HeroQuest: First Light Review

[Music] hey everybody Welcome to drive-through view 796 today we're going to talk about hero Quest first light now a couple years ago I reviewed of the new edition re-release of the original hero Quest I'll put a link to the video description there uh that was your only entry point into getting heroquest until this came out and this is coming out like right now as I'm recording this video uh that other box is somewhat north of $100 uh it's quite a big box you know it's got tons of Miniatures and plastic and plastic doors and all and furniture and all this kinds of stuff uh this one is going to be like right around $50 kind of depends which country you're in Europe Canada United States and so on but ballpark $50 this is a kind of a new entry point so you could pick this up and then get expansions that are all going to be just perfectly compatible with this if you kind of already have everything or you have the original set this still might be of interest to you because it has kind of a new intro starting Quest or quest line uh there's 10 quests in here and it's kind of interesting because the story is sort of parallel the original story in the original game which is kind of cool you have your four Heroes your Barbarian your elf your dwarf and your Wizard and uh you know some of the similar monsters and items and all that kind of stuff that you get uh so a couple other things are are interest depending if you're coming into it brand new or if you're kind of a returning player into why or why not you might pick this up so I'm going to go down to the table uh I'm not going to really go over like all the mechanics of how to play here request it's pretty simple like I said I'll have my video linked below I will show some updates to the app that are pertinent based on some of the comments I had made at the time uh in that video they've updated and improved the app so I'll show that here and then I'll kind of walk through some of the other uh pieces of it here and kind of come back give you my general thoughts on it so let's jump down to the table and then we'll take a look okay so I did kind of want to sort of unbox it I've obviously already punched it and played this a little bit so but I just want to kind of give you a sense of the box so you see kind of the size the box here You' got your quest book which you don't want to see too much of unless you're going to be the zargon player slightly updated rule book with just some clarifications from the original so you do if you are a returning player you get kind of an slightly improved rule book you get a new quest line which you could use to um you know introduce new players to the game instead of playing through the same one again and again and again this gives you kind of an alternative path in and then you get another zargon screen I think this is exactly like the other one I'm not super sure but I didn't really see any differences there so you get another screen get some more sheets which you probably have hundreds of you get a new board which is actually double-sided which I'll show you in a minute and then you get the kind of this nice box insert here so couple things to note we have some new Miniatures here so you have a new Dragon miniature which is brand new and then so you've got that and you've got different sculpts for the basic four Heroes here so you've got the Barbarian hero there just a little different pose and then the cards are just slightly different too with the new poses but these are the same four Heroes the dwarf actually starts with a different weapon it starts with the hand ax instead of the short sword which is a little bit more thematic because it's a dwarf here you've got the wizard miniature and then finally here an elf miniature so that is all of the Miniatures that you get in the game now the rest of the components that would be plastic here you got some doors and or excuse me walls and little traps and things like that just like in the base game other tokens here for wound markers now the doors you got the closed door and the open door here these are of course plastic in the re-release new edition of the game uh one thing with these I kind of wish these were Hollow here cuz in the new edition and even in the the original Edition these were Hollow so I wish it was kind of like a double punch so you punched the door out and then you could punch out this I don't like that it's black cuz you can there's like figures hiding behind that depending on like where you're sitting around the table that you may not readily just be like oh there's a skeleton there or something you know you might forget and then that kind of gets Noy so that's that's a kind of a minor thing but um I do wish that so here we have standies and these are all monsters that come in the original game here so you can see kind of the dark night uh you've got the Abominations here and these I quite like um because I mean the I prefer the mini let's be honest but for kind of a cheap entry point um this is a fine tradeoff I think cuz I think I like the illustrations and the artwork on these like so it's a goblin let me see if I can find an orc here like so and then so we have other I think I showed you everything there's some zombies and mummies and stuff like that in there now here is also the furniture which of course is big chunky plastic in the original game and so here you just have cardboard again I think this is a fine trade-off for a cheaper entry point in the game which you can then upgrade to you know either get the big box or never get the big box and just get the um expansions and just come off of here now the cards nothing really to speak of here the one thing I will say about the cards is you'll have extra equipment which isn't very useful um you know for a returning player