HeroQuest: First Light turns the classic board game into something I could actually imagine kids playing today

Once upon a time, HeroQuest was the board game equivalent of a gateway drug, only instead of leading to meth it would lead you into the slightly less financially crippling life of a Warhammer player. Or maybe it would get you into Dungeons & Dragons. Either way, you'd end up a nerd with a collection of little guys you will definitely finish painting one of these days.

Unlike that original board game, Avalon Hill's boutique revival of HeroQuest isn't for an audience of kids who might grow up to be roleplayers. It's for the adults those kids already grew up to be. A deluxe nostalgia box full of lushly detailed plastic orcs and goblins and dungeon furniture—which turned out to be easier to paint than I expected—it's an expensive proposition aimed at middle-aged folks like me who played HeroQuest in the 1990s and still have fond memories of saying "I use my broadsword!" and "Fire of wrath!"

HeroQuest: First Light exists to get new kids into that roleplayer pipeline. While Avalon Hill has already rereleased a bunch of HeroQuest's expansions and added some brand new ones, First Light is more like an alternate edition of the base game. It includes everything you need to play, board and dice and cards, at a lower price and in a smaller box you could actually imagine handing to a 12 year old without the weight immediately crushing them.

Where it saves money is by doing away with almost all of that lushly detailed plastic. Most of the miniature monsters and all the doors and furniture are cardboard. If you think HeroQuest is just about the toyetic tactility of the physical objects, then First Light is not going to be for you. For anyone who is just here to play the game, however, First Light has a lot to recommend it.

For starters the board is double-sided, with a different dungeon layout on the reverse which several of the new quests make use of. And while most of the monsters are cardboard standees, you do get new plastic sculpts of the four heroes and one new monster—a dragon rearing up on its hind legs, who acts as a recurring foe in the 10 new quests.

Those quests are completely different to the ones in the original game. Though taking place at the same time, they tell the story of a separate squad of heroes facing different problems. By the end of this campaign you'll have earned a lot of the same relics and bought the same equipment as someone who played the original, but you'll have got there via an alternate route.

The quests are a little more involved as well, with a lot of rooms having a paragraph of narration and sometimes a point of interaction beyond just some monsters to kill. Do you steal donations from the temple? Give a magic ring to the ghost who says it belongs to him? One quest involves a Lord of the Rings battle scene between two bad-guy armies, and the players get to take control of one set of monsters.

These are quests created by a designer who is familiar enough with the game to experiment with it, and while the frequent additions of bespoke rules for one-off situations might be tricky for younger players, figuring out how to adjudicate these kind of edge cases fairly is a useful skill for a baby Dungeon Master to learn. First Light feels even more like an incubator for the next generation of DMs than HeroQuest already was.

It's also got some extra rules that feel like they should have been part of the base game. For instance, if there are no enemies on the board, players can just move eight squares on their turn instead of rolling dice for it. If you search for treasure in a room with a cupboard in it you get to draw two cards instead of one, and if you're in a room with a fireplace you can rest to heal a body point by having a hot chocolate or something.

The one downside to these additions is that instead of being in the rulebook they're in the separate quest book, making them harder to reference in play. I spent a chunk of my first session leafing through the rules trying to find things that weren't there, and even when I did find them, flicking back and forth between the page with the current map on it and referencing additions like the new rules for blessings and curses was a hassle.

Light my fire (of wrath)

It's hard to recommend First Light if you already own HeroQuest. Sure, you get a book of new quests, a double-sided board, and a dragon, but existing players will get better value from an add-on where everything is new like Rise of the Dread Moon or Mage of the Mirror. If you were put off HeroQuest by its price, however, or if you're looking at it as a gift for kids, First Light becomes an easy recommendation.

In an alternate timeline everyone got really into budget games that came in an envelope like Give Me the Brain and Kill Doctor Lucky and the golden age of board games was defined by clever design and low prices. But instead we live in the timeline where gigantic crowdfunded board games you need a spare room to store are what the people want. HeroQuest transforming from a gateway to Warhammer and D&D to become more like GloomHaven—but simple enough you can still play it while three beers deep—was probably inevitable. First Light brings HeroQuest back to its roots, making it once again a game someone's parents can afford to buy for their 12th birthday and, in doing so, completely change the trajectory of their life.

When I say it like that, it sounds like a bad thing. Maybe buy that kid a guitar instead and give them at least a chance of growing up to be cool.

HeroQuest: First Light will be available through Target from January 12 and via other retailers after that.