Heroscape
Join the Conversation on Discord!
Heroscape
Stephen: [00:00:00] You know what else is important? Having an SD card in your port,
John: having an SD card plugged in.
Stephen: All right, take two. This is Heroscape.
John: Never heard of it.
Stephen: Come on guys.
Samuel: I'm totally unfamiliar with this game.
Stephen: Come on guys. You gotta be a little more excited. It's Heroscape!
Samuel: Woohoo!. Heroscape.
Stephen: There you go. That's what I'm looking for.
Samuel: I'm so glad Stephen spent half an hour putting this beautiful map together.
John: This is
Samuel: and not me.
John: This is the ultimate larger than life game.
Stephen: I mean, this is like the ultimate toy game. Yes.
Samuel: It, it is. Exactly. It's like, it's, it's almost like a lifestyle game. Mm-hmm. Like 40 K or one of the other miniature games.
John: Without the pain and suffering that without goes along with it. Yeah, yeah.
Samuel: Without all the pain and suffering. Yeah. Or at least there's no pain and suffering involved on my end. So, yeah.
John: And it, and it shows up out of the box pretty, and it's got a million little pieces. And granted, this has not been printed in 15 or 20 years.
Samuel: Well, I don't think you could do it now. I don't think it'd be economical.
John: I agree. The, excuse me, the, the good news [00:01:00] is, is that there's so much of it out there. That for a hundred dollars you can get yourself set up pretty doggone easily, man. You may not be getting in a brand new box, but there's all kinds of stuff out there for anybody who wants
to try it.
Stephen: I mean, you can get a base set and a bag for like $40. Yep, yep. And yeah, you don't need a box. I, all of my Heroscape is stored in, in big plastic tubs. Mm-hmm.
Samuel: And it kill, and that seems to be, kills me a little bit more every time I see it.
Stephen: I mean, well, I mean, the box. I mean, the boxes are big and unwieldy and they, they tore very easy
John: and the pieces were very carefully put in. And you, there's, you just can't, after every single time you play reinsert, all those pieces.
Samuel: No, I just meant you just have all the figures loose in this giant plastic tote.
But they're tough. So
I know they're tough. So they survive. I know they're tough.
Stephen: He's talking about finding. Particular things.
Samuel: No, I am talking about how they just like rub all together and jostle and they get [00:02:00] dumped.
And every time I play with the, every time I play this game, I think of my foray into war hammer. And I'm like, oh, but they're tough. It doesn't matter.
Stephen: !They're tough. They got, you know, the,
Samuel: they've got the bendy weapons, but it's all right.
Stephen: Yeah, I mean, some of those spears are kind of curves, I guess, and some of the guys look like they're laying down, but you know, that's just, that's Heroscape. Yeah. That's how the figures.
John: Yep. And everything comes painted, you're ready to go lay it out on the map and get started. And the rule set is as intuitive as they get. Mm-hmm. Things just make sense in Heroscape. So I, I, you know, this, this game kind of gets it on four different places. There's, there's this whole puzzle building aspect to it.
There's a collecting aspect to it, which is a lot of fun. Um, there's a. Almost like a, like a, a role play. There's a, there's an adventure play, pretend that kids just love, even if they're not playing the game. And then finally there's the game itself. Mm-hmm. With this, even the advanced rules are very, very straightforward.
Everything makes [00:03:00] sense the way it works. And you just, you throw a lot of dice and, and so you, you sometimes you get bad patches of luck, but sometimes you get great patches of luck. Everything comes around. It's just, it's, it's a good time every time you.
Stephen: Yeah. Really the only difference between the basic rules and the advanced rules is you flip the card over and you use the special abilities.
Yep. That's really the only difference. And maybe line of sight, there might be some line of sight differences between the two, but honestly, there's no reason, unless you're playing with five year olds to play the The basic game.
John: The basic game. No. Go straight to the advance game. No,
Samuel: I do like how all the.
Units have different, most of them have ran, you know, weird abilities and do random things, and you're encouraged to stay within your faction, but it's not a requirement.
Stephen: Um, yeah, there's actually a lot of synergies between factions that you, I mean
Samuel: Yeah, but you are, you are like, A lesser player is if you mix and match poorly
Stephen: than John.
No. [00:04:00] So there's, there's factions. So there's what, six factions? I guess. The, uh, we're playing with, uh, what? Jan Dar and Agar Agar. And you're, you're
Samuel: your van. How many three factions do you have,
John: John? Yeah. Actually I do have three factions. But wait, my, my, my main faction is, uh, I gotta turn the card over. Is.
Vidar, Vidar. So there's a couple of Vidar,
Stephen: so I think there's six factions. So in addition to factions, there are also different subgroups. So for instance, I happen to be playing with all humans where there could also, there are can also be all a group of all ORs or a group of all elves. So, Groupings of that nature are subgroups that all that can all work together as well.
Mm-hmm. Even though they're in different factions. And,
John: and there's also like profession, there are soldiers. Now a soldier may be a Roman soldier, may be a World War II soldier, but whatever, and [00:05:00] there are, there are special things that apply to soldiers differently from others as well. So there's, so there's four or five different ways they
Stephen: mix and match.
Yeah. There's, there's three different layers of synergies that can be possible. So yeah, I mean, Y if you build a bad army, you build a bad army. But it's possible to build good armies that span different factions. Yes. And
John: sometimes surprisingly so. Mm-hmm. That things seem to work out that you almost didn't.
Yeah. But stylistically
Samuel: though, I just feel like it's a poor choice and
John: that's the Right, so and, and that's, so that's another part of the game. That's what I'm talking about. There, there, there's a part of this game that is. You know, well, you know, if, if, if I'm
Stephen: gonna play, uh, world War ii, I'm
John: gonna play World War ii.