obviously a new player is going to be useful you've got the Monster cards here which you don't really need you've got kind of the alternative um dwarf card here that starts with the hand ax but otherwise these cards are pretty much you know what's in the base game now the nice thing is you get extra sets of the Spells so now you have air fire water and Earth and you've got extra copies of this so if you wanted to run kind of a funky party with like two wizards um I mean not that you couldn't do it before but it's kind of cool because you can sort of play with some party combinations here uh because typically what happens if you're new is the wizard will choose three elements and the elf will choose whatever the other element left over is so in the games that I've been playing recently I gave the air spells to the elf and then the wizard had fire water and Earth and you know that that was fine so now I if I had two sets of these I can run some different combinations which is fun uh now the treasure cards nothing really to speak of here same treasure deck as the original and then the artifacts and then you have the dread spells which is the same that's in there so if you're a returning player the only thing really of value here is the extra spells which is cool um you've also got here um some different Miniatures and sculpts you know some extra dice um the rest of this the cardboard components are really not going to be of any use to returning player but you know like I said for an entry level player this is good it makes it a cheaper uh more available sort of entry point and then you can move on from there now let's take a look at the board here so here we have the normal side of the board it's just slightly different the board itself the spaces are the same size as the original Edition or the previous Edition uh the board itself is a little bit smaller The Other Board is just very slightly bigger but it doesn't really make any difference and then the logo here is a little bit different on this board I like the other logo better but on the other side of this board you get a new style of map which the quest line makes creative use of so you have this sort of cave system and it looks you might look at this and be like this just a bunch of square s it's very interesting how they do it um I don't want to spoil it because it's kind of a cool sort of Riff on some of the the quest that you know you maybe are familiar with so I just want to say I really like this I'll talk more about this when we go up to talk my talking head in the review but if you're being you know like a creative like a game master or the zargon player this is kind of nice because it gives you a different kind of layout and once you see how they kind of use it in the quest book that'll give give you some more ideas I think so this is also a nice um bang for your buck uh you know if you're a returning player or an existing player now the last thing I want to talk about here is some of the updates they've made to the app let's get this back on here and then I have the uh sound turned down a little bit but there's usually some ominous music so I just want to show basically couple things here so if we go here let me just zoom in so this is all in the settings here the thing that I really want to point out now you can go and add this is already available the first light quest line and what this does is it the app acts as a game master for you so you don't need a zargon player it'll run it through you which if you go back to my previous review I was kind of like not so fond of but they made some changes first of all they changed the tablet landscape which I think is new some of these have have been updated like a year ago um and some are more newer I think so tablet landscape is nice cuz then you can you know turn this on its side and I will say even today I I would not play this on a phone I would play it on a tablet just because you're dragging the position of your characters where they are relative on the map and doing that on the phone is not fun I just I wouldn't play this on a phone anyway so a couple other things you can track monster tokens you can toggle the furniture to be intangible if you really want I wouldn't do that I think that's new um these three settings right here monsters attack weed we Advanced goblins and advanced skeletons now and I've toggled some others here but the most important I think is Advanced goblins and advanced skeletons I would have those always on because without those then the um AI so to speak in the amp is quite dumb right and you it's very exploitable okay now whereas if you turn these on then they kind of move around a little bit more smartly they don't just clog up the doorway for you to just kill one at a time and so on so to me these should just be on all the time there shouldn't even be an option I just turn both of those on monsters attack weak I'm a little bit of two minds about that I kind of go back and forth because what it'll do it'll always attack if they can if the monster can get to the character that has the lowest hit points which is going to be the wizard now it doesn't know how many hit points you might have left because it doesn't really track it in here but um so here you've got the body there and the body there so I think you can set it up to track that but if you don't then it'll just attack whatever your starting is but then that at first that was really I liked that but then it kind of makes it a little bit predictable um so yeah I don't know so I turned it off I played a couple games with it on and then turned it off because then it was kind of it's pseudo random it's like whoever it can get to it gets to which seems fine because it it seems like it would be a nice little difficulty improver to improve the difficulty make it more