Warhammer Quest


Warhammer Quest is a fantasy dungeon, role-playing adventure board game released by Games Workshop in 1995 as the successor to HeroQuest and Advanced HeroQuest, set in its fictional Warhammer Fantasy world. The game focuses upon a group of warriors who join together to earn their fame and fortune in the darkest depths of the Old World.
Games Workshop stopped producing Warhammer Quest in 1998.

Game

Mainly written by Andy Jones, Warhammer Quest utilizes a set of simple game mechanics to simulate the Warriors' actions as they explore and fight through the dungeons of the Old World. The game puts a strong emphasis on co-operative and thoughtful play by the players in order to survive against the myriad monsters they inevitably face.
Primarily designed for four players, the original game continues the tradition of HeroQuest by supplying a Barbarian, Wizard, Dwarf, and Elf as its main Warriors.
The game components are
The game focuses on the acquisition of vast amounts of treasure, which is divided into two types:
Treasure can be sold for gold, which can then be used to pay for training and advancement, as well as buying items essential to survival: healing, a weapon, extra armour, or magical talismans that evoke special abilities.

Monsters

All of the hostile creatures encountered by Warrior parties are known under the collective name of "Monsters". Almost all Warhammer creatures of the time were included in the Bestiary section of the Roleplay Book. Monsters are broadly divided into the following species:
Lizardmen are the only major race not to feature in the game. They were later released as an additional supplement in the Warhammer Quest magazine "Deathblow".
The challenge of encounters is related to the current Dungeon level and the strength of the party. At lower levels, a small group of Orcs will provide a reasonable challenge; at higher levels, tougher opponents such as Ogres and Dragons are encountered.

''Warhammer Quest'' Roleplaying

The game was released with a Roleplay Book, which enables players to expand their games by introducing tabletop roleplaying game mechanics. When used, the Roleplay Book offers the players the chance to travel between Settlements, train to the next level, visit numerous shops and traders, as well as visit Special Locations. The Wizard, Elf, and Dwarf have a Special Location that was exclusive to each of them and, if their luck was good and if they had enough gold, they could buy specialty items to help them in their adventures.
Additionally, the Roleplay Book introduces the element of Psychology, which includes new rules for Fear, Terror, Hatred, Breaking, and being Prone. There are also rules and descriptions for using two new Characteristics: Luck and Willpower.
The Roleplay Book also contains a bestiary of Monsters that the warriors might encounter. The Roleplay Book also offers a Hazards Table, a Settlement Events Table, extra Treasure and Objective Room Treasure tables as well as ‘Battle-level Monster Tables’ for use as the Warriors' careers progress.
The last section of the Roleplay Book contains guidelines for writing adventures and Warrior development. It also contains an entire pre-written campaign for the Gamemaster and the Warriors to play as well as introducing the first expansion Warrior of Warhammer Quest: the Dwarf Trollslayer.

Warrior progression

Every Warrior can be progressed up to 10 stages or ‘Battle Levels’. In many role-playing games, character advance by accumulating experience points. In Warhammer Quest a Warrior accumulates gold to advance battle-levels and can also use the gold to buy items. Every monster encountered and killed is worth a certain amount of Gold. In addition, the Warrior can sell any treasure at the end of the adventure. The leader carrying the lantern decides which warrior gained an item of treasure.

Expansions

A number of expansions were released for Warhammer Quest. These included two new adventure packs, several Warrior packs as well as additional Treasure Card packs and a set of blank Monster Cards & Event cards, where players could record their own monsters from the Warhammer world that were not written within the Roleplay book or else not produced as an official card by Games Workshop.

Adventure packs

There were two adventure packs released for the game. Lair of the Orc Lord contained six new adventures against Greenskins while Catacombs of Terror featured six new adventures that pitted the Warriors against the evils of the Undead. Both expansions contained new, pewter models to represent their enemies as well as new Board tiles and cards.

Warrior packs

released packs for nine additional Warriors, all of which had some background within the Warhammer world. The packs consisted of a Warrior model, rulebook and a set of card tokens detailing the warrior's original statistics & equipment. The rulebooks offered a piece of background as to the warrior-type & a set of rules to use the warrior including details about any new special locations they might visit, skills or equipment they could obtain as well as details about their Battle Level progression. The Warrior Packs released were as follows:

''White Dwarf''

To accompany Warhammer Quest Games Workshop produced a number of articles in their White Dwarf magazine that added additional elements to the game play such as extra rooms, adventures & other articles. They were as follows:
To accompany Warhammer Quest Games Workshop produced a number of articles in their Citadel Journal magazine that added new semi-official adventures and scenarios, alternatives rules, and warriors. Some articles were written by the usual contributors of Warhammer Quest while others were fan-submitted material. They were as follows:
Deathblow was a dedicated Warhammer Quest journal released by Games Workshop to accompany the game in a similar vein to its Citadel Journal and Fanatic Magazine. Deathblow consisted of only three issues. Deathblow included articles by contributors outside of Games Workshop's employ and featured articles from White Dwarf, the Citadel Journal and contained new adventures and a selection of other Warhammer Quest related paraphernalia.
Deathblow introduced eight new Warriors: The Halfling Thief, Kislev Shaman, an Assassin, an Ogre, Druid of Albion, Dwarf Brewmaster, Salty Seadog & Lord of Aenarion.
Deathblow was named after Warhammer Quest’s ‘Death-Blow’ mechanic where if a warrior killed a monster in one single strike he could then carry that attack through to an adjacent monster.
Deathblow #1
Deathblow #2
Deathblow #3
Warhammer Quest and its expansions/articles were authored, illustrated or produced in whole, or in part, by the following:
Andy Jones, Geoff Taylor, Richard Wright, Dave Gallagher, John Blanche, Wayne England, Mark Gibbons, Bryan Ansell, Gavin Thorpe, Ian Pickstock, Mark Hawkins, Dean Bass, Steve Anastasoff, Tuomas Pirinen, Mark Hawkins and more.

Sequels

Eighteen years after the game ceased production, Games Workshop released Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower and Warhammer Quest: Shadows Over Hammerhal. These games follow the original in overall design as dungeon crawling board games, but with substantially different rulesets.

Other implementations

On 20 August 2012 GW announced Warhammer Quest for iOS devices. The development company is Rodeo Games. It was released on 30 May 2013.
It was later ported to PC, Mac and Linux by and was released by on Steam on 7 January 2015, Android on 25 June 2015, and later to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
Warhammer Quest 2 by Perchang was released on 20 October 2017 for iOS and for Android on 11 April 2018.

Reception

In the January 1996 edition of Dragon, Rick Swan liked the high quality of the game components, and the "easy-on-the-brain explanations" of the rules. But Swan objected to actual object of the game, which he summed up as "a string of random events, most of them combat encounters, with an occasional death trap thrown in to break the monotony." Swan also noted the game's complete lack of realism, but said, "Warhammer Quest doesn’t pretend to be realistic, and therefore doesn’t deserve to be criticized for its lack of logic. That’s like criticizing a candy bar for its lack of vitamins." Swan concluded by giving the game an average rating of 4 out of 6, and only recommended the game as a means of training up new role-players: "Warhammer Quest does a admirable job of incorporating role-playing fundamentals, and thus serves as a painless introduction to RPGs. And when Quest-ers get the hang of hit points and attribute scores, that’s where you step in with Call of Cthulhu or the AD&D game."