I'll play almost anything, once. How much further play the game sees is largely about how much I don't like it. When it comes down to it most games are at least playable. So this review will start with a game description, move to what I don't like, and finish with whatever I think is outstanding.

So...

Return of the Heroes

Choose your classic fantasy character (Elf, Dwarf, Mage, Fighter, or Cleric) and race to complete Tasks. Collect Items, Gold, and Experience to become powerful enough to defeat the Ultimate Evil Bad Guy du jour (ie the "Nameless", secretly chosen at random from six slightly different "Nameless".)


If you reckon you know your way around how Return of the Heroes works, you can skip the dry boring Contents and Rules Overview bits, and go down to the guts of What's Not To Like, and What Stands Out.


Contents

Lots of STUFF! ...

• 16 unique Map squares (6.5"/17cm) to assemble a variable board
• 5 Character Sheets (thick card stock, Male one side, Female the other)
• 10 card character figures (five bases)
• A ziplock bag with all the wooden bits in it...
• 4 plain wooden houses, eurogame style
• 20 each of three colours wooden experience cubes, eurogame style
• 30 wooden gold discs, eurogame style (0.6"/15mm)
• 5 dice
• 23 red stones (0.6"/15mm, for hit points)
• 4 tiny polished river stones (representing precious stones) in a small ziplock bag
• 8 "Heroic Deed" cards (thick card stock)
• 6 "Nameless" arch fiend cards (thick card stock)
• 33 square digit chits (0.5"/12mm, for upgrading skill values)
• 106 game chits (1"/25mm, items, monsters, tasks etc. all unique)
• 1 cloth Bag
• 15 half-page glossy Rulebook
• 15 half-page glossy Glossary
• 4 half-page glossy "Condensed Rules"
• 1 glossy sheet "Introductory Game" on one side, "Solitaire Game" on the other



Stuff

The first thing you notice is that there's so much stuff... this box is pretty full. It's ALL full colour, glossy, and evocative of theme, let down only slightly by being a couple of notches below photo grade print quality. There's a background colour of "unbleached paper tan colour" underlying everything.

Personally I'd been GREATLY looking forward to getting Return of the Heroes. But when I opened the box and flipped through everything, especially the three rulebooks, I quietly closed the box and waited for a day when I had more fortitude. (Fortunately I didn't have long to wait .)


So what are my component gripes? ...
• There are errors on two of the Nameless cards and several of the game chits, as noted in "Printing Errors" later.
• The rulebooks are worthy of comment, as noted in "Rulebooks" later.
• The backs of the map tiles are not quite the same colour. (They came in separate unique counter sheets.) But you will want to play the "exploration" version where the maps start randomised and face down.
• There's only five character bases, but ten character figure cards. You have to swap them around.
• The number chits are double sided. In a heap you can't tell the 9's from the 6's. This is a minor annoyance because the back of the 6's has the 7's and the back of the 9's has the 8's, so if you're looking for a 7 or 8 you find yourself flipping up a bunch of irrelevant chits. (For some reason, I always flip a bunch of the wrong ones first.)
• One of my "precious stones" is chipped.
• In an otherwise well organised inset, there's no sensible place for the rulebooks. They end up sitting a little bent on top of things. (If the rulebooks had been very slightly smaller they would have matched the character sheet sizes and could have sat neatly in that compartment.)
• As mentioned, the print quality is good (and certainly good enough) but in this instance a better print quality would improve the impression even further.



Return of the Heroes Rules Overview (You can of course skip this bit.)

Objective Finish your Personal Heroic Deed AND become skillful / experienced enough to defeat the Nameless.

Setup can take five or ten minutes. (I also note it's rather overwhelming trying to work out the setup from the very densely presented Introductory Game sheet.)

• Lay out the 16 map tiles (there are various approaches to this in the rules)
• Distribute two Random Encounter chits (chit backs are uniform) face down per map tile
• Each player takes a Character sheet, the appropriate Gold and Hit Point markers for the character, the matching Character Figure, and one wooden house.
• The Character Figures with their houses go on the map
• Depending on the variant, each player chooses zero to two Heroic Deed cards at random
• Market item chits (chit backs are uniform) are put beside the board
• The non-random non-market chits (printed with details front and back) are put in the Bag. (Some players sort out the chits for Heroic Deeds that are not in the game.) It turns out there's only about 20 chits to go in the Bag, which I disbelieved at first because the Bag is so big.

