I’ve been playing Warhammer Quest again this week and
finally reached the end of it, after ages of slogging through endless dungeons,
hordes of spiders and timed quests which were the highlight of the game! The
review will be up on Friday but I have a few additional points to make here: The
ending was a bit of a let-down; it’s hard to spoil a game that has no real
story to speak of, but it essentially amounts to a text scroll. Having said
that, and as I mentioned in my review and some of the other blogs, when the
game really goes for it – cuts your health down to the wire and forces you to
win in a couple of turns or die, and puts timers on certain missions forcing
you to act quickly – it can create some very tense and thrilling sections of
the game which I’m glad I played! I spent a lot of time deliberating over
whether to score it 2/5 or 3/5; I enjoyed it enough for it to be a three, but I
always find something to like about Warhammer games and I can’t objectively say
anybody else will enjoy it in the same way. In the end it came down to: “Did I
enjoy it more than Regicide? No.” Therefore I gave it a two.
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Snotlings aren't much of a threat but they're
always fun to splatter. |
One thing I was quite pleased about when I reached the end
of Warhammer Quest is its treatment of Orcs. This echoes back to something my
friend Victor mentioned to me a while ago: Orcs, or Orks (their Warhammer 40K
equivalent) are very often presented as hulking stupid lummoxes with nary a
brain cell between them, and while that’s not necessarily the case – they tend
to possess a certain amount of low cunning at the very least – it does make it
very easy for writers to show them as being subjugated by a higher power. In
video games, Orcs are almost always under the control of Chaos agents, or Skaven,
or even Eldar depending on the game. This has the effect of limiting the Orc’s
potential as a threat and knowing that the twist is coming gets old after a
while. The main villain at the end of Warhammer Quest is an Orc, and I was
delighted to see that for once they’ve allowed the Orcs to have a leading antagonist
role. Let the Orcs be the bad guys!
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| Where are the walls? |
Elsewhere, I tried some hobby games with Jessie. The discovery
for us this week was Magic Labyrinth, the game in which you search for treasure
in a maze where you can’t see the walls. This is aimed at quite a young audience,
but Kirsty and I have enjoyed it well in the past, and Jessie seemed to like it
too. She loves treasure hunts, so it was an easy sell! I really like this game
as it is a good balance of luck and skill: The maze is constructed prior to the
game, but once it starts, you find the walls via trial and error, which is
where the element of skill comes into it. As you can twist the board around before
the game starts, you’ve got potentially eight variations of the two mazes it
gives you, and it’s given you rules for constructing your own. Also, you use a
6-sided dice for movement, which adds a random element to the game. Magic Labyrinth
was easy enough for Jessie to understand, but random enough that I wasn’t
necessarily at an advantage for having played it before, and in fact Jessie won
the game by collecting five treasures!
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I mean who wouldn't want to see
what's in the box, at least... |
We also had a go with Ninja Dice; this didn’t go so well as
I haven’t played it before and wasn’t able to explain to Jessie how to play
(she was allured by the admittedly brilliant “box” art!) So, she quickly became
bored with Ninja Dice and we moved on to an old favourite: Dungeon Roll, where
she gets equal enjoyment from playing the heroes hunting for treasure as the
monsters defending it. I need to modify the rules down slightly for the game to
work, but she loves the theme and understands the basic mechanics. Not bad for
a four-year-old!
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