Or if I, if I'm gonna do the, I'm gonna do the Western guys, I'm gonna do all the Western guys. I'm not gonna mix it up to you and put a dragon with
Stephen: Western guys. That's just not right. Yeah. I wanna be the samurais why's, why would I have a Viking with my samurais? It's crazy. So, so you can, you can,
Samuel: can you imagine choosing an army that it's stylistically thematic?
That would be not thematic. That would be nonsense.
John: That would be crazy.
Stephen: Yet we've done it anyway.
John: We have done it anyway.
Samuel: I, what do you mean? [00:06:00]
Stephen: I mean, you've got dragons and or okay, dragons and ORs, great dragon and ORs, and
John: a dinosaur being ridden by an or a weird guy.
Samuel: It's an orc.
Stephen: I mean, I have Vikings and, uh, Irishmen.
Samuel: Okay. That's totally consistent.
John: See, and mine are consistent as well.
Stephen: Oh yeah. I'm sorry. I have, I have, I'm sorry. They're Scott's, sorry.
John: I, I have revolutionary war holders, um, genetically modified gorillas with cyborg attachments. What is, for all intents and purposes of Medusa, And then of course the, the token, uh, native American character as well, um, into the mix that he's actually like a normal human.
So, yeah.
Samuel: Okay. I, I see.
John: There's absolutely no yeah. No symmetry here at all. No, it's a complete mess. Yeah. This is H 57 over here.
Stephen: Yeah. And you know, sometimes you know when you've got limitations on how you build your army. So for instance, we're playing with 350 points,
John: which is exactly what I have.
Stephen: And we also are playing with 10 base, 10 bases worth of figures.
Which is [00:07:00] exactly what you have. Uh, you know, you have to sometimes work within those confines, so it's not like, and on this particular map, you could field 10 Roman le 10 squads of Roman Legionnaires. Yeah. It, it meets the. It meets the point spread, but you don't have enough spaces to put that many arro Legionnaires out.
So
Samuel: all I'm hearing is a bunch of excuses.
Stephen: I mean, you could, you could spin the points on 'em, but you've only got 10 spaces to put people out. So
Samuel: I'll just bring 'em in when they die.
John: You, you usually, I, I do play an army that is kind of a grouping, but this time that just didn't feel right. So every time you sit down to the table, you can do whatever you want.
Yeah. And that's fun. And there's, that's part of so much fun variety to choose from, that you can really go in any direction you
Stephen: Yeah. And, and the last few times that I've played, I've. Tried very hard to make a, you know, make the conscious decision to play factions or play armies, or play play figures that I don't normally play, cuz I typically go with the grunts, [00:08:00] the ORs, or I typically go with the, the, the vere, the, like the valry type.
Um, angelic warrior people. So those are the two factions I typically go with. But you know, this time I'm trying out the, the Vikings, which I don't think I've ever played, so I'm pretty interested to see how this goes. So, uh, any parting thoughts on, um, what didn't we cover from the last time?
John: Well, just, just the basic rules is you have these little shields that tell you which units you're gonna, uh, play in, in which order, and then you roll bunches of dice on attack and on defense.
Stephen: Yeah. So, I guess the basic running gear is you have four order markers, 1, 2, 3, and X, and so you place out these order markers on your cards. And basically that's gonna be the order in which they move and activate and attack. So, um, you'll, you'll flip over your one or you'll turn your one [00:09:00] around, and that'll be the army that you, you use.
Next person will do their one and the next person will do their one, and it's back to you. You do your two, so on and so forth. The X is there as a bluff. Uh, you can play with it or without it, but it's always kind of fun to look over at how your opponent's order markers are being set up and kind of guessing.
Alright. Is he actually taking a double move with Miron? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Or is one of those a bluff? Right?
Samuel: I'm gonna put all four ordered tokens on the dragon.
Stephen: You need to put 'em on the grunts because the GTS give the dragon.
Samuel: I know what I said. I didn't misspeak.
Stephen: Uh, yeah. So, you know, um, yeah, it took me about half an hour to put this map together, but I tried my best to integrate as many features as I could.
So I have some walls, I have a couple of outcroppings, I've got trees. Uh, I even have the, the marrow swarm in the middle. Just a block line of sight. [00:10:00] Look really cool and finally was able to put a bridge into a map. Uh, it doesn't seem like bridges would be hard, but for some reason they kind of are. That's cuz they're a set length.
They're a set length, and you gotta get 'em up to a certain height and then you gotta build around that. It just, I, I don't know. I'm happy that I'm happy with the map that I built and, uh, you know, I'm hoping that it provides a pretty good experience for us.
John: I think. It's very nice. I'm ready. Get into it.
Stephen: How about we get to it and, uh, You know, battle for all time.
John: Let's, let's kill us a dragon.
Samuel: Oh, man, I want grim neck to eat a musketeer.
Stephen: It'll happen.
All right, so the battle for all time has, has finished. Um, and the, the dragon has been vanquished.
John: Yes, indeed. And, and the Tyranno. So as
Stephen: well, yeah, that damn Tyranno sore. Let's how, you know,
Samuel: it was a good game when Tyranno that
John: kind of reaction of
Stephen: damage. I mean, just [00:11:00] ate my six Health Hero. Oh,
Samuel: that was a great role.
And Six Health,
Stephen: that's, that was a great role. And I mean, on top. His ability was the, um, the more damage he took, the, the more damage he had on him, the more dice a squad attached to him got to roll.
Samuel: Yeah. Then he should have walked up the, you walk him on the board that could eat
Stephen: him. Yeah. I, you know, I was not expecting you to roll.
Um,
John: Uh, 19, was it like 17 or something?
Samuel: Right. It was a 16 or higher. So it was a 25% chance.
Stephen: Okay. Well, I was expecting to, I mean, I put a hurt on that on Grim Neck before You did. You did before you swallowed me hole. Mm-hmm. It
John: was very, very, uh, and, and, and that was, that was a team kill. Steven's guys came in and really softened,
Samuel: necked up.
This was really a two v.
