Thoughts on Heroica

My first-born and I have been playing Heroica every once in a while now. When Lego released this little board game with a dash of fantasy-rpg mixed in there, I was stoked but quickly disappointed when I actually read the rules of the one set I bought. Now, years later and as a father of two sons, I see where its target audience lies. And I know that hacking this is part of the design.

We've been lucky enough to acquire a few additional sets from a friend of mine at an okay price (the full sets have become somewhat expensive since they're out of production). We do not play in competition but in cooperation. That means, the monsters barely stand a chance. We do have permadeath for characters but each of us usually has two characters spare waiting for the first one to die.

Our current landscape. (c) 2020 Me on my Blog.

My son with his five years loves the thing. A usual run through all the lands we have usually takes us around 45 minutes, a good time for a kid his age. He generally spends the next thirty to sixty minutes after that playing with no rules and making his own stories into that world. It's really rather excellent and something I totally didn't account for when I bought the game as a university student with no offspring in sight.

Some things need to be changed about the monsters in order to make them more different from each other. The Goblin King in our game usually has that helmet-thingy and thus an additional HP. The Vampire can, of course, replace himself upon his death with the Giant Bat which has four HP and a damage rating equal to its HP – it is out of the box the most interesting beast in the game. Still trying to figure out how to make the Druid and the Golem Lord more interesting without breaking the game.

I also intend to make the game bigger and perhaps even add come characters. This will cost me some money and I need to scour BrickLink for some items but I think it could work. Perhaps a central village and one or two new landscapes with enemies like spiders and rats can be done without too much trouble. Also some female heroes are totally in order. When I get around to all that. Perhaps, when my second son becomes old enough to join us.