difficult but then it just becomes exploitable it can so I think there's some Wile room there I just leave it off cuz you know bad rolls can kind of harm me anyway now down here at the bottom there's a couple other ones which I played with well I didn't play with double wandering monsters so whenever you go through the treasure deck sometimes you can get Treasures but you can also get wandering monster which you then tap in the app and it'll spawn what the whatever the wandering monster is appropriate for that Quest so you can you could do that I did play with some of these other ones here all of these so plus one body points plus one mind points plus one attack plus one defend so if a monster has let's say here like if I turned all those on instead of four three attack dice this would roll four it would roll four defend dice instead it would have three body points it would have four mind points and I bumped all those up I'm like I played heroquest a whole bunch I'm just going to turn all of these on and then I've proceeded to uh well I didn't party WIP but I was like pretty much about to wipe the whole party on the first Quest and I was like yeah that's too much because this game is not like level driven you don't really level your characters up the leveling happens through the different items and such so as you level up you might know oh instead of the hand ax I have the battle axe I've got four attack dice now and I'm now got chain mail which gives me extra body points and so on or extra defend Dice and so what's nice about this though is if you could do something this is just kind of theory crafting you could take somebody through this quest line and then if they were like ah we want to play the other Quest when you start that game off if you carry your characters over they're going to have all this great equipment by the time they get done with this quest line they're going to have you know a bunch of they're just going to steamroll the entire first Quest but you could go turn a lot of these on and play with it you know that way cuz this sort of simulates a little bit of what the argon player will do if you're playing one versus many because the game is really designed in its heart and its core to you know be tinkered with by the game master similar to how a game master will operate in Dungeons and Dragons cuz if it finds out like this you're just this too easy for you guys we got to we got to ramp up the difficulty or whatever or it's too hard or whatever you know you can make some some changes there now this will never be as good as a human or at least a a you know a game master that knows what they're doing kind of thing um but it's going to get close so you can Tinker with this here and I think this as your character sort of level up and take on different quests you as a group can kind of collectively say okay well what would the game master should they do here well let's just double wandering monsters up this time or something like that so it's good but anyway I would say always turn on Advanced goblins and skeletons because that's just really um really really required okay so that's pretty much it with the components everything everything let's go back to my talking head okay so that's a little bit about hero Quest first light um I'm not going to really do my normal three pillars of review but I'm going to kind of go through them in a sense the main thing I want to talk about is kind of the uh solo experience versus The Experience you know with other players and then kind of the app in both cases now for me I played through five of the quests in this um just all solo and I really enjoyed it I think the quests themselves that I've seen are are really fun I think there's a couple of nice little twists in there that I've seen I haven't gotten all the way through the quest book yet but I was pretty happily surprised about like oh this is a cool little twist or this gu this is a little bit tricky then I you know figured out not like crazy hard or anything but it was like oh that's cute how they did that you know and I use the word cute and I feels derogatory I don't mean that in a derogatory way at all I'm like oh that's a little clever you know that's fun it's it's all it's a very light game right so and I liked what they did there so that was cool I will say having now sat down with the app the new additions to the app the new updates I like them a lot I like how you can do these different things where you track the hero and all that stuff or you make the monster smarter you can upgrade the difficulty as you want I think those are all really excellent I will say when I was playing through it solo it gets a little bit like you're too much in the app like you could basically play the game with just the app get rid of the board sit there with some dice have your little character sheets in your cards and that's it you don't even need the board out which kind of like that kind of it's a let down because the game is such a visual thing heroquest you know with the furniture and the doors and everything now I think in a situation where we were playing multiple people at the table and nobody really wanted to be zargon everybody wanted to play the heroes then the app's actually going to serve itself very well um because you can have one person in the app but not everybody's going to be looking at the app and you're not you don't really it's not like the app is sucking your attention away from the board you can choose to look at the board or the app and move your character around the main thing is though because you have to drag your character through the spaces in case there's traps and things so you might walk over a spike trap or pick trap then you have to be in the app to do that so I think though the app would work really well you could have one person with