Hex-based miniatures battler Heroscape just rose from the grave after nearly 12 years
13-year-old me is screaming with excitement.
Likely surprising everyone, miniatures-based skirmish game Heroscape is coming back from the dead and apparently bringing its iconic stackable hex grid pieces with it.
The baffling news was appended to the end of publisher Avalon Hill’s Gen Con Indy 2022 announcement and contained not much else beyond a name - Heroscape: Age of Annihilation - and the promise of future details.
A teaser video showcased several miniatures posed on top of the game’s trademark modular hex tiles. Though it’s difficult to make out fine details, fans of the original’s high fantasy aesthetics will be pleased to know the ensemble included some extremely pulpy heroes posed with weapons, orcs and goblins arrayed against them and one very ornate dragon with feathered wings rearing up in the background.
The tiles create a scorched and desolate landscape complete with lava flows - an appropriate setting for the Age of Annihilation, one assumes. If it seems as though I’m spending a lot of time on tiny details, it's only because this is a real teaser for me. I collected Heroscape back in the mid-2000s, when it was still produced by Milton Bradley. Wizards of the Coast picked it up in 2008 before discontinuing the game two years later. My pieces were sadly liquidated in a yard sale one youth-shattering summer.
It was, in retrospect, my first wargame. The modular hex tiles could be stacked to create terrain with incredibly varied types and verticality. Fantasy mainstay minis captured the heart of a kid neck-deep in Dragonlance and tabletop D&D, and though I never actually played it, constructing different fields and imagining the battles that would play out was still quite exciting.
Heroscape has been officially dead for nearly 12 years, but it survived as many discontinued games do amongst a dedicated fanbase who kept the hobby alive with custom battlefields, figures, lore and more. It’s not clear if original creators Craig Van Ness, Rob Daviau and Stephen Baker, who released it together while at Milton Bradley, will contribute to this new version. Dicebreaker has reached out to the publishers for more information ahead of more reveals planned for August 8th.