From the Battle of All Time to the Adventure of All Time, or How Heroscape Made Me Who I am Today

For a little over a year, I’ve been demoing 2-4 board games twice a month at Pandemonium. At PAX East, for two years in a row, I’ve taken on a similar duty talking to hundreds of folks about the board games on sale. On top of this, for eight months (twice a week), I worked the store’s register where I had to shelf, answer questions, and suggest board games for our customers on current and former releases alike.

In other words, I’ve talked with innumerable folks – regulars, seasoned hobbyists, the board-game curious, and one-time visitors – about several board games. 

So – to the point –  why is my first article for the store about Heroscape, a game released 20 years ago and vaguely remembered by my adult peers as “the one with the hex tiles, right?”

The answer is simple. I hope – fervently – that the game’s newfound publication via Renegade Games will allow it to reach a new audience of gamers, be they around the same age I was 20 years ago or for folks my age who weren’t able to play the game when it was coming out.

That’s because beyond being a game whose simplicity and accessibility still holds true in a crowded market, Heroscape gave me the tools to become the game facilitator I am today. It was a toolkit of ideas meant to bring one’s imagination out of one’s mind into a place where I could share it with others. 

Heroscape was a board game unlike any other – for one, it didn’t even have a board!

Good marketing begins with a question someone never knew they needed to answer. In my case – then being about 13 years old – the question was simple: what was going on with this thing?

Whether it was the box, the 30-second commercial ad, or the bubble display put up in Toys “R” Us, I can’t remember exactly what my first exposure to Heroscape – “the battle of all time” – was. All I knew is that I had to find out.

(An old bubble display, not in its original location. These have become a collector’s item, like much of the game. Image courtesy: https://boardgamegeek.com/image/5505848/heroscape-master-set-rise-of-the-valkyrie)

At that age, I knew what valkyrie were, and I knew about dragons. I knew about samurai, and Gundam had exposed me to the idea of killer robots (regardless of scale). And I was a Navy brat, so I knew about WWII paratroopers. But what on earth were they all doing in the same box fighting each other?

When I saw “Valhalla” in the box copy, that made slightly more sense, but I was already hooked. So on an out-of-state trip to my grandmother’s house, I remember bringing my saved money ((the princely sum of $40) to Toys “R” Us and picking up the first Heroscape set.

It was as big as my torso, and the lid (held down by velcro) popped open to show more of the staged battles within. I remember carefully sliding the brown, cardboard tray out of the richly decorated box and being puzzled at what I saw. There were the figurines – all 30 of them, painted – and then the hexagon tiles, neatly stacked and slotted into the shape of the box. 

Was this it?

Unlike board games I had played before, there was no sense about how the game wanted me to fit them together or what troops would be fighting on which sides. Instead, within the two rulebooks I quickly opened, there were basic and advanced rules, some LEGO-esque instructions on battlefields to build, and, perhaps, the greatest unprinted and unasked question I would ever receive: what will you do with this? 

What will your imagination unlock?

Heroscape gave me the tools to share the stories I imagined

I could belabor the point about the joy of growing up with Heroscape as it was coming out. How new terrain, from the mundane roads to the soaring edifices of castles (The Fortress of the Archkyrie – a classic, if not difficult-to-assemble joy!) added new fields of adventuring for one’s merry band of warring heroes. Or how the confounding ecstasy of seeing heroes from Earth’s history – Shaolin monks, Mohican warriors, Scottish highlanders – paired with alien witches, robotic overlords, winged Kyrie (the valkyrie) and a whole vampire family introduced new elements of lore and seeds of stories to discover while playing.

This type of play was not new to me. I was lucky to have grown up with toys and action figures that evoked similar questions (look up the “Great Adventures” Fisher-Price sets), but those stories – the lore and adventures they generated – all stayed within my head. Sharing them with others required complicated discussions of histories few of my friends had time to understand (at least as I perceived it), so I kept my imagination to myself. 

And this was fine. 

But Heroscape gave me the tools to try something different. I could build battlefields and construct armies to set up the great adventures I sought to undertake and invite others to discover the stories with me.

I remember the first scenario I built for Heroscape was an adventure I called "The Great Wind". It was a large, mound-shaped map that, every turn – owing to its elevation –  had wind that would blow characters back (potentially off the mountain!) while both sides raced to retrieve a glyph on the summit. By all means, it wasn't super great (my older brother quickly figured out an exploit – and I learned the value of precision in rules), but it was the first time I had created imaginative play that others could directly enter and experience in a somewhat systematic way.

The game was less about “what will you do?” but more about “what will you do – with others?”

[To be able to rebuild the battlefields I designed, I took sequential pictures with an old webcam of the build, level by level. The Great Wind (on left) got as high as 15 (!) levels. On the right – the last battlefield I documented, is The Fortress of Gribanoptogurt. One army had to capture the castle’s flag, while the other defended. One of these days, I’ll recreate them on VirtualScape. Both original – low resolution – pictures.]

To this end, I credit my mother. She didn’t necessarily understand why her son liked this game so much, but she did know it was what he liked. And so she would try out the scenarios with me and let me keep terrain built in rooms less occupied or on otherwise empty tabletops not used for eating. 

Whenever parents come into Pandemonium with teens who were roughly my age then, asking questions while their children rattle off multiple facts about the game they want to play, I think back to my own past, and I’m grateful for parents like this.