You can speed the setup by sorting chits during packup. You can speed your packup by sorting chits during setup. I sort during packup because some things are already part sorted (or easily found) at the end of the game.



Cardboard character standup figures.


A Player Turn...
• Move
• Combat
• Do other stuff
• (Probably) draw a new chit from the Bag and put it on the Map.

Move Each player has a movement value, which can be enhanced during the game with magic boots or horse or cart. The board locations (called "Fields") are joined in a somewhat arbitrary network, but each Map has exactly one path linking the middle of each edge, so they always connect.

Combat Your Character may bump into a bad guy. In this case, you must stop to deal with it. Each character has three Skill values (Magic, Ranged Combat, and Close Combat) and each enemy has modifiers specified in one or more of those Skills. Your character chooses the most likely skill of those allowed for the enemy, and rolls dice. Succeed and kill the enemy (gaining some Experience), fail and lose a Hit Point.

Other Stuff There's a lot more doing "Other Stuff" than Combat.
• Accept Tasks (which are all basically requirements to go to one or two locations, possibly collecting an Item at the first location which possibly may still be a chit in the Bag).
• Complete Tasks (getting gold, experience, or magic things as rewards)
• Buy training
• Visit the Market and buy Useful Things (like transport, armour, weapons, and magic things).
• Get Healing
• ... and a variety of other special locations and encounters.

Draw From The Bag any time you do almost anything. If your turn was move and do nothing, then no, but if you took any chit off the board or finished any Task then a new chit is drawn and added to the board. Most have specified locations where they appear.

Progression

Through a combination of visiting Trainers, gaining Experience, and picking up some Items your character improves their chances at defeating enemies... working towards being strong enough to defeat the Nameless.

Your character is required to complete a Heroic Deed before they are allowed to fight the "Nameless". The Heroic Deeds are a standard format... defeat something (at a particular location) to gain a special Item, carry the Item to another particular location to trade it for a different Item, carry that item to a third location (usually Home) to gain your Precious Stone... which is also your magic key to the Nameless stronghold. The two Chits for each Heroic Deed start in the Bag, so you have to wait for yours to appear for at least one of your Deeds.

Once someone finishes the first step of their Heoric Deed, the chit representing the Nameless is added to the Bag, so that later someone will draw that chit out of the Bag at the end of their turn. When that happens, tougher evil bad guys ("Servants of the Nameless") appear in the game, some on the board immediately and most in the Bag. The Servants are pretty tough, and from then on it gets a bit harder to move around without having to deal with them on the way. (But at least they're worth good Experience if you can beat them.)



A Character Sheet... spaces for up to four Tasks, up to four Items, Gold, Hit Points, and Experience


Notes On Play Feel
Return of the Heroes plays in a relatively short time for a "fantasy/adventure" style of game... in our case we seem to take one to two hours. In over a dozen games it's never overstayed its welcome, unlike the Talisman games of my younger days or (dare I say it) our one attempt to play Runebound.

I especially note the dominance of "escort this person/item/chit to location X" over combat to gain experience.

Characters are limited to a maximum of four items, and a maximum of four simultaneous tasks. There's a fair bit of decision making about which tasks and items will best benefit you at this time. Since the tasks involve "get to location X" there's also a fair bit of route planning as you try to find tasks that fit well together AND happen to carry you past the market / trainer / fountain of life or wherever else you have your sights on at the moment.

The Nameless are surprisingly easy to beat the first time you encounter them... only due to an expectation that they ought to be really tough. With more experience of the game, players start juggling when to do the first step of their task (so that the Servants might start appearing and hampering the other players) and when to take on the Nameless with decent odds before some other hero takes the job. So the game is not just "get as powerful as you can"... you can certainly waste effort becoming TOO powerful.


Rules Complexity
I assess in order to play Return of the Heroes you need to learn about 7 basic pieces of info before you start, with about 61 (!) in total to get all the gritty detail.

