Unplugged #42: Five and Dime

[GamerDad]

Dr. Matt Carlson's Unplugged #42: Five and Dime article - http://www.gamerdad.com/detail.cfm?itemID=2957

[Alpern]

Hey, Matt! We picked up Heroscape about 4 months ago based largely on your review, and I've been meaning to tell you just how much we love it! I played a game with Becca just yesterday, in fact!

[txa1265]

Heroscape was a game that our older son thought looked very interesting and put on his Christmas list. Based on your Holiday Guide we gave it to my Mom to get for him ... he got it (plus an expansion we've not opened yet) and have played a bunch.

Couple of thoughts:
- Until you get used to it, it is somewhat dismaying to have a game take so much longer to set up than to play.
- Once you are used to it, you can do some decent strategy playing - the boys were playing last weekend and the combination of ranged and melee combat, and the different objectives and moves for higher ground, etc.

Thanks for the insight, it is a pretty fun little game!

Mike

[happycamper]

Couple of thoughts:
- Until you get used to it, it is somewhat dismaying to have a game take so much longer to set up than to play.
Thanks for the insight, it is a pretty fun little game!

Mike

Nifty avatar there!

I'm so pleased to hear that my columns have actually helped folks find fun games to play.

Heroscape does have an annoying problem of needing to set up (all the cool plastic terrain pieces) in order to play.

To reduce the set-up time, I now rarely use the scenarios in the book or on the net and just put together some set-up willy-nilly. As long as you take care to make the setup somewhat even for both sides, you can get away with a much quicker start.

If you try to build the provided scenarios piece by piece its pretty time-consuming, I could see it taking 15-30 minutes or so. However, I can throw a playing area together in 4 or 5 minutes if I'm not trying for anything too spectacular.

If you like Heroscape, I plan to try to write up a review of all the expansions that have come out in an upcoming column (say, Febuary or so hopefully.)