If you've never played Milton Bradley's "HeroQuest", you've missed out. In junior high, my parents probably never imagined what kind of a treasure they gave me one Christmas. It wasn't on my "wish list". I'd never even heard of it. I was in that limbo stage where action figures weren't doing it for me much anymore but hadn't discovered any new hobbies yet.
HeroQuest is an out of print fantasy adventure board game, like an EXTREMELY light version of Dungeons and Dragons. No role-playing involved, just four heroes, controlled by 1-4 players, exploring dungeons, taking out monsters and recovering forgotten treasures. The rules were much simpler than modern equivalents like "Descent" from Fantasy Flight Games, but they all owe something to this gem.
Recently I pulled my old game boxes out again and re-discovered a lost world that I had adventured in for over a decade with my long-time gaming buddy, Mark. We went far beyond any published material and I began writing epic quests of my own. To keep pace with his growing heroes, I created pages and pages of new monster stats, new artifacts to be found and new rules to keep things interesting.
Little did I know I was one of many, and was doing it with far less attention to detail. Now you can find a number of awesome websites online dedicated to HeroQuest, with carefully balanced new character classes and tons of new spells, artifacts, monsters and of course QUESTS!
My reigning favorite and "one stop shop" for all things HeroQuest is Ye Olde Inn, which resurrects a site I used to visit all the time and also adds more material to it.
You can even find software that will run the game for you if you need a game master but don't have one. Never as good as a flesh and blood person to play with, but those are hard to come by, and all this reminiscing might just make me desperate enough...
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