Play Report: Heroica with my son

My first-born and I cleaned up his little childreen's desk and assembled all of the Heroica we have into one big land full of danger and adventure. I knew that this campaign against four bosses and their minions spanning several different regions would take a long while (it wasn't our first big campaign, but the first one involving stuff we had designed and built ourselves). It would replace a chunk of goodnight-reading for a couple of evenings. What we have looks like this:

Our Heroica land is ready to be adventured in.

To the left you see the village with the graveyard. It is connected to the grassy lawn which leads into the secret tunnel (both are my son's work), the forest and the catacombs. Beyond the forest there is the goblin fortress. The four bosses are distributed over the lands, each in their own boss room and guarded by patrolling minions. Each of us got two characters, one to play and one spare. The other heroes were hanging out in the inn, with the exceptions of the king and the red mage, who were imprisoned in the cells connecting the catacombs and the goblin fortress. We play with permadeath to characters, by the way.



Session 1

We started out as the thief (my son) and the archer (me). We decide to ignore the vampire in the graveyard and leave him for last – he does turn into the giant bat upon death which is the most dangerous thing on the board. We want to gather up weapons and equipment before facing such a foe. Our first target is the dark druid in the forest. We hit the woods like a battering ram, each taking some kills and only getting lightly wounded. In the end I manage to snipe the druid from the side, the thief slips in and gathers the Chalice. That artifact gives you the ability to self-heal – very valuable. I decide that my archer needs that skill as well and backtrack to the store to buy a staff of healing.

Our next target is the golem lord which sits at the end of the looong hallway of doom my son has constructed. As he didn't put 2x2 plates down, we move one stud at a time. The kid had also decided that there would be an environmental hazard there: A big round slab was a circular saw that would do two points of damage to the first hero trying to pass. The thief takes the hit. When we reach the end there are two golems and a bat standing guard. I snipe one golem, my son stabs the other. We ignore the bat. The thief attacks the golem lord an a fierce battle ensues. He remains victorious but is griveously injured. We decide to keep ignoring the bat and go back towards the village.

Exiting the tunnel, the thief decides to try to get some more gold from the entrance of the catacombs. I walk back to the village alone, my archer wanting no part in such foolish business. The thief does get more than a piece of gold because of his special skill. Upon returning to the village he wants to go to the cookie-store (which my son built) but he can't get past the coffin blocking the way on the graveyard path. So the thief joins the archer in the inn. The thief then needs to go to bed and we end the game for the day.

Session 2

The plan was to slay the goblin king next. For that we had to go through the forest again but there were no monsters left in that place. At the fortress, we quickly overwhelmed the first goblin guard and then decided to split up: Each of us would go for one of the keys. The thief was to collect his key and then free the prisoners while the archer would try to assassinate the goblin king in his hall.

The plan went awry and the thief had to come over and help the archer get to her key. Despite being injured she couldn't resist taking a look into the throne room and loosing an arrow, plinking away the goblin king's helmet. The thief followed suit and finished off the boss – using the sword he had bought earlier in a special move. The archer took the helmet and put it on, effectively giving her a save against death once if she ever reached zero HP.

Next was freeing the prisoners. The goblin guard was quickly dispatched and the two hostages ran back to the village, one joining the drinkers in the inn, the other visiting his friend the shopkeeper in the store. We decided to go out the back entrance of the fortress, through the catacombs. While the golem lord was dead, his minions were still haunting that place and so was his artifact, the scepter. The mission through the few remaining bats and lone golem guard was without greater problems. The scepter in my backpack we hiked back to the village where the archer invited the thief for a drink at the inn. Bed time, next session on the next day.

Session 3

This session would go a bit crazy, as things sometimes go when you play with children. But before it did, we had a vampire to kill. We were all geared up: My archer had bought the healing staff and a health potion and wielded two artifacts, the scepter and the helmet. My son's thief had a sword, a strength potion, a potion of protection and our third artifact, the chalice. Thus equiped we decided to enter the graveyard.

There are several different types of obstacle in Heroica and coffins are one of them. Those can spawn an infinite number of bats if your dice rolls are bad enough – thus they can be a formidable obstacle in your way. There were several of them on the graveyard grounds, as well as a few bats and zombies. The first real danger however was the smaller crypt, where a zombie and a bat awaited in a positioning that forced an entering character to fight them both. The thief managed to kill them but got wounded and used up his potion of protection in the process.  The archer gave him her health potion as a reimbursement. Inside the crypt was the key to the large crypt where the vampire awaited us.

In the large crypt, the fight was quite even: I opened up with an arrow, seemingly killing the vampire. It turned out to be a ruse though, because he came back as an enormous bat. We took turns attacking the beast, getting some hits in, getting wounded. In the end we had used all of our remaining potions and my archer lost her helmet to a hit that would have otherwise killed her.

With the vampire slain (at this point we stopped playing with rules) and the threat to the village gone, everyone decided to meet at the temple in the forest for a victory celebration. While on the way there, the thief told the archer to go ahead without him – he wanted to go into the catacombs to mop up some leftover bats. On the way there he saw that a mountain had sprung up next to the grasslands. He climbed it and realized it was a volcano and it was about to erupt.

The thief ran as fast as the dice-rolls would take him to warn the others. Yelling he ran into the forest to tell everyone to seek shelter from the loomig volcanig inferno. As the villagers heard him, they decided to flee into the depths of the catacombs. Later they were forced to go into the cells of the fortress dungeon as chunks of red-hot lava rained from the sky. In the end, there was devastation everywhere. The villagers and heroes would have to find themselves a new home for our next campaign.

Lava everywhere!

Once again it was great playing this with my son. We took about three hours for the entire campaign with four bosses. The last boss fight against the giant bat was, what all boss fights in a game like this should be like: We both fought it, did damage, were almost killed but prevailed in the end. For future expansions I'll make to the game, I should definetly keep that in mind as far as boss designs go.

Heroica at its base is not a game for grown-ups to nerd-out about but it's ideal for my older son's age group (he is five years old). Simple, imaginative and capable of sparking a lot of creativity. When he grows older we can involve his younger brother in the game as well. We plan on adding more modules to our Heroica – even though we will need to play at a bigger table then.