ON THE SUBJECT OF HeroQuest: I was forced to play it last week as I was holidaying with the girlfriend and her parents in Devon, and her dad brought HeroQuest. He's the only one that like it and the rest of us think it's trash. It's as dull as dishwater. I remember being really excited about it as a kid but never playing it. I did play the PC game though! The rigid turn order makes it so that most players spend ages being blocked in a corridor with no much to do, especially as the optimal move is to just make the barbarian P1 and send him to stand in doorways and hack at stuff, doing this one room at a time. There's also a tonne of cards that are basically "you get hurt/die", which means the weak wizard should never do any searching ever, as he'll often just die from it. A more flexible turn order would suit the game better and allow everyone to actually do something, as well as getting rid of the shitty cards (or make them luck based?). Well except for the evil Wizard. He has the most boring role ever and I can't think of a way to change that without making HeroQuest another game.
Though really you're better off just buying a game like Descent or even Doom[1], which are a modern, actually-fun version of HeroQuest, though they take even longer to play. Any dungeon crawl would be better, really. SpaceHulk is still brill, though. You can sell the original HQ + expansions for tonnes if you have the original box. You could do that and buy descent + expansions and be much better off in terms of fun, says I.
On holiday I did manage to get my girlfriend's mum addicted to
Lords of Waterdeep. It's a simple worker placement jobbie that involves lots of blocks. And I also bought Stronghold over the holiday, just because I was near Exeter and I knew there was a shop there. Anyway the game caused my girlfriend to cry when we played it yesterday.... hmmm. Not sure if I should bring that one out again, no matter how positive she seems to be about playing it again with the rule errate we've found on BGG. (Even though the version we have is essentially the second English edition, the rules are still ambiguous and crap and don't completely match the intent of the original polish version, it seems).
IN OTHER NEWS, as I'm sure you all care, I'm about to start forcing my usual group of players to play a game I designed and printed out on card. Let's hope it is great success and once it's in working order I can force all of you to play it. After that: World Domination.
[1] I've not played this, but it's meant to be a bit unbalanced, I think I remember reading? I