Stephen: Well, you know, did you
Samuel: guys even attack each other at all? You
John: Yeah, we did, but you inserted yourself square in the middle and, and went completely on offense. So in and in true [00:12:00] spirit of scape, you took two great big lizards and went right down the middle and went after everybody.
And that's, that is what makes heroes escape the coolest game on earth because you can just completely throw in with wild abandon and just hope for the best. And, you know, You don't mind losing it. Hero escapee. As long as you do it in a, in, in a legendary fashion.
Samuel: Yeah. I went out in style. I'm not
Stephen: complaining.
It was fun. Yeah. And you know, the, the game's only an hour. Uh, this particular game was only an hour. Yeah. So technically we could, we could probably squeeze another game in. And when your games are that short, Who
John: cares. Right? Exactly. Yeah. Don't, and, and don't, don't think it too much. Don't, don't try to be too strategic.
Don't try to be too
Samuel: safe. Yeah. I mean, I could've wiggled the dragon around for a while. Could, while, and could, but that would've been lame. So instead I just don't do it. That, that's right. That's no fire everywhere and and done.
John: Right. So, so, so at at one point, Steven's Hero is charging up the bridge. The dragon is on [00:13:00] the bridge.
Steven is charging straight at the dragon. The dragon breathes. And
Stephen: misses. I mean, it's straight out of Arturian legend.
John: Yes. And, and Steven's hero gets up and keeps charging straight at the big lizard. I mean, it was, it, it was just, it's it's larger than life. Yeah. And you, you just, you don't get that out of games with, with little wooden meatballs and, and you know, playing a card to move a guy.
It's just, it's not the nature
Stephen: of it. I mean Yeah. Uh, you know, those types of games, it's abstracted out. You kind of use your imagination here in heroes. It is in your face. Yeah. Yeah,
Samuel: it is. And you know, you kind of gotta play into it a bit, right? I mean, absolutely. You can't play with, you know, you can't overthink things.
You can't go, oh, well, what's the most strategic way to play this? I think you, I guess you could, but it's not
Stephen: as fun. That's for tournament play. But, but yeah, but, but even,
John: I mean, at one point your dragon was facing the wrong way and you wanna breathe. And I'm like, you can't do that. You, what are you doing for you [00:14:00] breathing between your legs and you're.
Oh no, she's just gonna fart. That's, that's how, that's the breath weapon this time. And it's just, that's, that's the kind of humor, that's the kind of, of just over the top that heroes Escapee brings.
Stephen: And by the way, it is within the rules for her to breathe behind her straight backwards. Yeah. It's essentially you get a straight line off of either base in any direction.
Okay. Well that's fair enough. So it's not. It's not six lines that she has access to. It's actually 10 lines that she has access to.
John: Okay. Cuz she has two different base hexes that she can be shooting from. She's got a long,
Samuel: stretchy neck, John.
John: Yeah. And, and, and, and frankly, when, when you are the biggest lizard on the board, everybody is worried about you as much.
And you I know, I know. That's, you
Stephen: know, it was funny because that was, that was the initial thought, but then Grim neck. Yeah, grim
John: came in, became a problem and just kind. Uh, I just gobbed up your character
Stephen: and So Grim Neck is a, is a tyran, I guess a Tyrannosaurus. He's the,
Samuel: of, he's, [00:15:00] he's an or riding a tyranosaurs Rex.
Stephen: Yeah. It's kind of eel looking. Yeah. And it's, yeah, there's an or on its back. You sometimes forget there's an or riding here. Yeah, that's fair. But yeah, he just, not only does he get to attack with a normal attack, he also gets to eat just swallow people. Yeah.
Samuel: So if it's a regular guy, he just gets to eat 'em.
If it's a hero, you gotta roll a 16 or higher. Yeah. And I
Stephen: did, yeah.
John: Suck it. And Steven got mad and, and, and I forgot. That you could just eat a squad guy, just walk up and gobble him up. And I think that was how one of my goink went. It was, yeah. You just said, yep, that's the end of him. And I'm like, Ooh. Okay.
So apparently all focus needs to be on grim neck, but you had a squad of, or guys that allowed you to double attack. Mm-hmm. Because the orgs get the ability to allow some other character with
Stephen: whatever it's called, these, it's called bond. Beast bonding a lot. So that was beast bonding. I had human bonding and hero bonding,
John: so, so I'm looking at it and thinking to myself, [00:16:00] cuz, cuz I can see where your shields are, and I'm like, he's got more shields on the ORs.
I'm better off killing the ORs because once the orks are dead, grim neck doesn't get to do this thing anymore until he puts a marker. On Grim next. Yeah, I'd have to wait for the next round. Right. So, so Sam came out with this highly tuned army. He had two nice bonding things going on that allowed him to do a whole lot more.
I didn't have any bonding at all, but I had a couple of, of of pretty solid guys in my back pocket, including a woman that essentially stares at you when you dropped dead. So that was a pretty solid piece to have in my back pocket and I. The, the, the Brave Arrow character who I really didn't get out and get a chance to play because Grim Neck wandered right into the middle of everything and that became the center of the battle and everything had to focus there.
So the ga the game told its story. I mean, with a couple of us making a couple of different key decisions, Sam running Grim neck into the middle of everything, it's like, okay, that's where the battle's gonna be today. Mm-hmm. I mean, we're, we're along for the ride, whether we like it or not.
Stephen: Yeah. And I, [00:17:00] I. I don't know if I consciously made this decision or not, but I did not take any ranged units and I don't know why it ended up that way, but having a full Miele team against, well, your team was all ranged.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. John was almost all ranged. And then you've got grim neck that just eats everything. And the fire breathing dragon, you don't want to be next to it. And, and you had archers
Samuel: and archers
Stephen: it, uh, it was gonna be an uphill battle. And, and, and for
John: a minute there you sounded pretty tragic. Steven, you mean you sounded like, well, there's no way I'm gonna
Stephen: win.
