Dragon Strike Boards: the Valley

A story about the use of the amazing Dragon Strike gameboards for HeroQuest in four parts, written by shy-design:

Hi all... Here is a look at the the Dragon Strike Boards... Some of you might have these in your collection, they are a great addition to my HQ games and add a lot of variety to gameplay. My players espcially like getting outside of the HQ dungeon board every now and then :) ... Just thought I would share with everyone how I have incorporated them into my HQ world.

The Valley board

The Town board

The Castle board

The Cavern board

First up is the valley board. The first thing I noticed about this one was that there appears to be a raised hill at the bottom right quadrant. I chose to make a 3-d hill to create a little more variety on the board. This way heroes can step up the hill to "reveal" what is on top, much like opening a dungeon door. here is a step by step. I started by tracing the area that represented the hill on the board. From there I cut a piece of MDF board to fill the trace. I then glued down two 1/2 inch pieces of styrene (wall insulation that I bought from a hardware store). From there I carved out the cliff sides and 1x1 in squares on top with an exacto knife, and some modeling was done with the heat wire tool as well. (it cuts the styrene like butter). I added some sand and small rock accents for texture where it was needed and then I painted it.

The space that occupies the incline or path to the hilltop is able to hold a miniature in place.
In my game the pillars are actually waystones that can transport the heroes to different quest maps or sometimes they find a chaos sorcerer summoning some evil monsters through the stone portal. I tend to mix it up. I wanted to also note that I wanted a raised hill to create not only some variety in the board but to also make it a good vantage point for enemies/heroes that have ranged attacks... I allow those who can, use ranged attacks from the spaces that touch the edge of the hill. When my group plays quests on this map, I have noticed that my friend who plays the Ranger (equipped with the longbow) usually makes a break for one of these spots early on so he can cover the rest of the group from the higher ground without getting in the way.

I downloaded and printed off the blank quest maps for each of these boards from this site.

From there I just let my imagination run free and made up my own quests mixed in with some house rules for each of the boards... The valley for instance has difficult terrain (the thick wooded areas, the river, the grass plain with that weird snake thing, the pool with the monster swimming around in it) I actually just treated these areas like "traps" only revealing what happens once someone stepped into these places for the first time. There was one quest where the Heroes were sent to this map but were given a map of the land by a Ranger... it was just a blank quest map... that way they heroes could make notes of their own as they discovered the different areas and dangers of the terrain.

Here is a pic of a quest where the heroes had to recover some mushrooms for the town's baker.

In the next post I will begin to reveal how I transformed the town board into something that would change the way that my friends and I play HQ forever!