Add your own Tips, Strategies, & House Rules! Vote for tips that you think are useful.
Tips & Strategies (17)
Tips & Strategies (17)
Add your own Tip, Strategy, or House Rule
You must be logged in to add a comment.
- 01Galaxy Trucker
- 01Mansions of Madness (1st ed)
- 01Navegador
- 00King of Tokyo: Halloween
- 00Spirit Island: Branch And Claw
- 00Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization
- 00Twilight Imperium (4th Ed.)
- 00Thunderstone Quest
- 00Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon
- 00Nemesis
- (updated once every hour)
- Check out our users' favorite games!
- (152) 7 Wonders
- (149) Dominion
- (144) Pandemic
- (135) The Settlers of Catan
- (120) Carcassonne
- (115) Ticket to Ride
- (97) Small World
- (96) Munchkin
- (92) Arkham Horror
- (91) Forbidden Island
- (# of user reviews, updated every 12 hours)
- 3 Mansions of Madness (1st ed)
- 2 Formula D
- 2 The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game
- 2 Maracaibo
- 2 Port Royal
- 1 Exploding Kittens: Streaking Kittens
- 1 Everdell
- 1 Arkham Horror
- 1 Peloponnes (4th ed)
- 1 Arkham Horror: Innsmouth Horror
- (# of times played, updated every 12 hours)
- see all new games >
-
Hasty Baker
19-Aug-24, GoChuckle -
Mythic Quests: The Card Game
7-Nov-22, BoardGaming.com -
Mythic Dungeon Crawler – A Solo Card Game
27-Sep-22, BoardGaming.com -
Lost Ruins of Arnak
28-Dec-21, Czech Games Edition -
13 Monsters
4-Dec-20, Twisted Stranger B.V. -
Forgotten Waters
4-Dec-20, Plaid Hat Games -
Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Core Set
18-Nov-20, Paizo Publishing -
Unlocking Insanity
5-Oct-20, Petersen Games -
Planet Apocalypse
5-Oct-20, Petersen Games -
Marvel United
1-Oct-20, CMON, Spin Master Ltd. -
Draconis Invasion: Wrath
23-Sep-20, -
2 Minute Dino Deal
5-Aug-20, Petersen Games -
Mythic Challenge: The Card Game
2-Aug-20, BoardGaming.com -
Viscounts of the West Kingdom
27-Mar-20, Garphill Games -
Glamazons
14-Feb-20, Prettiest Princess - see all new games >
- see all upcoming games >
-
Gravity Warfare
2018 Q4, Smart Iguana Games -
BANG! The Dice Game – Undead or Alive
2019, dV Giochi -
Hasty Baker
2019, GoChuckle -
Penguinramids
2019 Q4, dV Giochi -
Origami: Legends
2019 Q4, dV Giochi -
Decktective: Bloody-red roses
2019 Q4, dV Giochi -
BANG! The Duel: Renegades
2019 Q4, dV Giochi -
Buy It Or Don’t
2019 Q4, Binks Games -
Four Levels
2019 Q4, Four Level Productions -
Unlocking Insanity
2020, Petersen Games -
High Noon
2020 Q4, High Noon Inc. -
Quantified
2021, Quality Beast -
High Frontier 4 All (4th ed)
2021 Q2, Ion Game Design, Sierra Madre Games -
Legends of Sleepy Hollow
2021 Q2, Dice Hate Me Games -
Game of Energy
2021 Q2, Ninex Games - see all upcoming games >
Recent News
- New Game Adds – What Do You Want?
9-Feb-22|13 comments - Winter Gaming and Gift Giving
17-Dec-21|11 comments - Games Added – Dec 4
4-Dec-20|8 comments - The holiday shopping season is upon us!
30-Nov-20|5 comments - Technology, table top games and the coming holidays
19-Nov-20|8 comments - Support Mythic Kingdoms – Get BG Rewards
11-Aug-20|10 comments - Tournament of the Mythic Kingdoms: Illustrated Playing Cards
1-Jul-20|15 comments - How have games been helping you, your family and friends?