the app kind of acting as the DM but is also playing and then you know Billy across the table says okay I roll up I get six so I'm going to go this way so in the app just go okay he didn't hit a trap or you did hit a trap and then the app does a good job of narrating there's actually voice over um there's a lot of cool stuff it's it doesn't the app doesn't like overstay it's welcome or insert itself it's just that when you're playing solo you're always in the app because you're doing all four characters and it's just like you end up just being in the app that way in the solo experience so which kind of just detracts from the thing that makes heroquest great which is like this is going to sound strange but it's the furniture right it's like you know it's just the visual 3D of all of it all and like it feel there's an immersion to the way the board works in this that has just never really been achieved in other games even with tiles there's something special about the way you know where there could be corridors and you don't know if you go around this corner If this just going to be a block or a trap or whatever other dungeon crawls don't really do that that visceral sort of crawling experience they just can't achieve it with the tile system that this does and because the app pulls you out of that it's like yeah okay so but I I don't hate it I like I said I really liked the quests and stuff and the little you know sort of side curve balls that throws at you and all that kind of stuff it was fun I had a good time but it just kind of started pulling me out of it but again I think if I was an experience in a type of experience with multiple players and just had like one person and I would run the app no problem and I then we but our Attention our focus our conversation would all be on the board and then I wouldn't give a crap if I got to go do okay you moved work okay okay we're good fine and then we can discuss things cuz then it would just be couple seconds in the app back to here you know what I mean and uh but again this the solo experience it was like too much the other thing I will say so do I recommend this that kind of thing um I would say yes especially if you're a new player I think this is cool I like that there's a different quest line CU I've played that starting Quest I don't know probably three times not all the way through three times but all the way through twice and you know it's like this you if you want to say we've talked in our group excuse me for stuttering a little bit there but we've T talked in our group about you know playing this cuz we do some Campaign games here and there and some of the other guys haven't played heroquest and it's like I I'm like yeah let's totally do that and I'm like I don't really want to play in the first quest line again um but you know now this is different you know so it's like a nice alternative so I think that's really worth its salt there um you know just having that and I like having the extra board um you know I don't know if other expansions will rely on this board or not because then it'll kind of force you to buy this I don't know if they should do that but it' be kind of cool because it's kind of a neat board um and that kind of thing so yeah so if you're existing guy then I don't know really if you should get this I think if you're the type that gets everything you're probably getting it anyway cuz there's I know there's people out there like me that have everything already for it um the one thing I will say though this was what makes it tough is like I mentioned before and this I know this sounds silly but the furniture I don't really miss the Miniatures of the monsters that much although I kind of do but I miss the furniture being 3D like it being flat it's like yeah that's not really hero Quest unless the three the furniture is 3D cuz you know there's just most games don't really have the 3D Furniture it's heroquest came out what in the '90s OR ' 89 or 90 or something and they just came out with 3D Furniture right away and it's just cool because it just pops up that may not be that important to people but you know like I said this is a good entry point if you don't want to commit to I think the original box is like $125 it might be more than that it's a lot of money and this is a much easier ask for people that have really wanted to try this but have not done it and a much you know easier price point to get in and then at that point you're like okay let's do that and then get an expansion or something because I think really the only thing you're missing out of that base box is the Furniture cuz you you you'll end up getting with expansions Miniatures and you know the you do come with hero Miniatures here and yeah you you don't have Miniatures for the the guys and the Monsters um you know to me that's not that big a deal but it be cool if they did like a Furniture pack or something that you could upgrade this with cuz then it's like a jump from $50 and you're like oh we're spending another $125 just to get the furniture um but to me like I don't know you can't really oversell that furniture maybe I'm just stuck on that because I think it's you know I remember when this came out all those years ago and I was like holy cow this looks amazing um but yeah so I think like I said as an experience kind of Taken on its own it's really cool like the quest I like the new map um I like the changes they've done to the app you don't have to you know have a zargon player if you don't want that kind of thing um so a little bit some kind of caveats in there but generally I recommend it I think it's quality I think it's fun and um it's just kind of to you in terms of what you want to spend money on and what what you want your entry point to be um with heroquest but uh yeah take a look thanks [Music] [Music]