I might, there wasn't any way I was gonna win you lunge in, if we had con, if we had completed this game, you would've mopped the floor with me. I,
John: I would've finished off your last couple of guys, but yeah. You know when the second huge lizard falls over. Us mere humans on the table all sit there and say, Hey man, we good.
Looks like plenty of barbecue for all of us. Yeah, man, [00:18:00] we good. Let's sit down and, yeah. And,
Samuel: and. You know, I lost, um, but it was
Stephen: a lot of fun. Right. So did you really lose, if you had a good time, did you really lose? No, not
John: really. And, and I had a good time. And, and you, you gave every bit as good as you got.
So there's a, there's no shame in that either. I mean, that, that, that was, that was a good battle. And you know, it's funny, I'll come to the game and I'll go, well, do I really wanna spend the time to pick out the guys around? And then you play and you're like, oh yeah, this was absolutely worth the time to get pulled out.
And, and yeah, it
Stephen: was fun. Yeah, I mean, I'm the one that set up the board and I, I can't remember if I mentioned the first time when we weren't recording or if I mentioned it the second time when we were. You know, it was at least a half hour investment for me to get the board set up. So, you know, the reason we don't play hero scape so much anymore because if I had the space and could have a hero scape board up all the time, we would play a lot [00:19:00] more.
Mm-hmm. But I essentially have to take down the hero skateboard every time my in-laws come into town because, uh, the space that we're using here in the cellar is actually our in-law. And so when they're in town, obviously I have to put all the toys away, but you know, there's a certain aspect of putting the maps together.
That's also fun. I get that. I get that. It might not be for everybody, but for us, or at least for me, It's a, an enjoyable part of the game is to, you know, think, have a vision in your head of how you want the map to kind of be, and then digging through the pile, the, the bucket of pieces that I have because I've got like three base sets and then one of each of the terrain sets, and then at least one of each of the expansion.
So I got a bucket of terrain and just putting it all together and making something that comes out and. [00:20:00] You know, has good play on it. Is, is, is actually pretty rewarding. So, and, and this
John: turned out to be a great map. It's got a couple of pinch points that worked really well, sorry. And, uh, and, and it, there was favored ground and there were a couple of spots where the battle really went into the favored ground.
And that, that, I think that made a big difference on how all of us were approaching the battle.
Samuel: Yeah. I mean, I kind of gave up. The high ground about halfway through or even a little bit earlier. Cause I wanted to dig in right. And then just kind of get into tame. And that worked. It was a ton of fun. It worked out all right for me.
Um, but if I'd taken a slightly different force or I wanted to play things a little bit differently, maybe I wouldn't have given up the high ground. Mm-hmm. Maybe I would've. Would've camped out on the bridge. I
John: I honestly thought you were gonna stay on that, that ground, on that one end of the bridge where there was a lot of higher stuff.
And I'm like, well, I'm gonna be shooting uphill. And that's, and honestly, if I,
Samuel: if I had your army, John, I would have, and I would've just [00:21:00] sat up there on that bridge. Yeah. And I would've just rained fire down on both of your heads all day. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but as it was about half of my army was melee only.
And I was like, well, you know what? Let's, let's get stuck.
Stephen: Yep. Yep. Yeah, and I built this, I built this map thinking that Chris was going to join us tonight, but he had a, an engagement that he couldn't get out of, and. So like there were, there are parts of the board that just weren't touched. So there's a little des deciduous forest over on John's side, and there's some ruins on our side where if we were setting up in the four corners, those two areas would've come into play more.
But because I set up in the middle to kind of make a triangle, The middle of the board became the focus, and that's kind of where all the action happened except for the bridge with, uh, with the dragon and, uh, and fin, the fin, whatever fin's name is fin the dragon, the vigon slayer, now fin the Viking Dragon.
Slayer. Yeah.
John: Yeah. And, [00:22:00] and, and you came to us, you came across the middle of
the
Stephen: board. Well, I had to, you had to. I was a Miele, so I had to, I had to close the gap and engage. Otherwise you would just kind of pick me off at.
John: Yeah, so, so once again, this game that is now um, just shy of 20 years old proves itself, still fully capable of just producing a great time. Anytime you, you wanna set it up and get it out and play and, you know, for games like this, technically I guess it's a dudes on a map game, it's a combat sort of game.
Um, the line of sight rules, which can be very confusing in a lot of these games are very, If you know, you put your head down on the side of the board and if you can see from your guy to the other. That's line of sight and you can take that shot. Um, so altitude gives you an advantage and it's very easy because the altitudes are very discreet.
The pieces just, uh, the, the way these puzzle pieces set together, it's very easy to tell you get plus one die if you're higher. You get plus one defense die if, if, [00:23:00] if your attacker is lower. So, uh, it's, the rules are about as simple and as straightforward as you can get, which makes it really aids in the, in the flow of the game since the rule set is so simple.
You are focusing on that drama. Um, you're making the jokes, you're talking about the fact that you've got, you know, red coats fighting against vikings that are fighting against dragons, that are fighting against whatever. I mean, that's in a lot of ways everything that's going on on the board is completely absurd, but somehow completely intense, both at the same time.
Samuel: And I, I do really. The map. I mean, I think the, the map should get some credit for just making it a mm-hmm. Really easy game to play. Yeah. Um, I mean, I've played some other, you know, dudes on a map. Games and terrain can be a hassle. Yep. Right. You're right. Especially cause like you want it to be interesting, but then you get into like hills and it's like, well how do I put my guys on this hill?
There's not really a space for them to stand and they're gonna fall down and I've got this big old tank that just makes things awkward. And here it's all very [00:24:00] simple, right? You've got everything in discreet hexes, and.
Stephen: You know, yeah. There's level, there's very distinguished, uh, there's very distinct levels.