10-Apr-20|12 comments - Games Added (March 27)
27-Mar-20|7 comments - What are you playing during your Stay-At-Home?
27-Mar-20|13 comments
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.
Organized storage for this game is extremely essential. Being able to setup quickly and efficiently while drafting your armies saves significant time. Valuable time that should be used to actually play! I’ve found that Plano tackle containers work best for storing your Heroscape miniatures, they’re clear, they stack neatly and have many customizable compartments to adjust to the size of the figures. You can find them at any store that has a sporting goods department. Thankfully they won’t cost you $1000 😉
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.
The third tip in my “Heroscape Engagement Series”: Players are frequently afraid to risk taking damage by disengaging and will instead leave their unit in a statistically riskier position. Remember, when disengaging, your opponent rolls one die, rather than the multiple dice he/she rolls when attacking. Discretion is often the better part of valor, and accepting the risk of one wound is often a smarter choice than remaining to be destroyed by a strong attack.
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.
I have not been to any tournaments so maybe this common knowledge for some people but our group has a great solution for storing out player hexes. They are a about the size of a CD, just a different shape. And Im sure lost of use have CD books we used to keep our CD’s in before the digital age. We have a CD book where all the cards are in order of point value and you just flip through the book to find the player you want to draft. It keeps everything organized and protected.
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.
Most players will draft their big guns in their first two picks. Basically showing their strategy right away. This is one reason that I dont like to draft first, I want to see what the other players are doing and then counter attack. With this in mind, you are at a slight disadvantage if you are drafting first. Everyone can see part of your strategy. What I do when I roll to draft first is to select a low point roll player, possibly the lowest point player that I know someone is going to be looking to capitalize on later. Draft low first, then come back strong when everyone else has their power players and you can counter.
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 anyone not familiar with Heroscape, when two units are adjacent to each other, without an intervening obstacle, and within a particular height range, they are considered engaged. This can have a significant impact as both an offensive and defensive maneuver because, if a unit is engaged, it can only attack the unit it is engaged with. Using cheap, mobile common units to engage an opponent’s strong ranged unit can tie the stronger unit up and prevent it from taking advantage of its ranged attacks. This can protect your more vulnerable units and provide the opportunity to pick away at the stronger unit while it is occupied with the units that are engaging it.
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.
As a group we always enjoyed playing with the castle sets. Problem is that it gives the defender a huge advantage over the assaulter. The way around this is that the assaulter usually chooses flyers to counter the walls and doors. This kind of limits the game and takes away from the castle assault idea. We play a game where only ground units are allowed but the assualter gets two points for every one the defender gets. It seems this was a nice ratio for equal victories. We still play with flyers as well rom time to time but the knights and musketeers assualting the front doors of a fortres is great fun. Give it a try to get those castle assualts to be more than a range vs flyer game.
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. 🙂
This is something that’s been discussed and I just really like the concept.
The way it works is pretty simple. The first few rounds of the tournament are spent playing the army you brought with the latter half spent playing against that army. It’s best to keep things as even as possible with the first half getting any odd-numbered rounds.
What this kind of tournament does is shows which people know the game better since it’s not as simple as just bringing the best made army. In a five round tournament they’d play their well made army against everyone, but then for those last two rounds they’d be using their opponent’s army and vice-versa. They not only need to know what to do to take their own army out, but they have to be ready for any kind of army that they could get.
Haven’t seen it played out yet, but like I said, it’s a really interesting idea.
“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. 🙂
Special attacks do not receive any types of bonuses. This is pretty second nature for anyone who has played this game for any length of time (or anyone who has been on any forum on Heroscapers), but it seems to be one of the most common mistakes for players just learning the game. I don’t know how many games my son and I played before we realized this. It definitely resulted in some decidedly one-sided victories; once a unit with a strong special attack got height, it would reign destruction down on the other player. Once we discovered our mistake and started following this rule, the games became more evenly matched and more fun for both of us.
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.