White Dwarf Retrospective - 145 January 1992

The front cover of White Dwarf 145 comes as something of a shock, the main logo has been displaced to make way for the logos of HeroQuest and Space Crusade. I have written about HeroQuest before and Space Crusade was its Warhammer 40,000 inspired equivalent, in which players took control of squads of Space Marines battling Orks. Chaos Space Marines and Chaos Androids (the fore-runners of the Necrons). This was White Dwarf's second special issue dedicated to these more mainstream board games (the first being 134). It seems like a smart piece of marketing. The prominent logos could entice younger fans of the game while existing Games Workshop players could expand the games with a wider range of miniatures.

The Space Crusade article is particular elaborate, featuring a five part campaign with rules for Genestealer Hybrids, Terminators and Librarians. Given that Space Crusade had no system for psychic powers, the inclusion of psychic power cards for all the marine players, albeit ones you have to cut out or photocopy, is particularly ambitious. On the down-side, to make full use of the rules you are going to need a lot of models. One mission requires you to replace all the Orks with Genestealer Hybrids. With that in mind, its hard to see who this is aimed. Younger players would have to buy a lot of new models to play the missions, while the only players likely to have the required miniatures already would probably have a copy of Space Hulk and play that instead.

The HeroQuest article is rather better in my view. It consists of a two part quest called the Eyes of Chaos. It is illustrated with some imposing pictures of metal Games Workshop Ogres, but was released hot on the heels of the HeroQuest expansion 'Against the Ogre Horde' which featured seven plastic Ogres, so plenty of existing players would have the necessary models. The only truly new character is a Bretonnian Knight on foot, not a particularly challenging character to proxy. In fact I gave the Eyes of Chaos a go at the time of its release, but never player the Space Crusade rules at all.

The Eyes of Chaos for HeroQuest

In a clever piece of synergy, the issue also contains a version of Eyes of Chaos for Advanced HeroQuest, Games Workshops more complex HeroQuest spin off. The latter may not have offered the straight forward fun of HeroQuest, but had a number of enjoyable features, including its random dungeon generator tables, and was well supported in White Dwarf.

and again for Advanced HeroQuest

Moving on from the HeroQuest and Space Crusade material, the issue also features an article on Dragon Masters. This was a slightly odd game, written by Ian Livingstone one of Games Workshop's co-founders who ultimately went on to found video games company Eidos. He had long since left Games Workshop by the time the game was released and it feels like a product of a much earlier time in the companies history.

A self contained board game in which players took on the roles of rival High Elf lords sending out armies to explore a map board, it had the rather interesting mechanic of counters that were placed in each space face down and flipped over when an army entered the space to show what they encountered. This article provides a series of new counters to expand the game. A nice stand alone expansion that sadly has the drawback that, in a time before downloads and scanners, the new counters would have stood out a mile next to the professional printed counter-parts from the main game.

New Counter rules for Dragon Master

The final article is a new army list for Tyranids in Warhammer 40,000. It says something about the way Games Workshop has developed as a marketing machine that this article is weirdly low key, almost an after-thought.

It does feature an intriguing new idea. The whole list is printed on cards, or rather on paper intended to be cut out or photo-copied and used as cards, with background and images on one side and rules on the other. I suspect this idea was inspired by the recently release 2nd edition Epic which also used card-based army selection to good effect. It certainly pre-dates the modern fad for card-supported miniature rules and it is intriguing to imagine a world with army card decks instead of books. They would have been easier to refer to mid game, if trickier to read and store, and also would have allowed the seemless introduction of new units. Sadly this was not to be and the idea was never used again.

Army Cards - an idea that never caught on

The army list itself is a bit of a hodge-podge seemingly put together from existing models with as few totally new elements as possible. Some elements will be familiar to modern players, even if the models have changed, Tyranid Warriors, Genestealers, Termagents and Carnifex (the last two called Hunter-slayers and Screamer-Killers). Also present are Genestealer Hybrids, brood brothers, the Patriarch and the Magus. In fact, there is enough Genestealer elements here to comfortably put together a Genestealer cult army without recourse to Tyranid specific elements at all. Then there is the rather odd inclusion of Squig hordes which are apparently Tyranid-modified Orks, Zoats, effectively armadillo centaurs imported from Warhammer 3rd edition, and Mind Slaves, really an excuse to import chaos space marines and others into the list.

So ultimately, a decidedly bitty army list and one that doesn't seem to have much of a coherent plan behind it, except, perhaps, to put together an army with as little recourse to new models as possible.

This was an unusual and slightly special issue, but we still haven't moved very far from the format of White Dwarf we have seen so far. The bulk of the magazine, and all the key articles, are new, experimental rules for a variety of games. Much of the magazine is black and white with a few colour pages only. However, although not readily apparent from this issue, Games Workshop was starting to change in a way that would seriously impact White Dwarf as we will begin to see from the next issue in our tour.

Heroquest - A Retrospective

Today I want to do something a little different and write about a game that was a huge influence on my early years as a gamer - HeroQuest. If this blog post works I might do more a long a similar line.

