Over the fall my youngest son, Gregory and I collected all four Heroica sets and had a lot of fun playing with them. Grognardia has a nice in depth review of the components and game.
The only thing he missed emphasizing in his review is that the Heroica components are basically dungeon tiles that you assemble in a wide variety of configurations. There are two types of "tiles". The rooms which are mostly built on a 6 by 6 plate and the corridors which are built on 2 by X plates. Both rooms and corridors use the 2 by 2 pieces with a single post on top to control movement and placement.
There is no reason why it can't be used to run a game of basic D&D if you and the kids want a more detailed game. In addition once you get how the corridors and rooms are built it is easy to rob your other lego sets to build your own custom pieces. Gregory built a half dozen new potions and items to put into the dungeon. When we finally got all four sets he even took the extra weapons and items and painted them when he saw me painting my miniatures.
not sure if anyone has mentioned it, but legos also sells a carry case with a large fold out map for all the heroica sets. making the game very portable and kinda expansive. there are more sets in the works for the near future that are referenced on the map. my son, who is a huge lego fanatic, loves these.
ReplyDeleteIf you're robbing your other Lego sets to build dungeons you could improvise the single-post 2x2 pieces by sticking those 1-dot transparent bits in the middle of 2x2 dots on a regular piece as well.
ReplyDeleteThough that's probably not news to any marginally serious Lego fan, I suppose.
Rob, perhaps you remember Tony playing D&D 4E, KotS, with his 7 year old son back in 2008? They used lego figs. ... http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=10628
ReplyDeleteSadly the pics are gone. But one distinct advantage of using lego figs instead of minis is that you can dismember the former. Tony's son butchered the kobolds in the early fights... there were kobold parts all over the battle map. How cool is that?
Secondly, I've been playing Descent with my nephews, who're slightly older (9 and 11). It's the best D&D starter box there could be, filled to the brim with tiles and minis for monsters and heroes. You'll never need anything else, though I bought them the three Dungeon Tiles master sets to build their own 'missions'.
The lego thing has only got brand recognition going for it (and oh, dismembered monsters) but other than that it's vastly overpriced and you get hardly anything for a lot of money. Children will transition more easily into it, using familiar toys, but then my nephews didn't need any familiarity factors to instantly find Descent minis cool.
Between Heroica's rules and D&D full-on there's other ideas for rules out there - I know that I've downloaded from BoardGameGeek rules which make it a lot more heroquest-y.
ReplyDeleteI played it. I found that without some customization, it got a bit repetitive. However, it was fun, and I especially enjoyed the potion mechanics.
ReplyDeleteI stumbled on to the same idea of using Heroica for Basic D&D minis/tiles. See a dungeon I made while playing (and then wrote up):
ReplyDeletehttp://zenopusarchives.blogspot.com/2014/01/mini-dungeon-monster-mountain-1.html