Distinct levels. And then, you know, you've got features that block along the site, or if you are adjacent to them, they provide you with, uh, you know, defense, b defensive bonuses. Mm-hmm. Yeah. You know, if you, if you walk in water, you have to stop. Yep. It's that easy. Unless you have water walking, which an ability.
And
John: at one point, Sam, you were looking to put ing down below the bridge, down in the water. And the, the rule's pretty simple. Hey, if, if you can't stand the guy up on the spot, then yeah. At that point, he doesn't go there. Yeah. So the model
Samuel: wasn't, wasn't gonna fit. The wings were too
John: bad, we're too big. The shape of the model aids in, in, in the way the game is played as well.
Yeah.
Stephen: So the, the base would have fit, but with the way his wings kind. Or fla out towards the top, uh, the bridge would have, would've, would've been allowed, wouldn't have allowed him to lay flat on the, uh, on his base. So that would've been an illegal movement. [00:25:00] Mm-hmm. And, you know, it's, it's really cool how, cuz like all, so the other thing with the bridge is, I believe it's five hexes off of, I think it's five hexes high.
Uh, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. So it's five hexes. Most squad figures can fit underneath the bridge. There are a couple squad figures that have their swords up, like they're holding 'em up in the air. They cannot fit under the bridge because their sword is in the way, but some of the other ones could. So, Doesn't fit
John: fit.
The Go ator can fit. We're actually pushing guys under the bridge right now to see who fits and who doesn't. Yeah. Does it
Stephen: fit? So it's a super simple system that, I mean, you can't ask for this kind of simplicity. And then when you, you know, when they're building the figures, when they're building the armies, You know, they're taking all this into account, but as the end user, [00:26:00] it's, it's very easy.
It flows, it's very intuitive and you know, it shouldn't take a person more than five minutes to figure out how to play hero escape. Yeah.
John: Because it's just so intuitive. It makes sense. It feels
Samuel: like a beer in pretzels war game. Yeah. Which is,
Stephen: which is enjoyable. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would certainly have, you know, a glass of scotch or a beer or two or three.
John: Yeah. And at the same time, it's a game that you could play with your seven or eight year old and still have a blast. Yeah. And frankly, your seven or eight year old kid could have two of his friends over and they could play it as well, because the rules are straightforward enough that that's okay.
Stephen: Yeah.
And you know, that's the other thing. It's very scalable. So yes, one-on-one is the way to go, but you know, you can play. Two V two where, you know you've got two people on one side of the map and you're trying to take out the other two people on the other side of the map, I've made a six player map. Mm-hmm.
Where, um, for the [00:27:00] first like four rounds, you cannot attack the two people to your, to the, to your left and right. But you can attack the three that are across from you. Okay. And then after round four, it's anything goes. It's a rule, there's a kit to it that you can just make whatever kind of rules you want.
And you know the other thing that you can, the other thing that people do, and there's a whole subreddit that's dedicated to it, is people use this as a role playing system. Really? Yeah. So they'll, huh? They'll build like caves and, and they'll build their world. You may use, they'll build their world and use, uh, you know, the terrain and everything.
And then they'll use the monsters that came in, the d and d sets or some of the ones that come in the, so you mean the
Samuel: components, not the rules. Oh. Both, huh? I wouldn't have guessed there was enough. So
John: they do, they do combat with the hero escapee rule
Stephen: set. Mm-hmm. I mean, I don't that, you know, I haven't gone that hard into it, but I, I imagine [00:28:00] there's a, that's worth modified.
Samuel: I, I wouldn't have guessed there was enough meat on the bones for this rule set to be used for an R ppg. Yeah. Um, it's, it's fine for a, a light war
John: game, but yeah, I suppose it would depend on how much, um, how much advancement your characters have and how you would set up both, how those rules work. Yeah.
Stephen: I mean, it's, it's all there.
I haven't explored it, so I can't really speak
Samuel: to it. I mean, component wise, frankly, I'm, I'm in the back of my head. I'm toying with, you know, I could go on eBay, get some of this
John: terrain. Yeah. And it's, and considering what it is by, by modern standards, it is crazy and expensive. A hundred dollars gets you.
Two feet. I mean, you've, you, you, you are all set to go, all the terrain. I
Samuel: mean, frankly, the problem is it's all hexes. Yeah, that's true. Um, I don't think I have any system right now that uses hexes. Mm-hmm. You can convert them, but it's an adjustment, but part
Stephen: part, yeah.
John: And you know, I, I've discussed this before.
I like team games because it allows you to buddy up with somebody and have them, you can coach them, you can help them because you're working on the same team and it gives you the ability to take somebody who's [00:29:00] younger or somebody who's less experienced. And help them ease into a game that they don't have otherwise.
And this is a game and, and I've done this, I've done this with my boys friend of mine, brought over his boy and we had a all out battle. Great big long map, boys on one side, boys on the other side, everybody rushing towards the middle. Where the people that start on the left side of the board are all one team, and the people that start on the right side of the board are all one team.
And, and it just, it just works Absolutely. As well as a team game. It can be, uh, individuals where you can play 3, 4, 5, 6, however many, and everybody's against everybody. Uh, you can mix that up any way you want. And it's just the, the, the core rule set is just so foundational that you can take it in any direction you want.
Stephen: Yeah. So I was just looking through the, um, Master set three, the battle from the Under Dark Hero scape, um, instructions. That's the d and d version. This is the d and d version. Okay. So it's not a roleplaying system, but [00:30:00] it's kind of like a roleplaying campaign that you can do. So like Gloom haven? Uh, yeah, I would say so.
Essentially what you do is you can either buy four sets or you can build each room. One at a time and play through. Okay? And so what happens is you go into the first room and the first room is called like the altar room or something, and there's a glyph in the middle of the room and some monsters that are surrounding it.
And your objective is to secure the glyph and. Defeat the, like half the monsters in such amount of time. And what it does, instead of leveling up your characters, you get glyphs that you can take from the first room into the second room mm-hmm. And into the third room and they augment your hero. So it might be, um, you know, Use this cliff to give you plus one health or plus one, whatever.
