I think board games and I have a cosmic connection. Since I was in high school, in phases, I’ve gravitated towards board games, drifting through so many awful haircuts, spinning alongside relationships, living arrangements, and obsessions.
A new one is Heroscape, which I’ve been playing for the last few months and I love it. Rather than explaining why it’s awesome in this post *cough* when you aren’t playing with overpowered Marvel figures *cough*, I’ll put the variants my friends and I play and how they work if you’re looking to spice up game night.
Deathmatch 400: Each individual gets 400 points, several glyphs are placed around the map, high ground is possible but not huge. This can be modified to go up or down depending on amount of people playing.
Team Deathmatch: Depending on how long you want to play, 300/400/500 is standard, usually allowing one super huge figure per team. Typically, plays well with 3 to 5 players. To make it asymmetric, you can substitute 2.5X points for two players to make up for decreased frequency of turns.
Rising Acid: Each round, acid rises one level and deals a wound to everyone on that level (per round). This incentives a lot of movement.
Get to da choppa: There are 2 teams and 3 players. One team is trying to get 4 unique heroes into the castle, the other is trying to either wipe out the castle or kill enough heroes to prevent them from succeeding. Typically, the team trying to wipe out the castle/stop the movement should have a massive point lead.
Draft: Arrange the heroscape figures on cards by relative point/value cost. Next, select a certain amount of cards from each pile I like breaking it down as 50-100, 120-180, 200+ as general rules. If you’re doing this in teams, everyone ranks who they think the strongest and weakest people are, and aggregate them to balance teams.
Random Draft: This is the draft, but with random picks.
Themed Battle: Players get a specific color or heavily lean into one theme, with a total number of points.
Capture the Flag: Two teams try and capture the other team’s flag. In this variant, you should find some way to minimize the effect of range so the other team doesn’t get to take infinite potshots. It may help to make it so flag defense occupies low ground. If you have a not-even amount of players, we add in a powerful unit which re-spawns every round and an army of ants or spiders that grow each turn to stalling wars of attrition. This final team wins if both teams lose.
Betrayal At Marro Point: 3 players have a shaky alliance against one player, and are trying to capture a command point. They get to avoid friendly fire, and don’t automatically take attacks of opportunity, until one person ends it, seeking glory. If 1 of the 3 players ends with a unit on the command point at the end of a round, that player wins. The other team wins if by the end of round 7, no one ends on it.
Are there any game modes that you like that my friends and I can try? Let me know by commenting 🙂
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