Heroquest was a co-production between Games Workshop and MB games that first appeared in UK in 1989. A dungeon crawl game that saw a party of adventurers descend into the depths to battle Orcs, Goblins and Skeletons. Games Workshop supplied the miniatures, game world and atmosphere while MB got it onto the shelves of Woolworths, Tescos and Argos.

At the time, the Roleplaying boom wasn long over in UK and Games Workshop was following a policy of not explicitly advertising its products. Games Workshop stores were dark and slightly forbidding places, unfriendly to new comers and youngsters and the only contact with Games Workshop outside of stores was the sporadic availability of White Dwarf in WH Smiths. So HeroQuest appearing in mainstream stores and, more startlingly, in TV ads had a huge impact on a generation of potential gamers. So much so that I know no gamer of my generation who didn't own or play it at one time or another. It was not the first Dungeon Crawl game, but was one of the most successful.

It's easy to see why it had an impact. The box is suitably grim depiction of High Fantasy with a seriously angry Barbarian showing off up front while his compatriots go toe-toe with Orcs and Zombies while a Skull faced sorcerer and Chaos Warrior advance from the right.

Inside its interesting to observe the mix of influences from mainstream board games, wargames and roleplaying. It's dice are red and gold wood and would look more at home in a snakes and ladders set. But it also includes what is essentially a GM's screen, for the Evil Wizard Player who controls the monsters.

Looking back on the rules its surprising how simple they are. Up to four players control the heroes - a classic combo of Barbarian, Wizard, Dwarf and Elf, and another the monsters, this player is also responsible for laying out the dungeon. During their turn players can move, attack and search for treasure or traps and secret passages. Combat is resolved by means of special combat dice. While searching for traps or passages has no random roll, if they're there you find them and treasure is resolved by a random draw from a deck of cards. Interestingly, hero movement is determined by roll of 2 6-sided dice, a possible concession to more conventional boargames, though monster movement is set by a number on the monsters profile card. In the basic set no Monster has more than 1 body point, so there is little record keeping. The only other complication is Magic spells, printed on cards and shared between the Wizard and Elf.

Interesting detail is that the Dwarf is taken from the White Dwarf logo of the time and the miniature follows the illustration quite closely, making it one of the earliest White Dwarf miniatures.

The game has a couple of interesting features. First is the inclusion of model furniture. This mostly doesn't do anything except take up space in dungeon, but adds greatly to texture of the dungeon, giving it the feel of something lived in and not just collection of monsters in rooms. Also, rather than use a series of seperate board sections, the dungeon is one big board. Doors and rock markers used to control access to parts of it so the whole board is rarely used in one quest.

A big advantage of the standardised board is that it allows quests to be printed on a double page of the Quest book with the Map on top and notes on the bottom. Notes are kept simple, so theres is little need to flip back and forth through rule book. Though ocassionally rules were left a touch loose requiring some intepretation from the Evil Wizard player as to how they work.

There is no experience system as such. Players can collect treasure and buy equipment and completing three quests nets them a 500 gold piece bonus, but that's it. No character advancement, no levels just more gear.

Despite this, I know of some copies of HeroQuest that languished in the box because owners couldn't get their head around concept. In days when most board games were variations of scrabble or monopoly easy to see how something like this could be confusing. And it's easy to understand why MB and Games Workshop kept the rules as basic as they did.

It was not my first encounter with Games Workshop. That came from a friend's older brother who had a copy of White Dwarf and a first edition Blood Bowl. So when HeroQuest came along I recognised the miniatures. Nor was it the first set of miniatures I owned. Another friend got the game first and I went looking for other miniatures stumbling across a few random selections before getting round to buying HeroQuest itself. But it was the first set of miniatures I painted and the first game of it's type I really played. And I really did play it, working my way through the whole of the basic quest book and the Return of the Witch Lord expansion over the course of a weekend with friends.

That said, it also started a grand tradition for me and wargaming - buying miniatures and expansions I never got round to using. I owned all the expansions for HeroQuest available in UK, but only played through one. I spent days drawing out new quest maps in squared paper exercise book, but played few of them. Much of the excitement came from reading through the rule books and imagining the possibilities.

My copy is a touch battered, but still in half decent condition. The miniatures fared less well, many being hacked to bits for conversion parts in more short-sighted days, while others suffered from being left on floor of living room and were variously stepped on or kicked.

The appeal of HeroQuest is easy to see. It provided an easy entry point for young gamers who could practice the concepts of the roleplaying and wargaming without being bogged down in complex or inpenetrable rules. It gave players the start of miniature collection and a game they could get into with a minimum of fuss. For me, it was effectively a 'gateway game' prompting me to try more complex games and to investigate the world of Games Workshop and wargaming.

Its impact was huge, for myself and many others. It not only got us into wargaming, but allowed Games Workshop to dip a toe into a more mainstream world. It lead to the appearance of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 in Argos and combat cards and plastic boxed sets in Tesco during the early 1990s. For many gamers it was the start of the wargaming hobby and for that reason alone it deserves to be remembered.