[00:31:00] Or it could be use this to blow up an area like as like a fireball or something. Yeah, so I mean, there is a lot that you can do. Like a creative person could go really crazy with a standard heroes scape set. And have a completely different game that is still hero scape.
Samuel: I mean, that's one of the things that I like about hero scape is I think every time I've played, you see totally different.
I mean, yes, part of this is to do with your collection. Mm-hmm. Steven. But every time I play hero scape, I see totally different units. The boards totally different. All of the units have different abilities. Mm-hmm. Right. It's like that's, it's, it's crazy. Like, yeah. Yeah. So there's similarities and you can kind of see like, okay, these are balanced if you look at the points and the stats.
But I mean, frankly, some models feel like they're better than others. Yeah.
John: It doesn't, and they're, and they're, and that's the point system allows you to, to even that out. It doesn't feel like a
Samuel: [00:32:00] perfectly balanced game. And that's okay. Yeah. It's still a lot of fun and you just, just, you know. Be a good sport about
John: it.
Right. And, and the game kind of lends yourself to that good sport. Yeah.
Samuel: But I, I think the system is flexible enough to allow for that. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Um, it's not like we've talked a lot about some games very, being very polished. Mm-hmm. Being very tightly tuned. Um, and here Escapee isn't,
Stephen: it's me. I would say It's medium tuned.
It,
Samuel: it's, it's well tuned. Yeah. But it. Tightly tuned. Mm-hmm. Um, it's, it's, and
Stephen: you know, there's, there's evidence of that. Um, I'll shout out Hero escapers.com. It's the hero escaping, community gathering place on the internet. There's a project that they've been doing where they've essentially gone through all of the.
Retail of retail available hero, escapee figures, and I say retail available re hero escapee figures because [00:33:00] they as a community have designed hundreds of additional figures that you can 3D print out or you can repurpose your own figures or. Um, you know, they use hero clicks, figures, uh, for, you know, these different as proxies, but I digress.
There's a pro, there's a project that they've done where they've gone back and revalued all of the hero scape units that you could, that were official units, and they call it the Hero Delta Project. And essentially what they've done is they've, I guess, through hundreds of plays and. Maybe cross-referencing abilities and stat blocks and whatever they've adjusted the, the, the values of all the different units.
And what you'll see is there are probably of the hundreds of units that there are, there are only like seven that are way out of whack. Huh? The rest of 'em. I mean, I, I, I briefly [00:34:00] glanced at this document and I say briefly, like I looked through the entire list just to see what I thought was broken, to see if it was broken.
Mm-hmm. There were only like seven units that stood out to me as like over 20 or 30 point variants. The rest of them are within five to 10 points of each oth of Okay. Where they naturally were. So, I mean, all that's, they
John: run, they run that a little bit when they did the development. Yeah, yeah.
Samuel: Yeah. And I think, so frankly, my, my biggest issue, it isn't that some units are more powerful than others.
Cause that happens. It's whatever. Mm-hmm. You paid some points for 'em. Who cares? The problem is some units are boring compared to others.
Stephen: Oh yeah. I mean, there's always filler units,
Samuel: right? It's like, okay, what does this guy do? Whatever. Like, I had all these orks and they rolled dice. I. But they
John: aren't as exciting as playing a dragon or something like that.
Yeah, well, I mean, it's
Stephen: like the, even, it's
Samuel: like basic infantry, ghost. There's more interesting,
John: but, but when we were picking Sam, one of the things I pointed out to you, I'm going through a whole set of the cards and the, and the whatever the faction is, that's the red pieces. And I'm like, these are the ugly pieces.
And some people [00:35:00] love the, the, the, the guys that are skin with re on 'em or they like the, oh, the,
Stephen: the marrow. Like eight people
John: just love that stuff. And I'm like, no, I would much rather be playing the Roman legions. I would much rather be playing something like that. And it's just, I think everybody comes to the game and they've got the kind of things that they like to do, and they grab their guys because it doesn't matter what your hobby is, your guys are in this set somewhere.
There's somebody here that's gonna appeal to you. And you
Stephen: know that that was another fantastic thing about. You know, the original release of Hero Scape, it was a conglomeration of like everyth theme possible. Yeah. So yeah, you've got your, you've got your Roman Legion, you've got these nasty looking marrows, which are like half.
Decay swamp people Dead. Dead people. Yeah. Right. I mean, you've got zombies. There's zombies, zombies, zombies,
Samuel: sores.
John: There's giant,
Stephen: the zombies are hilarious. There's,
Samuel: there's Samurai. Yep. [00:36:00] There's many black, there's Valkyries, there's
John: robots. Fictionist. Stuff. There's robots, there's all kinds of things. Yeah.
Stephen: The zombies are hilarious because you have to have line of sight on their heads, so you have to essentially headshot the zombies.
So the
John: sense
Stephen: of humor is there as well. Yeah. I mean, and that's all within the framework of how this game works, and and
John: that's, that's what allows it to tell the story. Absolutely. The fact that they, they found ways to. Part of the game. And you
Stephen: know, I I, I remember when I was trying to buy sets of zombies back in the day because I missed that wave.
I was buying 'em secondhand on eBay. They were going for ridiculous amounts of money because that was about the time. That was it last night. Don't, no. What was, what was the zombie game that came out after last night on. Hmm. Like it, it was, there was a zombie game that came out around 2012, 2013. I do not recall.
There was like all the rage, and essentially what people were [00:37:00] trying to do was make a hero scape version of it. So there were people with like 10 and 15 squads of zombies, and the idea would be to start at one end of the map and have the zombie hoards start at the other end of. And to get all the way through them.
You didn't have to kill them, but you had to break a and get past them. You had to break a wedge through them, huh? Was the one scenario I saw. And I just thought it was really cool and ingenious and just goes to prove that with a little creativity, you can really come up with some really interesting concepts with this system.