Heroscape (among other things) let me realize I wasn’t alone in liking games

When I was lucky enough to go to college, I did not take Heroscape with me. Ostensibly,  I didn’t want it to get damaged, but,  in reality, even though the game still occupied a large chunk of my consciousness in middle and high school, I never talked about it much outside of my own family. To me, it seemed, there were always more important things people wanted from me. I’ve always enjoyed learning, so as Honors classes became AP classes, I had tests, homework to complete, lab reports to write, and so on. We had a dog to walk. Extracurriculars, too.

Plus, it was super nerdy. I was never all that social in school, but even I knew that there were certain things you didn’t talk about, lest you open yourself up for derision or even more exclusion. Even though I had the tools to share my games with people, I didn’t have the courage to do so. So, like many things, I ensconced myself in my studies and found myself as a science major at a four-year school.

But sometimes, you end up where you need to be, especially after stress and exhaustion wear down barriers to social anxiety, and you get to talking and realize other folks (especially the ones in the library on Friday nights) were out there, just like me, even if we came from completely different places.

All of us, that is, had stories within us that we were aching to tell and thought games were the way to do that. These interactive, analog, experiences could open up a place to exist, for just a little bit of time, to enter a world of adventure and daring, and take back a little of that positive feeling into our day-to-day lives. Just like a campfire creates a place of gathering and warmth, our games, too, do so much more than pass the evening.

So, gradually, over the four years, and in the rare downtime between things, I found my people. Some of them had even played Heroscape and remembered it fondly. But by then, we had found other ways of engaging our creativity. Thanks to a few summers with a research stipend (and the realization that buying used games was much cheaper), we soon got to try the world of hobby board games: Runewars, Mansions of Madness, Mage Knight, and even Twilight Imperium (3rd Ed), we all got to play and explore. A friend (“Why didn’t you tell me you played Heroscape?”) introduced me to D&D (3.5 edition), and tabletop roleplaying games blew the lid off of everything.

I had a whole world opened up to me, maybe because, for the first time, I felt like I could be open with people about my hobbies. And I did finally bring my Heroscape to college (during year 3).

Heroscape gave me a way to give back to the community

I had done well enough in college to attend graduate school, and I knew about the power of board games to bring people together. It didn’t take long for me to whisper the magic words at a mandatory social gathering for graduate students (“Catan? Sure.”) before I found my tribe and we formed a regular board game group. I don’t know if I accomplished much in graduate school, but I can say with great pride that 2 marriages tie back to those meetings (and lifelong friends).

But getting back on track – it also didn’t take long for my friends to introduce me to the new thing happening in our school’s hometown. Elm City Games – which started as a board game cafe of sorts – had just opened downtown. Initially, they were looking for DMs to run games – and so I went – but in the process of volunteering and playing there – and finding a suspicious number of Heroscape minis in the collective miniatures box –  I learned that the owner also played Heroscape, also was a fan, and also had some of the designers in his phone’s contact list.

To make a long story short, the store’s second anniversary was coming up, and the community of volunteers was given the opportunity to run events for the all-day celebration. I could have run anything, but I knew it was a special night for the store, and I knew that called for a special occasion.

We hauled the tiles out of the basement. I organized them into rolling racks (and cataloged what they had). I pulled out my college laptop (which could still run VirtualScape – the fan-made, map-making software), and I got ready to run the event.

[My inner showman, on display. And, also, what you can do with more than one basic set. Personal picture.]

We started in the afternoon and played all night. I got to see the 4th Massachusetts Line take on Tornak, the orc-riding-a-deinonychus. There was laughter, shouting, and a lot of folks who recognized me from D&D saying “so that’s where that mini comes from?” It had been nearly 8 years since Heroscape had stopped being printed, and the magic of the game was still there.

But the best part of the day was earlier that afternoon. A dad came in with his daughter and her friend. “What is this?” they both asked.

“Would you like to play and find out?”

And so they did. Not only did the two kids get to play, but you could tell the dad wanted to as well. Were there tactics perfect? Were their turns fully optimized? No. But neither were the adults later that night (especially when The Incredible Hulk fought Marcus Decimus Gallus and his squad of Roman legionnaires).

Being able to pick something up – wonder what it is – play with it – and do that with friends: this is what Heroscape offered. And for a while, there was some regret when I thought back on demoing the game. Did it make sense to teach something that was out-of-print or astronomically inaccessible for the very demographic for which it was designed? 

Yes, ultimately – I did think so. 

Heroscape is a game with minimal rules that allows gamers to translate their ideas into tangible realities they can share with other people. This game, when seen as an entry point, is evergreen as long as there are folks willing to share it. I wanted people at the store to pick up Heroscape, and, in doing so, recognize that the tools it offered went beyond that game itself. You see them in the ttRPGs, the wargames, and the board games (and trading card games) there and on Pandemonium’s shelves. “If I can play Heroscape,” I wanted folks to ask, “what else can I do?”

For me and for others, did exposure to those tools have to come from Heroscape? No. 

But am I glad they did? Yes.

And now, 20 years later, it’s my hope that a new generation of gamers who never got to play the game can try it out for themselves. And, I hope, that someone, somewhere out there – playing either with their friends or a very confused (but loving) parent – may be able to write an article like this 20 years from now too.

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Jeremiah has been a volunteer community member of Pandemonium since 2019 and a part-time staff member since January 2023. These days, you'll currently find him running board game events and ttRPGs at the store, something he's been doing in a semi-public fashion since 2015. His favorite games are ones where players feel empowered to play the game as they choose, which ends up being a lot of low-prep, tabletop RPGs (and certain board games). But if asked -- and depending on his mood -- he'll choose Heroscape, Duel of Ages II, Mansions of Madness (1e), or Runewars for board games and Ten Candles for a ttRPG.