For comparison:
Ra: 10 .. 14
Chess: 9 .. 12
Settlers of Catan: 12 .. 19
Puerto Rico: 20 .. 31
Ticket to Ride: 11 .. 11
Bohnanza: 9 .. 9
Carcassonne (H&G): 8 .. 11


This deserves a comment. Many of the rules are extremely specifically circumstantial.
eg "If you have the broomstick, and you roll a 1 trying to use it, you get taken to the Witch's House at location K2."
eg "If you kill a Servant, it is out of the game rather than put back in the Bag."
If nobody currently has the broomstick, not knowing how it works doesn't hurt. Even if the Servants are on the board, knowing they don't go back in the bag usually makes little difference.

Which is all just to say, although there are many individual rules, at any given moment most are of low immediate relevance.



Printing Errors

There are several annoying printing errors in my set. Some are (sometimes needlessly) corrected in some files uploaded. For your edification and enjoyment, here is the complete list I felt compelled to actually correct using (gasp) ink, directly on the game pieces...

... Two of the six Nameless cards have incorrect notations. These are two corrected images, uploaded by zzini.

... All the Heroic Deed / Quest cards say "place (special item) here" after completing the first step, which is incorrect. To avoid confusion, I crossed this out on each of the eight cards.

One of the chits is labelled "Diadum". There is a Diadum in the game, and it's not that chit. The chit should have been labelled "Necklace".

One of the chits has no name, but has special rules in the Glossary under the entry "Shadow".

The "Magic Broom" chit should have been labelled "Stubborn Magic Broom" so as to match the Glossary entry.

With the above corrections all the instructions and identifiers on the chits are fine.



Rulebook Infamy

Much mention has been made by many people on the "worst rulebook ever". In particular, the Rulebook being written as a dialog rather than an instruction manual is certainly not everyone's taste, and makes it a little harder to look up things you aren't sure of. There are certainly other problems with the organisation of the rules, and a number of ambiguities go unanswered. But after several games I noticed something... it didn't matter! Where there were ambiguities, we made a quick ruling to play either way and it all seemed ok. We had fun from our first game, and later games we incorporated rules corrections as we found out about them. The ambiguities are in the detail, and there are so many individual details that one going this way/that way doesn't really tip the scale.

I drafted a separate article of all the ambiguities / uncertainties / mistakes / unfound rules I had after reading just the rulebooks, and what the corrections / answers were. In many cases they were in the rulebooks but not clear or in a strange place that I'd skipped. An important lesson was... really you need to read the Rulebook, the Glossary, AND the Condensed Rules from front to back. Every word. That's a bit of a disappointment when it turns out a player who knows the rules can easily and happily lead a new player into the game with a very small subset of the rules, and expand on the details as they arise. It would have been nice for the rulebooks really to reflect that, and that was what they try unsuccessfully to do... separating the "required" info (Rulebook) from the details (Glossary).



So What's Not To Like?

So after all the "irrelevant rule summary" waffle above that I hope you skipped if you weren't interested, here's the juicy bits...

Printing Errors (as above)

The Rulebooks (as above)
Noting that the fun and play satisfaction in Return of the Heroes seems to survive rule errors extremely well, and of course at some point you'll have the rules figured.

Task Sameness. All the Tasks may feel similar. (Take this chit to X. Find location Y.) If you want epic battles in your fantasy, this (mostly) isn't it.

Combat Over-simplicity. Say what you will, there's a fun element in both sides getting to roll their dice, or having "rounds" of combat wearing each other down. In RotH, you take your basic Skill, add item modifiers, subtract the enemy's modifier, and make one roll of the dice.

Very low player interaction. You can't trade or even attack each other.
Though you can do things like throw random encounters in each other's way, hold items the other player/s need, and even swap Map boards at crucial moments!

Somewhat Vanilla. One of the unsung fun aspects of ye olde Talisman was that each card had a little description. It wasn't just, "Zombies. 4x2HP". It was, "A vile band of Zombies has decided to make their home here". And so forth. On the RotH chits, you get a small picture and "Giant -1 -2" with a picture of a cube to indicate your reward. It's just slightly... bland. And the tasks themselves (which are the majority of the chits) are always just minimal text with the location/s and rewards involved, with a subtle silhouette in the background relating to the task.
This is offset by the evocative map boards and a sufficiency of unique tasks, items, and creatures to make "escort this merchant to Zenda" a bit more individual.

