goal, Nadeau said, is to fill a faction that “back then” just wasn’t given enough time to develop. There will also be additional characters drawn from the lore of the original game but modified and evolved after years of conflict.

If the campaign is successful, what could come next? hero landscape? Nadeau is extremely optimistic about the game’s potential.

Image: Avalon Hill/Hasbro

“What the team was doing in 2004 was scraping together entertainment trends and different genres that were emerging and building different units based on different genres that were emerging in pop culture at the time,” Nadeau said. “It’s created a very interesting brand that’s insanely scalable. You can bring basically any genre, any IP, any licensed partner, anything to the battle on Valhalla and it makes sense to the story. The possibilities for the future are almost unlimited.”

That kind of openness in the hero landscape The universe goes well with Hasbro’s other game features, such as: Magic the Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons. Both marquee franchises have put a lot of energy into crossovers in recent years. Hasbro’s own intellectual property, including Transformers and GI Joe, would be an easy addition to the hero landscape universe in the short term. In the meantime, magic‘s Universes Beyond initiative shows the way forward with external brands. Previous partnerships include stranger things, the Walking DeadGodzilla, Street Fighter and Fourteen days, while magic Cards based on the Warhammer 40,000 universes, Dr. Who and Lord of the Rings are based are also on the horizon.

The project to be funded Heroscape: Age of Annihilation now runs until November 16th. Delivery is expected in autumn 2023.