Heroscape - Tips & Strategies

The *one* thing I wish I’d done differently when I began playing this game:

Some units are “Unique.” Some of the heroes, some of the squads. Some are “Common.” If you’ve done your research in advance and know you’re getting a common unit, or if you’ve purchase a lot from eBay or picked some up from Criagslist and you realize you have a common unit, get *more of the same*. That’s very important. The Warriors of Ashra, female elves with spears, are fun. If you have three squads of them. You don’t want to have only one.

Here is a Common card. See where it says “Common Squad”?
http://www.heroscapers.com/oldgallery/albums/userpics/10007/4thmass.jpg
Try to get three or more of these guys, if you like ’em.

Here is a Unique card. It says “Unique Squad.”
http://www.heroscapers.com/oldgallery/albums/userpics/10007/samurai.jpg
You can only use one.

Heroes can also be Unique or Common. A small handful of relatively recent heroes are “Uncommon.” For the purpose of your collection, it’s probably best to think of them as common, though in game mechanics they are more like unique. You’ll see, if you don’t already know.

One thing that I continue to notice when I play Heroscape is that people often equate being engaged with being stuck in one spot. As long as your unit doesn’t disengage (move to a hex that is not adjacent to the unit with which it is currently engaged), it is free to move around the other unit. In this way, you can gain height advantage, move to obtain a defensive bonus from nearby cover, or negate an opponent’s height advantage. When relying on the luck of the dice, the ability to roll an additional attack or defense die, or preventing your enemy from rolling an extra one, can make all the difference in the game.

This is a fun variant that myself and a few friends talked about which can be a lot of fun.

Everyone playing brings 1000 points worth of figures to draft from. At every matchup the two people playing show what they brought and both draft their 500 point armies from the 2000 points available.

The reason it’s a reverse draft is that you’re actually drafting the army you’ll be playing against, so it pays to bring some pretty terrible units. Those terrible units can be dumped on you, so it’s a good idea to make them terrible, but versatile.

There’s just so much fun that can come from first building a junky set of 1000 points, then to try and give your opponent the worst army possible, and then to see if you can make the atrocity you’ve been given work to your advantage.

Give it a try sometime.

Little kids are going to want to play this game. It’s a giant box of toys with rules, so it’s pretty easy to see why. What they’re not going to be able to do a lot of the time is to handle all those rules.

Since even the basic game can be hard to grasp for a 3-5 year old, it’s best to just play by whatever they can understand and forget the rest of the rules until they’re ready to add them.

A good practice to get into is to let them pick what figures they like without worrying about how many points it adds up to. Take the same number of figures for yourself, but make sure it’s significantly less points. This way you can play to win, still lose, and not feel like you gave the victory away. The child seeing you using strategy will likely try to mimic you, so it’s a good idea to explain what you were trying to do.

They’ll learn the game a little more with each play, won’t get discouraged by being overwhelmed with rules or beaten down by constantly losing, and you’ll get to share some fun time with them without having to play to lose.

I’m sure a lot of gamers are aware, but the best source for Heroscape information, strategy, maps, customs, etc., and the home of the online Heroscape community can be found at http://www.heroscapers.com. It is a great site and a great community.

For use with the castle expansion (or some particularly advantageous terrain):
One player (defender) drafts their army (point value is up to you), the other (attacker) then drafts from remaining units. Initially, the attacker is weaker (with respect to points and terrain), but after each defeat, increase the points available for their draft until they overwhelm the defender (who uses the same army for each fight, it’s up to you if they recover losses in between battles), see how many waves the defender can defeat.

So after playing several standard games yesterday where we eliminated each others armies for a victory, my brother and I decided we wanted a better use of all the terrain we were playing with. So we designated “base” areas with glyphs and played a Capture the Flag styled game where you had to infiltrate your opponents base, seize their “flag” (once you land on the glyph, you must stop for the turn), and then safely get the glyph back to your base area by moving it along with your character. Any time a character dies holding the glyph, the glyph stays on the hex and may be picked up by another ally. We randomly select 2 positive glyphs for flags. The glyph powers are still used and when player A is holding player B’s glyph, they’re allowed to move with it and gain it’s powers. If player B takes the glyph back, they have to stay stationary on top of the glyph if they want to keep the powers (and defend the flag). We found this was an extremely fun version to play and had us exploring all over the map to defend and attack as we escorted the glyph back to base. My assumption is that this works slightly better when you have multiple master sets so as to build out your battlefield on a larger scale and as with any house rule, YMMV, but we really liked it. 🙂

“No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” – Helmuth von Moltke

In the normal rules, you get 4 turn markers which you secretly place on your units. Those are 1, 2, 3, X. The X is a dummy marker to help hide your plans from your opponent. At my house we play with 5 markers, 1, 2, 3, X, X. With the two X’s, we play that you can play with one of them on a turn, but not both. So each turn you get 4 unit actions with the 5th one being the dummy. The X unit is always last to go and having two X’s gives you a level of flexibility and versatility with your last move to adapt to the current battlefield conditions. Place one X on an offensive unit and one on a healer and you can alter your plans on the fly based on what your opponent just did. Perhaps he moved into an advantageous position for you to attack or maybe he just killed off one of your units. Having the double X option has given us a little more in the area of strategy which we always welcome. As with any house rule, YMMV, but we really enjoy this. Give it a try, you might too. 🙂

In our games we’ve included the ability to push enemies. This adds a level of danger and strategy when you start scaling heights for combat advantage. Instead of attacking, you can attempt to push a character of equal or lesser size (ie, small, medium, large, etc) than the pusher. If you roll a 16 or higher you can push the character 1 hex space into any of the 3 hex spaces behind the character. If you are more than double the size of the target, the target is pushed if you roll a 14 or higher. Published fall rules still apply. We’ve had a lot of fun with this rule and I hope you all will too.