Only 106 80-ish Unique Things. Runebound and Talisman had hundreds of unique "things" buried in their various decks of cards. RotH has 32 unique Random Encounters, 13 Market items, 21 unique chits starting in the Bag, plus two per Heroic Deed (two Deeds per player out of eight possible Deeds). In Runebound, Talisman, and Magic Realm you see only a subset of everything in each game. In RotH you will see almost everything appear in each game. In this respect, you get familiar with all of the nifty things a little sooner than some "peer" games.

Only 5 Characters. Again, instead of dozens of different characters, you have a choice of only five.

Dice. Your game fate is in the hands of some dice rolling.

The Bag. All the better Tasks and all the Heroic Deeds require chits to come out of the Bag before you can do them. You can get stuck just waiting, waiting, waiting for the right chits.
Though (a) while waiting you're still developing your character, (b) you should have two Heroic Deeds to choose from, and (c) there is a Mystic random encounter chit somewhere on the board, who stays there once found... pay her 1 gold and get the chit of your choice from the bag.

Luck. Did I mention the dice? And that Bag thing? You may feel thwarted at every turn.

Unbalanced. Some Characters are obviously less likely to win than others.



There are 16 Map squares, all very different.


So What Stands Out?

Highly Accessible. Especially for a fantasy/adventure game, I can drive this point home in five very important words. My Wife Loves This Game.

Simple play. Once you deal with the rulebooks, Return of the Heroes flows very smoothly. (It's been called "an Adventure Game for Eurogamers" more than once.)

Engaging. From the very outset you feel you have purpose, and that you can do something towards that purpose. Talisman (and for us Runebound) suffered very much from a sense of periods of aimlessness. We haven't felt that in any of our games of RotH.

Planning. In contrast to (for example, again) the meandering of Talisman... in RotH you plan your route around the network of roads / locations on the map for best effect.

Highly Thematic. A greatly successful evocation of fantasy theme, exploration, questing, and character building.

M/F. Each of the five characters has an (otherwise identical) Male/Female version.

The Task/Quest System is a lovely piece of game design, keeping players moving about the board trying to achieve things. And the limit of four at a time is a superb idea... one player can't monopolise, and you need to make sensible choices.

Replayability is clearly high. (Unless you burn out on being too familiar with the "limited" unique aspects.) Variable board setups, dealing with different tasks driving character development in different directions.

Viable solo variant. Straight out of the box.

Not too short, Not too long. "About" 90 minutes is just right.

Quick turns. No individual turn is a brain burner, and each turn takes only a moment... move where you wish, maybe fight, maybe do another thing, draw new chit.

Works well up to N players. I see comments from people even claiming it works well up to 6 players, though the box only says 1 to 4.

Wide audience. Works for family gaming or with your gaming buddies. (Well, most of them.)

Built in handicapping. For playing with your kids or newbies... some characters are clearly less likely to win than others.

IT'S FUN! We've had this out most nights in the weeks since it arrived. It's been a blast to play every time, and every time the game has unfolded in a different way. I've spent games taking the Dwarf (the slowest and therefore most hindered of the characters) just to see if I can beat her Mage (the second worst off, being almost as slow AND having only one spare Hit Point). We've had characters develop in very surprising directions, upsets and glorious defeats and victories. I won only one of our first nine games, and I had a lot of fun losing!



Four Magic Experience, 3 Gold, 2 Hit Points, and a partridge in a pear tree pair of Magic Boots. Plus three Tasks she's working on.


Overall It's worth working your way through the rulebooks to get into this game. It's a lonnnng way from abstract, or even "thinly themed pseudo abstract". If you want control of your gaming outcome, perfect information, total balance, a contest of pure skill... just stay away. At the other end of the spectrum, if you want more thematic elements than you can ever memorise you'll only get a few plays out of RotH. For the rest of us, this is a SUPERB game where diverse gaming and non-gaming backgrounds can meet in the middle, assuming acceptance of the theme. And above all, it's a game you can have fun with even when you lose. We love it.