Heroes Welcome - A board game Review!

 

Ever since my kids were young we've always enjoyed playing board games together as a family. When they were younger we played simple games like Monopoly Jr., Who Shook Hook, etc. however now that they are older they are able to play more complex games. Today I have a fantastic game from Pencil First Games called "Heroes Welcome" to share with all of you. It is family friendly & a blast to play, we've played it almost every day since we received it last week. Our kids are nine and thirteen, both love playing this game and were able to pick up the rules quickly without feeling overwhelmed or confused. The base game and expansions can be bought at various retailers, amazon seems to be the best price at $35 for the base and $15 for the expansion. 

One of the first things I noticed and liked about this game is the fact that you can play it with as few as two players or up to five. We usually play games together, but sometimes one of us has something else to do or just doesn't feel like playing board games so we can sit out while everyone else still has fun playing. We haven't played a one on one match yet, but the next time the kids are at their grandparents or don't want to play, I look forward to seeing who wins, my husband or myself. 

The goal of this game? The mission/goal you are playing towards is seeing who is able to become the master merchant reaping the most coin and points before you reach the end round. It is crazy just how close some of the games we've played have been, we've had several times where two of us have tied and we have to resort to tie breakers. Typical games can last about ninety minutes, the first time we played it took an extra thirty minutes for us to play so that we could learn the rules and go over everything with the kids. After that it has taken no time at all to get everything set up each time we play, and we all know what to do now so the game goes a bit quicker. The rules are laid out so that everything is quite simple to understand, and the game is pretty straight forward.

After the first time of going through and setting everything up, it will go quicker every other time you play. It takes us three to five minutes setting everything up together, which includes setting up the boards, and setting up our own characters areas. If I set up the game on my own, it takes me five to ten minutes. In this game you will not get your own character piece to move around the board, instead you'll pass around a token that says "Master Merchant" so you will know whose turn it is. 

Every player will start off with one item, a set amount of coins, two scam cards and a mastery card which I will go over later on in the review. Each round you'll be able to play any scam cards you have and do one action for your turn which can be one of the following options: 

• Run a shop - To do this you'll move the heroes token to any open shop and perform the function of that shop which can earn you items, tokens and even upgrades.
• Visit a Guild - This option allows you to collect more scam cards, upgrade your specials, build another shop, and more.
• Craft for a customer - The main way to earn "VP" which are the points you'll need to win is to craft for customers. Each customer requires a certain amount of items to be trade in for their card which in turn give you Vorpal (victory) points and tokens. 
• Call for end of round - Self explanatory. 

A tid bit about scam cards - While the name might sound a little ominous these cards are actually quite helpful. They can help you move around the board, ignore closed shops, and more.

Mastery cards - These specialty cards give you extra bonus VP for completing the task on the card. Every player starts off with one that comes with their merchant and extra cards can be gained during the game. Each card has a different task, for example the Red Shard Mastery gives you an extra 2 VP for turning in three red shards during a craft session.

So how long does a round last? That entirely depends on the players, to start off with there will be four customers on the board that you can build for. Each player starts out with one item, however that isn't enough to craft anything, which means you need to start collecting more items. Certain shops allow you to buy the items currently in a heroes backpack, you'll notice in the image above there is a rectangular board which shows three characters - Olaf, Moonbeam & Knives, these are the heroes of our game. On their board they each start off with two items which can be purchased by or traded with the players. Every shop on the board will tell you what you are allowed to do, for example the Peddler allows you to purchase one item from a hero for one gold. 

Once a shop or guild has been used by a player it gets a "closed" sign places on its tile and the hero token stays on the last shop that was used, players can no longer use this shop unless a specialty scam card called "Late Nightshift" is played which allows you to ignore the closed sign and use the shop anyway. Players are only allowed to visit a shop that is located adjacent to the current shop the heroes are at.  You might be thinking "Hey Luna, what happens if you get stuck with nothing but closed shops around you and all the guilds are also closed?". If there is an open shop on the board you can move closer using scam card, however if you have nowhere to go and no cards to use, you can call round end. If another player is able to do tasks still, they can "bribe" you with an item to continue the round, in which case you cannot refuse it and it becomes their turn no matter the order they fall in.

On your turn instead of visiting a shop or a guild, you can choose to craft for a customer instead. The game starts off with four customers waiting for items to be crafted for them, they start off only needing two to three items per craft at first and continually require more as the game moves on. If you have enough to craft an item for the customer those items get placed back into one of the loot bags, a monster token gets placed into the dungeon and it moves to the next players turn. 

If there are only four customers on the board and each hero only has two items to start off with, how the heck do they get more? This is where the end of the round comes into play, once there are no longer any moves or materials to be collected on the board a player can call for the current round to stop. When this happens, all of the closed signs get removed, the monster tokens get flipped over to show which hero gets a "level up", a new shop gets built and a few other tasks covered in the book. Each hero also gets items equal to the number of the level they were able to level up to, with the help of additional tokens that can be earned from one of the shops this is how heroes get more items to sell. Then it is time for the next round to begin. 

This continues on until you reach the 16th customer who is the "boss", once the boss is defeated and end of game is called players can do one last craft or trade in tokens to earn some last minute "VP". After the last-minute build/trade is done, the player with the most VP wins and is the victor! 

Along with the base game they also have an expansion pack which adds some fun new elements and items to the game along with a new customer. If you are a board game fan, or just getting into board games you'll find you will run out of shelf space quickly, which is why I love the fact that they thought ahead and left space inside of the base game for the expansion pack to sit snuggly in, so it won't take up more shelf space. As someone who likes keeping their board game pieces organizes, I love that they also included baggies in the base game to sort the pieces into.

Now that I've blabbed on so much about how the game play works, I bet you want to know what we think about the game? We have found that it is set up so that it is quick and easy to learn even for slightly younger kids. We received the game to check out for review about a week ago, and I think there has been maybe two days since then that we hadn't played a round, otherwise we pretty much play one round a day. The creators and the artists who helped bring the imagery to life did a fantastic job on this game and it is one that should be part of every board game collection! I look forward to seeing if the creator of this puts out anymore board games in the future. 

I hope that you enjoyed my board game review of Heroes Welcome, and that I didn't muddle anything up! If you enjoyed this review & want to see what other games we've played there is a link on the right-hand side of my blog you can click to see other reviews and keep an eye out for new board game reviews.

Disclaimer-  Pencil First Games provided the products mentioned above for the review  free of charge no other compensation was provided. However, no product compensation will influence the outcome of any review. My honest opinions are used in all reviews, they are solely my own & they may vary from others. My reviews are posted for readers in order to provide an informed decision before purchasing the product.