Samuel: So who, who won? Who do we start with Giving rating?
Stephen: Um, I, I, I think if the game had played out, I think John would've been our eventual victor, I think. So he did still have an untouched hero. He had an untouched hero. He had mm-hmm. Two, two rifle men and two rifle girl, man, and a, yeah. So, and, and, and one, right?
I had one hero with some damage, and one, uh, [00:38:00] one, one. Um, well, one guy, one dragon slayer. One
John: dragon slur. That's right. Dropped a dragon. So,
Stephen: uh, so yeah, I think, I think had it, uh, played out, I think John won one. So let's, let's do the thing, John. And I think it's
John: fair to give Sam last word because he had the most glorious
Stephen: death.
He did. He did indeed have the most noteworthy death. Uh, On the board. So let's start with John. John, let's do the thing. So,
John: so through the years, I, my tagline for this game has been quote damn near perfect game and quote, and it's just, it, it hits a. On all the different levels. It's uh, it's like Lego where you get to build and, and create things, um, that can be quite beautiful.
Um, it's, you can collect, you can, you, can you, you get wrapped up in the characters. So there's a, there's sort of a role playing aspect to it. And you use funny accents depending on which
Stephen: characters you're playing. And you definitely can pick favorites. Yep. And have favorites. Like for the, for a long time you [00:39:00] had Sergeant Drake Alexander as a bumper sticker on the back Absolutely.
Of your van. Absolutely. Absolut. How many people are rolling around with hero scape, pump stickers
John: and, and then on top of, and, and those are the sidelines. I mean, the, the game itself, the actual game, the combat game, when you play. That's the fourth thing. Mm-hmm. I mean, so you gotta get to the fourth thing before you actually get to what the game is.
So I, as far as I'm concerned, I mean, as sevens go, this is just the most dependable, most, most go all day game. And, um, if you want to, you could build yourself a couple of 1500 point armies and play this all day long on a rainy Saturday and just have a great, great session. Yeah.
Stephen: If you wanna see some crazy setup.
Again, go to hero escapers.com and take a look through some of the gallery. Uh, you can also go to the hero scape subreddit. It's not as active as hero Escapers, but I mean, there are maps that are [00:40:00] like tens and twenties of square feet. Yeah. Large. Yep. And I've seen people with, like, there was a guy that I.
Was able to recreate the Battle of Helms deep in hero escapee. Wow. And I looked at it, I looked at that, I'm like, that is amazing. That is something I will never accomplish. Not with my collection and not with how much money I'm willing to spend on hero scape, but, you know. Good on you, dude. That was, that's amazing.
Um, but yeah, it, uh, it's just, it's such an amazing. It's just amazing what you can do with this system. Um, you know, there, there have been times where I've had. Like two or three boards set up next to each other that were small, that were designed for, you know, two people to get head-to-head and into battle.
Like within the first [00:41:00] turn, uh, there was a time where I built a, a, a map that took up an entire pool table. That had distinct zones. Like there was a mountain with some, with some glacier. There was a volcano on one side. There was a cave, well, it was a abstract of a cave.
John: You, you, you had climate zones, there were climate
Stephen: zones.
There was a castle in the middle. And you know, it was just this big monstrosity that, you know, I had a hell of a time designing like I probably. Two or three days designing that map and you know, just that, that to me was fun. And we played it and it wasn't as fun because we weren't close to each other.
But you know what, I did it and it was, it was, it was great. And there's a picture of it somewhere, I just don't know where. Anyway, there's just so much that you can do with this system that I can't imagine giving this any other rating than a seven because. [00:42:00] I mean, it's literally one of my favorite games.
It's no matter. No matter anything that happens, this one is always gonna be in the collection. Exactly. And at in some, in some
John: capacity. This, this is a game that may need to go into your will so that there's not an argument when you pass on.
Stephen: Yeah. So Samuel, it is now your turn. Why don't you, before, before you give your rating, why don't you eulogize your, your good friend memory
Samuel: ing, I mean, yeah.
Ing uh, see, really, in my mind, the main character here wasn't membering. It was grim, grim, grim neck. Yes, I agree. Right. Grim neck was, was out here.
John: Neck deep in bags. Yeah, he, he, he
Samuel: let his squad neck deep into the vicious human ambush. Trying to [00:43:00] clear the path with his good friend Membering to escape.
Stephen: Um, is he painting us as the bad guys?
John: He is painting
Samuel: us as the bad guys, but you know, you know, he, he ended up falling. He, he put up a good fight and he fell innocent. Cri, more innocent. Grim neck. Grim neck. No murdered in cold blood. And you ing just kind of lost it. And she could have escaped, she could have just flown away, but she had to try and try and make
John: it right.
Try and, and try to avenge grim Nas
Samuel: murder. That's right. She had to try and avenge that murder and it didn't work out. But you know what, it was a close thing. Um, I enjoyed this game. Uh, it checks a lot of boxes for me. And, and to be honest, what I really it not have thought about it some, um, it reminds me of the skirmish war games that have come out.
Mm-hmm. I could see that, [00:44:00] um, like UND and War Cry or
John: mm-hmm. I could see that. Yeah.
Stephen: I mean, even like Unmatched has a little bit of this. I know we haven't played on Match yet, but I've got a set and I've been reading up on it and watching videos, but, but this has a,
John: for lack of a better term, a toy aspect to it that those, it does have a toy aspect to it and, and I think to a certain extent that.
Gives you permission to, to leave your adulthood to one side and just fall into this like a kid. And scream. And yell. Yeah. And, and like I said, do the stupid voices and, and, and pretend to breathe across the other players when you're playing a dragon. Yeah.
Samuel: And like, I wanna sit down and like, oh, I wanna get into this.
