HeroQuest, the classic board game first released in 1989, is coming back as a retail product. Hasbro made the announcement on Monday, fulfilling a promise it made to fans during a successful crowdfunding campaign in 2020. Pre-orders go live today for the base game priced at $125.99. The product is expected to ship in December.
Originally published by Milton Bradley, which Hasbro acquired in 1984, HeroQuest was a dungeon-crawling board game produced in partnership with Games Workshop. Over the years it has achieved cult status, with vintage copies selling for many times the original retail price. This new edition is more or less a straight remake, minus a handful of proprietary Games Workshop terms and characters. It includes a 14-quest campaign and more than 65 plastic miniatures. It is being published under Hasbro’s Avalon Hill imprint.
This new version of HeroQuest began life as a high-profile crowdfunding campaign hosted on the Haslab platform in February 2020. Base sets originally sold for $99.99. The campaign raised more than $4 million, and final units began shipping to backers in November 2021.
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A render of the box art for HeroQuest.
Image: Avalon Hill/Hasbro
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All-new sculpts for HeroQuest. Note that the elf character is now canonically female, while the fimir miniature has been swapped for an “abomination” (lower left).
Image: Avalon Hill/Hasbro
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Orcs and goblins now also feature female sculpts.
Image: Avalon Hill/Hasbro
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A render of the box art for HeroQuest.
Image: Avalon Hill/Hasbro
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The original HeroQuest featured terrain that was a combination of plastic and cardboard components. The all-new terrain is made entirely from plastic.
Image: Avalon Hill/Hasbro
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More examples of the all-plastic terrain.
Image: Avalon Hill/Hasbro
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Image: Avalon Hill/Hasbro
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Image: Avalon Hill/Hasbro
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Image: Avalon Hill/Hasbro
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Image: Avalon Hill/Hasbro
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Image: Avalon Hill/Hasbro
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Image: Avalon Hill/Hasbro
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A render of the box art for HeroQuest.
Image: Avalon Hill/Hasbro
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Image: Avalon Hill/Hasbro
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Image: Avalon Hill/Hasbro
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Note that the original game’s Chaos Magic has been changed to Dread Magic, likely another attempt to distance the game from Games Workshop intellectual property.
Image: Avalon Hill/Hasbro
A deluxe set was also offered during the campaign. Priced at $149.99, it included extra miniatures, three new character classes, remakes of two classic adventure modules (Return of the Witch Lord and Kellar’s Keep), plus three campaign exclusive adventures. No word on when — or if — any of those add-ons will ever be available at retail. Nevertheless, the team at Avalon Hill tells Polygon the blockbuster campaign helped prove out its business model — and breathe life into its creative team.
“HeroQuest ended up our proof of concept,” Chris Nadeau, senior director and product development lead at Avalon Hill, told Polygon in October. “What it’s allowed us to do is get real, to really make a team of Avalon Hill at Hasbro. […] Now, on the other side of this, now we have the budget, we have the tooling dollars, we have the [research and development budget]. We can now do this stuff in a more traditional way than just primarily going out as a [crowdfunding campaign].”
Avalon Hill recently announced another project called Risk Shadow Forces, the spiritual successor to the original legacy game, Risk Legacy, designed by Rob Daviau and published by Hasbro in 2011.
