HEROSCAPE: THE BATTLE OF ALL TIME
Milton Bradley/Hasbro (no console- WHAT HAS SCIENCE DONE)

In a nutshell: I really want to play a strategy RPG, but my hometown has no electricity!

As a fairly long-time, if still somewhat casual dabbler in tabletop gaming, every so often I find myself longing for the more tactile number-crunching experience of a good old war game or dungeon crawl. Unfortunately, as our old high-school cell of gaming geeks started to fall into our respective ruts and develop all kinds of zany scheduling problems, it’s a feat to get a consistent group together for extended RPG campaigns. Normally. the likes of Disgaea or anything with the word “Tactics” in it will scratch the itch, but every so often it becomes a full-blown rash. A rash that can only be cured by me sitting down and realizing how much damn work would go into generating scenarios, NPC’s, equipment lists, maps/diagrams if I fear one of the group might be one of the nitpicking “rules lawyer” sorts, and so on. And even once a game begins, there’s almost always the realization that after all that prep-work, the one running the session ends up effectively sitting out of the game, playing an omnipotent referee and the commander of a small army of doomed minions (or a Freelance Orc Rape Squad, depending on the GMSQ (Game Master Sadism Quotient), depriving them of the carefree hack and slash adventuring.

On a carefully-researched larf (in the INTERNET AGE, even whims can be researched quickly), I tried out Heroscape, which is essentially as far as such gaming can be dumbed down without becoming Attacktix*. It’s a (relatively) fast-paced, multi-genre tabletop game, with a nice and easy tile-based battlefield. Frankly, if you play such games often it’s worth buying for the terrain alone- interlocking, stackable plastic hexes are much, MUCH more intuitive than paper maps with imaginary elevation levels penciled in, and a lot more flexible and cost efficient than the model-railroad dioramas that many of the games encourage.

The basics are pretty much this: Every turn, you move your units, and if an enemy is within range, you grab as many of the game dice as your character’s “Attack” stat, and roll them. Said target then gets to roll a number of dice equal to their defense. Now, these aren’t normal dice. In fact, they appear blank. (My Ninja info ca- agh, damn you, Youtube). The Heroscape dice each have two red skulls, two blue shields, and two blank sides- when rolling offensively, you want skulls. When rolling defensively, you want shields. When you just want to fail and accomplish nothing, you want blanks. Yeah, you’re going to want to stay away from those. There is also an included 20-sided die to remind you of the hit that playing with tiny plastic elves and Vikings will do to your social life, as well as being used once at the start of the game to see who goes first, and resolving certain special skills. (For example, there’s a Ninja character who can use a vanishing skill to evade damage on a roll of 9 or better. He’s great for annoying the SHIT out of people!)

There are two basic kinds of units, Heroes, represented by one stronger figure, and Squads, which can be represented on the field by several weaker figures, usually grunt troops, minions and the like. Squad characters typically have one hit point each, making them essentially cannon fodder, though their numbers and abilities usually succeed in making them hard to just brush off. For example, the EXTREMELY Zerg-Like Venoc Vipers, who have not only the usual 1 HP for squad types but NO defense roll whatsoever are capable of moving swiftly, don’t stop when they enter water, and best of all, can use the Frenzy skill to potientally ravage enemies while their typically short lifespan persists.

I have no idea how the game’s notion of balance works, but somehow it does. For the most part- I played a round recently with a team of Soulborg units, who have ridiculous defense rolls and low-to-average everything else. Since even their grunt units have 6 dice when defending, they got through most of the session unscathed, but also failed to deal much damage either. I made a point of no Soulborg units the next session and things moved much faster. But beside that, somehow in spite of nearly EVERY UNIT having some kind of special power that sounds awesome on paper, in practice the abilities are usually balanced out by a difficult activation requirement (usually a high die roll) or lowered actual stats (in the case of the above Ninja hero, his actual defense is a pathetic 1, with 1 HP on top of that. If he couldn’t Vanish, he’d be basically screwed.)

Of course, all this going on about the mechanics of the game system doesn’t even hit to the heart of the game. Warriors from throughout space and time, all united by their desire to beat the crap out of everyone else. The playable characters range from outright fantasy creatures like centaurs, bridge-dwelling trolls, and of course, Orcs, to historical figures like the Knights Templar, and fucking SPARTACUS. (Doesn’t everyone love him?) I hope the inclusion of him leads to more historical characters putting in appearances such as Evil Lincoln, Caligula, and heck, why not Jesus?

More unearthly beings such as the Doom-reject zombie-bug race, the Marro, and the Soulborgs, as well as ghosts, zombies, dragons, and a Marro zombie ghost dragon round out the assortment. There are also flatter tiles with magical extra effects, called Glyphs, which are laid face down on the field and when triggered can do things like heal you (good) or run the risk of killing every character in play (bad.)

Though the Master sets needed to begin play are a tad pricey, when compared to ‘real’ rpgs, the boosters and like are downright reasonable. (Insert cheap shot at Games Workshop- it’s still cool to do that, right?) Figure boosters aren’t blind-packed like most such games, you can easily see what you’re getting in each, which is refreshingly different than the norm. Also thoughtful is that most of the boosters also come with extra terrain tiles on which your growing army can stand. (Though lately, it seems like they mainly give out snow tiles- is it a seasonal thing?) As an added plus, the game’s pretty easy to customize if you have any sculpting talent and a knack for statistics. The hexes are about the right size for Transformers Robot Heroes, so I’m looking at making a Movie Ironhide card for the hell of it. (Actually, the Soulborg Deathwalker 8000 already has a pretty close set to what I’d give him…)

So assuming you’re anything like me, give it a shot if the chance arises. There’s a demo on the official site that gives a pretty good idea of how it works, as well as plenty of fan-made utilities on the web like map designers, blank character cards, so on (though I’ve yet to run
across a satisfactory custom character rule set.)

*Attacktix was/is a collectible miniatures game where the extent of the rules was pretty much you shot spring loaded missiles or other action features to knock other figures over. Some of them had special powers or something but it was more about picking the most bottom-heavy people you could find.