Lego Heroica: Castle Fortaan
2-4
8+
10+
Castle Fortaan has fallen to the Goblin King and his army of monsters. You must find a way past the Goblin horde to defeat the King, but can you discover his secret battle plans and return with the Helmet of Protection?
LEGO's Heroica series represents a classic dungeon game. The players move through tunnels, collecting treasure and fighting enemies. Conflict is resolved by dice rolls; the die results can be a number or a symbol, which might allow the player to use a special weapon. Instead of a character sheet, the players have equipment "backpacks" which can be filled with weapons, potions, keys, etc., depending on what they find during their adventure.
images © LEGO
User Reviews (3)
Add a Review for "Lego Heroica: Castle Fortaan"
You must be logged in to add a review.
Great intro to board-based RPGs
We bought this game (along with other expansions/sets) to play with my then-5-year-old son as an introduction to board-based RPGs.
For that putpose it worked really well. Lego was familiar territory for him and the rules were straightforward enough to grasp quickly.
Components
What you see in the picture above is pretty much it – lots of great lego pieces that are mostly simple stock lego components and them some special character pieces. All of the components are great quality (as you’d expect from Lego) and you can supplement them easily from pieces in your own lego colletion. There’s duplicates of some of the smaller, more easily lost, items as well so you don’t have to fear too much that you’ll lose something critical if you don’t have a large collection.
The rulebook is colourful, well-written and introduces the rules in a way that can be digested from a very quick skim-read.
Game play
Game play is semi-collaborative (although there is, in theory a winner) and don’t exclude anyone from play (as a lot of RPG style games do on character death) as characters that ‘die’ are only out of the action for a few turns. This does, of course, lead to bit of a lack of sense of risk but for younger plays that doesn’t seem to be too much of a problem.
Where the problems start to set in is with replay. The rules are very basic and there’s no real sense of progression to the characters so one dungeon-bash runs into another and they all seem a bit to samey to be entertaining beyond the first play or two. That said, the rules are clearly written with expansion in mind and so it’s easy to house-rule a progression system, add more monsters etc Very much in the spirit of lego.
Summary
If you’re wanting a simple introduction to RPG board games for some younger relatives this is a great place to start, especially if you’re willing to progressively add house rules.
If you’re looking for something with a bit of complexity out of the box then steer clear of this one or you’ll be disappointed.
There are TWO amazing things this game has going for it.
1.) ITS LEGO!!! the microfigs are amazing and the modular map is so cool! i love the Components i wish more games would team up with LEGO or Mega Block or something as you can make some fine board games out of LEGO. It was cool to build and cant with really cool pieces you cant get elsewhere.
2.) If you have young kids this is a great ‘My First Descent’ the base rules are simple and allow for a fair bit of the types of things that may happen in real Dungeon Crawls. The Modular board, collecting gear, judging fight or flight at low health, and many other aspects that are great to teach a beginner.
However the game itself, at first glance looks amazing, but the game is poorly designed and not worth playing twice. I guess to a degree i am reviewing a game for kids, from an adult perspective, but even my boys(8 & 9) find it boring.
With All that said this is Lego! the base rules are bland but as with all Lego the fun part is taking it apart and building it your way. I bought all the expansions, and now with house rules we have added a level up system that utilizes the modular die changing the die faces as you level up. we added other Lego monsters and spawn points, and well you get the idea. No one buys Legos to set them on a shelf and look at them. this like all other Lego products has to be personalized to make it fun.
We have a soft spot for Legos in our home, and when we saw that they were combining our love of bricks with our love of games we had little choice but to dive in.
Before I get to far into the review it is important to look at the Lego games for their own merit. Sure, most of the games are fairly simplistic, but that is because the audience tends to be younger kids. I’m mainly glad Lego even made games, let alone a dungeon crawl. The components are top notch, the level design is fun, and as for modularity, it’s LEGO! The game almost begs to be re-skinned with more advanced rules, of which their are a lot available online.
When you compare Heroica to other dungeon crawls it is fairly simple, but for our youngest it is just right. When compared to the other Lego games it is much more complex. Their are far more decisions to be made and the game is less linear than the other Lego games.
This product description is for the largest of the Heroica sets. Each set can be played by itself but are fully compatible and the games include suggestions for combining more than one set. We are such fans of the sets that we picked them all up and combined with the Lord of the Rings set make very large dungeons with lots of character and monster options.
Is this the deepest game on the market? Certainly not. Is it fun and approachable for young gamers? Absolutely. In my opinion that is the biggest draw of the game. I like to think of it as a bridge to more advanced games for my wee gamer.