In case you wanted to hear me (mostly) wax lyrical about Xenoblade Chronicles in the Dutch language (I know, it’s a bit of a niche), you can do so now at Gamebites.

It’s not just me though. Other voices include Guan van Zoggel and Bastiaan Vroegop, with the entire thing being hosted by Erwin Vogelaar. And with that, I have to apologize to all English readers out there. The guttural sounds required to pronounce those names must now surely haunt your sub-conscious.

About a year ago Lego started a new line of their famous brick toys: Lego Games. The idea was pretty simple; create board games using Lego pieces. Unfortunately, Lego was also wholly focused upon their core philosophy of toys to create with.

I say unfortunately, but it was more of a double-edged sword. Lego kept their games simple to the point of obsolescence. Ramses Pyramid had a nice core concept that was a little throwback to Ravenburger’s Coco Crazy but in essence was just boring.

The other side of the blade was that Lego wanted these games to be as simple as possible so players could expand upon them themselves. In other words, to bring the core concept of Lego’s bricks to games (and subsequently game design).

A valliant effort, but maybe a bridge too far. In the end only Creationary seemed to work as a board game as it was Pictionary with Lego bricks. While a brilliant mixture, it didn’t really translate the modular, expanding creation force that was behind the bricks to board games.

Fast forward a year and Lego presents a second attempt: Lego Heroica. The very first look I got at the game instantly rekindled an old flame within and I wasn’t the only one experiencing that feeling. Was this HeroQuest reborn? HeroQuest itself being the boardgame gateway-drug to proper role-playing games from the eighties made by Milton Bradley (Hasbro) and Games Workshop.

The brilliance of HeroQuest being that is was as modular as Lego is, allowing one board for a huge range of dungeons to crawl through. MB even released a creation-kit for it, so players could create their own adventures. Basically, the idea of HeroQuest captured in Lego was perfect. Insanely perfect.

As such, I ordered all four Heroica sets a week ago. Now that I finally sampled the actual game, the question can be answered. Is Lego Heroica HeroQuest reborn? No.

But (and that’s a huge but) it could be. Again, Heroica suffers from the same problem as the other Lego board games, it is simplistic. You move around a dungeon built from Lego pieces, but it’s mainly corridors you’re playing in.

Combat is resolved by rolling the die (funny thing: for some reason Lego refuses to call it a die, instead calling it ‘a Lego dice’?) which has more or less a 50-50 chance of defeating an enemy instantly or losing health.

The odd thing here is that different monsters have no difficulty, they just deal different amounts of damage if you lose. But for all intents and purposes, a spider is just as difficult to defeat as a Goblin Commmander for all players equally. Which is kind of silly as the game does tend to give you different weapons and skills.

Likewise, dieing dying is spectacularly meaningless. Lose all your health and you can spend following turns recuperating your health. Meaning that skill or defeat is wholly absent from the game, you just plod along until you finally defeat the boss monster.

It’s almost as if the game aspect wasn’t that important and the rules serve more as a way to provide a backdrop for Lego toys. In a way it’s just a very nice plastic Game of the Goose. Still, as I mentioned earlier, Lego’s aim was to instill that creation aspect into games and while this isn’t HeroQuest. It certainly can be. Of the four different sets, three have an additional mechanic on top of the basic Heroica rules.

Waldurk has moveable ‘magic doors’. Nathuz has blocking rocks that can be destroyed or negated. And Fortaan has doors that require players to collect keys. (The fourth set Draida, is really the ‘starter kit’ and actually has less elements than the others.) Again simple, but they hint at more than just roll-and-move.

There are also two variants described. Battle Heroica is the old RPG set-up with one player taking control of the monsters, while the others try to defeat him. There’s also Epic Heroica, which boils down to “you play your character in each set as a series of adventures”. The sets also hint at a grand set-up which involves all four sets combined as a giant adventure, which ups the strategic choices considerably.

All those concepts thrown together come awfully close to what HeroQuest was. Which basically leaves the combat system to be woefully simplistic. And guess what? Now the creation drive of Lego pops up and it becomes clear that while the games were kept simple to be played by anyone, all the elements are present to expand upon it: to create a new game.

Seems Lego hit the jackpot after all!

So, the sets are a great purchase. Not because of the actual game, but rather because it functions as a springboard to create something grander. I’ll be pouring over the old HeroQuest rules the coming days, trying to salvage whatever I can and transplant it into Lego Heroica. Might even post them here.

Lego Heroica may not be deep enough by itself, but it sure as hell is a great modular miniature system just waiting to be used for a truly heroic experience. And that, I take it, was exactly the point.

PS: You know what the brilliant thing is about Ramses Pyramid because of Heroica? It provides you with a small army of Heroica-ready mummies!

Xenoblade is currently my Game of the Year 2011, and visions of the Monado seem to imply only Dark Souls might get a shot at giving it a run for its money. That said, the Gem Crafting in the game seems rather complex and could do with an explanation.

So having faffed about with gem crafting for a few hours now, I thought it prudent to share my experiences with the rest. It’s not 100% correct (at least, I assume so), but it’ll get you into the right mindset for Gem Crafting.

(more…)

Ugly Sweet

• “How about releasing the game as is? There’s no balance to the game whatsoever, but everybody will be too busy with gorging on the wonderfully addictive dungeon-crawling to notice! Hah! I can just improve it with daily patches! I’m going to be rich!”

Ugly

• “Developing characters? Even the interesting and promising ones? Nah, that would be way too much work . Just give everybody some obtuse puzzles to contend with and we’ll get back to them in a year or so… What do you mean, ‘the game only lasts a few hours’?”

Ugly

• “You know, we should really keep every phase of the game the same. That way nobody is surprised by anything later on in the game and they will just drone on for all eternity.”

Ugly

• “How about we give every large creature the exact same strategy to beat? That will make things a lot easier for the players don’t you think? It’s not like they want to use their skills in unexpected ways or something like that.”