Right. I wanna come like, write up a. I dunno, rules for a campaign where you play different battles with different forces and there's a plot and it really makes it, [00:45:00] it makes me feel like a gm, right? Mm-hmm. Wow. Like when you're running an R ppg, I'm like, yeah, let's get into it.
John: Well, maybe there's five parts to this game.
I hadn't considered that because I wasn't,
Samuel: I was not playing this game to win, right? From like turn two on. I was playing this game to tell a good story. Yep. Yep. And it was a blast. Mm-hmm. Because normally when we play games, I played a win. Huh? You sure
John: do. You're, you're looking, you do win. You're looking
Stephen: for all the loopholes.
Yeah. Yeah. Looking for the best figure. I mean, and part of it is also like, if I had handed you all of the character cards last week and said, all right, take this home and pick out your army, you probably could have. The best army possible. Yeah. I think he did pretty good. He
John: certainly did
Stephen: better than I did.
Well, I mean sure. But Gru Grut and Grim Necker. Yeah. That's a, that's an easy Yeah, they're,
Samuel: they're pretty best. I didn't look through all of the cards. Yeah. I looked through about half of one of the two stacks you guys had out and when
John: I got here and you found your matches and,
Samuel: and I was like, well, these look cool enough.
I don't wanna [00:46:00] spend all
Stephen: night picking out an army. Oh, man. If he had seen or taken the death walkers, that would've been hilarious. I, I feel like the death walkers have Sam written all over them. Are they the zombies or next time else? No, they're like, um, they're cyborgs. Oh, okay. They're like the evil cyborgs, the death walkers.
Yeah, but no, I, I picked like, one of them, one of 'em basically walks into a middle, like a group of people and then explodes and kills everything within, I think four spaces of it or something. That's pretty cool. It's, it's
Samuel: ridiculous. Pretty cool. No, I, I picked a thematic force with two big stomping monsters.
Yeah. Because I wanted to have a good time and then I ran them in, into the middle of the board and killed a bunch of people and it was fun. Um, so your
John: rating, Sam,
Samuel: my rating, you know, I gotta give it a seven, right
John: then. Yeah. So there's consensus this time. It's all three of us. Give this
Stephen: game a seven. You know, it's ridiculous how we can finally agree on the, the pedigree of a particular [00:47:00] game, like usually.
One of us is just way off and left field. And some of the other ones, some of the rest of us are like, don't see where that's coming, coming from. Whyt you. Why can't you just like this game, like the rest of us? Yeah. I, I think we've reached a consensus and this is no, I, I
Samuel: like this. I really enjoy, like John was saying, there's a, there's a toy aspect to this mm-hmm.
Where it's just like, you just wanna mess with it. Yes, exactly. You just wanna mess with it. It's like, Like with Lego sets, right? When I was a kid I had, I had a Lego bucket, right? And I would just dig through the Lego bucket and I'd build whatever. Mm-hmm. And I'd, you know, mess with stuff. And now that I'm an adult, I'm not terribly interested in a Lego bucket cuz there's not enough.
Like, there's not enough colors to do everything in the right color and the brick sizes don't match. And the things, they don't look like dragons and they, they just don't line up. Right. Yeah. But you go, you go buy a Lego set. I got [00:48:00] a, like a diorama of the Star Wars trench run and you open it up and the bag is like, 80% little black and gray pieces that you kind of slowly assemble into the diara, and it was very satisfying.
It was very fun, and it was really complicated. Mm-hmm. It was like Lego
Stephen: building goes. Yeah. Lego's gotten real ridiculous. Right. And
Samuel: it felt, it didn't
Stephen: feel like a toy. Right. Yeah. The Lego has become the new model. Yeah. Like modeling kits. Yeah. Yeah.
Samuel: And, and hero Escapee reminds me of when I would just like look in the Lego bucket and go, what can I make with this?
John: Yep. Exactly. You let's, your imagination is forward in, in instead of back. Yeah. Yep. No, I agree.
Stephen: All right. Well that was, that was a pretty epic game of heroes. Escapee. Um, gentlemen, I thank you for joining me and playing one of my favorite games. Anyone else got any parting [00:49:00] words?
Samuel: Wasn't this on your top 10 list?
Stephen: Um, it was, uh, it is, uh, and we'll talk about it again when we get to our top 10 list. So, yeah, by the. We don't normally do top 10 lists or top lists or whatever. We, you know, we normally do our, just the game that we're playing. But, um, I think for our 25th episode, we're going to do a top 10 list. So keep an eye out for that.
Mm-hmm. And, um, Should be fun. Additionally, we do have a Discord server and you know, I and the intros and the outros and in the show notes and whatever I mentioned, the Discord server. But we really want to push for people to participate in our discord because what we really want to start doing is having you guys and gals pick the games that we play.
So, uh, if it's a poll that I put up and you guys can vote on it, or if you want to suggest games to us, and, uh, if there's a consensus, [00:50:00] uh, I would, I would like to, uh, let you do that for us. Uh, you know, broaden our horizons or maybe you'd get to see something new. Maybe, uh, there's a game that, uh, we have that we haven't played that you want to hear about, or, you know, you have a favorite game and you want us to trash it because, uh, you have bad tasting in games.
You know,
Samuel: as long as it's not a racing game, I think it'll be all right.
Stephen: So we need everyone to go to our discord and vote for racing games.
It's essentially what we're at. Check out our discord. Uh, it's gonna be a lot of fun. It's new, so, you know, um,
Samuel: wondering,
John: we're going to give instructions on, we'll
Samuel: certainly say hello, how to access the discord at some point.
Stephen: Uh, I mean, it's, it's in the show note. There's links in the show notes. Yep. There's links on our website games from the seller.com.
So yeah, from the website, um, from the link tree on our Instagram or our Twitter page. The show notes, uh, there's links everywhere to our Discord server. [00:51:00] Feel free to join us, drop us a line. Uh, most of us are there pretty much all the time, so, uh, yeah, look forward to hearing from you.
