The Money Pit

Even though I swore that I was done buying Heroscape stuff here I am $110.00 later with two bags full of it. For those that don’t know, Heroscape is a battle/war game where you and friend draft an army of small miniatures and fight it out on a multi-level battlefield made up of modular hexagonal plastic pieces that all fit together to create thousands of different types of battlefields.


http://www.hasbro.com/heroscape
There are a lot of miniature based wargames out there, one of the most popular is probably Warhammer, but games like Warhammer are very expensive as they rely on pewter/lead miniatures. These figures are also unpainted so if ya want them to look like anything more than a lump of silver you’ve got to paint them, which can be very time consuming. Now sure there are lots of folks that LOVE to paint their miniatures, some it seems focus more on the painting then actually playing, and boy some of them do fantastic jobs! But I’m a gamer and I would rather play, so I’ve always been on the look out for a game like Heroscape where the miniatures are plastic, i.e. cheaper, and pre-painted. But before I found Heroscape I stumbled upon Mage Knight and Heroclix.

Now Mage Knight and Heroclix were great, Mage Knight fulfilled my need for a Fantasy based wargame and Heroclix featured Comic Book heroes from both DC and Marvel Universes, but these games were “collectable” miniature games. What this means is that you would buy “packs” of random figures, so you were never sure exactly what you were getting, and some figures were rarer then others. My friends and I literally went crazy trying to get a decent representation of all the figures available, we spent way too much money. We eventually realized it was just a gimmick to get us to waste money and stopped. Then came Heroscape.

When my friend Ed and I, Scott did not and still doesn’t want anything to do with it, discovered Heroscape we were very excited, here is a game with cheep plastic pre-painted figures and they are not collectable. You can actually buy the figures you want and there are not any that are more rare they the others, cool! Also at first Hasbro, the makers of the game, promised just a couple expansions a year, we felt it would be pretty cheap to keep up with that. Then they started producing more and more special sets that added new types of terrain like snow and glaciers, and molten rock and lava rivers. Then there were special packs of giant size figures like Dragons and huge Robot Mechs. Then there was even a Castle Wall and Gate set. It was getting really hard to keep up. The final straw for me was when they came out with the Flag Bearers set. These were 5 individual figures with special powers that would boost other figures in your army. What really burned me about them was the fact that they were only available at Toys R Us and they were $13 bucks. “$13 bucks for one figure! That’s Crazy!” I thought. Then a couple things happened and I caved.

First Hasbro announced that they were developing a Marvel Superheroes version of Heroscape, and when I started seeing pictures of the game I was drooling. I then resigned my self to just buy the Marvel set. Then I was at Wal-mart, where Heroscape stuff is very cheap, and I saw the new Wave 6 expansion figures, they were awesome. The name of the set is Dawn of Darkness and it really excited me cause part of the set was focusing on a horror theme because there were Zombies and ghostly Shades. It made me remember one of the other major things I like about Heroscape, that it doesn’t rely on just one theme. There are Fantasy and Sci-Fi based characters; Historical based characters like Roman Legionaries, Musketmen, and WWII army guys; Oriental based Samurai and Ninjas; and the aforementioned Horror types like Warewolves, Ghosts, Zombies, and soon there will be Vampires. How could I give up on such a diverse game? Especially when I did some research and found out that there are some very cool expansions coming out. There will be a Jungle Set coming out, a Wave 7 set of figures including the Vampires I spoke of, and Right now there is a second Master Set out. The Master Set is what you need to start playing the game, and now there is a whole new one that includes a couple dozen brand new figures and new terrain pieces. Also there is already an expansion planed for the Marvel Superheroes version of the game. So with all this excitement over the new stuff that is out and is coming out I totally caved and went shopping.


As you can see I bought the Wave 6 figures they are on the top row, and because like I have said before I am a completist I went ahead and bought the overpriced Flag Bearers set. They are on the bottom row. I still have more to buy too, the Marvel Set is out as well as the Master Set 2. I wonder if my girlfriend, my family and my friends are concerned that I am dumping all this money into this game, sometimes it really does feel like a bottomless Money Pit, but what can I say, I am a total sucker.