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It's a swamp board on which we played a couple of different scenarios. The first scenario was a four-player (two per team) game to test out the strength of my StarCraft-inspired custom figures (Click Here for More on Them) by pitting them against a swarm of Marro, including two hives.
Despite being severely under-pointed, the Marines decimated the Marro swarm. We weren't sure if the Marines' points needed to be adjusted or if they were just particularly effective against the Marro. No points have been adjusted yet...
The second scenario we played on the board was called "John Jameson's Capture the Keg". I placed a barrel under the tower on each end of the board. The object was to have one of your figures adjacent to the barrel and unengaged at the end of a round. If you managed that, you'd captured the keg and won the game.
Time was running out and people had to go home, and with the last round, this is as close as Charles and Woody got because Woody put his last Order Marker on the wrong card.
So sad...
Then, of course, the board was up for a while between those two games, so the boys played a few free games on it, too.
In addition to the regular swamp and jungle terrain pieces, the board did have some custom pieces added to it as well, including the towers on each end. I find that aquarium décor (like the towers on this board) is great for adding character and obstacles to Heroscape boards. I also added some swamp/jungle plants of my own (from aquarium plants) as well as a couple of aquarium rock pieces.
I also used some custom terrain pieces on this board including Mud tiles and Blade Grass tiles. The mud tiles were created by modifying a pattern created and shared by Delphic on heroscapers.com.
Delphic's original design was for molten lava, but I recolored it for mud, printed it on sticker paper, then printed the hex patterns Delphic provided overtop. I put the printed sticker paper onto 1/4 inch Styrofoam sheets and cut them out. They work pretty well.
We played it that whenever you stepped onto a mud space, you had to roll the d-20. If you rolled 1-7 (or something), you got stuck in the mud and you had to bring a friendly figure adjacent to the stuck figure before it could move again (like the Glyph of Proftaka).
The other custom terrain piece on this board is Blade Grass.
The Blade Grass tiles were made by drilling small holes in a swamp water tiles in specific patterns and hot-gluing aquarium grass into the holes.
The special rules of the Blade Grass are that it you cross a line of grass, you must roll an attack die for each line of Blade Grass you cross. You take a wound for each skull you roll. That's why the patterns are important. You can created a walkable path through the grass or limit movement up onto land forms by creating a wall of Blade Grass. A figure can move through as a short cut, but not without risk.
I chose to use both red-tipped aquarium grass along with the regular green to suggest that they are blood-stained and dangerous.
I think that's all for now. I'll post something on Arena games after Labor Day.
Happy heroscaping.
