Heroes of Might and Magic III: The Board Game is 6,000% over its Kickstarter target
Deckbuilding meets exploration
Classic RPG Heroes of Might and Magic III has been transmuted into a board game, with its Kickstarter campaign currently on over 2.6 million pounds. That's 6000% over its £43,000 funding goal. You people want this. Are you sure you want this?
The board game is a hybrid of competitive deckbuilding and exploration, where 1-4 players travel around an overworld collecting cards to play in separate combat encounters. I do dig deckbuilding, but I suspect this might lack a little magic to anyone who isn't after a nostalgia kick.
As you can see in the trailer above, there's a lot going on. As well as moving your hero (of either Might or Magic) around the board, you're also building up a town that lets you recruit units and purchase spells. You use those in separate combat encounters, either against neutral units or other players, on a vaguely Summoner Wars-looking battlefield where positioning "matters a lot".
The victory conditions change with each scenario, so you might be racing to find the Holy Grail, collecting treasures, or trying to occupy the most mines. There's a solo mode, and a special 2v2 mode if you want to play with four people.
Varied victory goals combined with map tiles being plonked down in different ways mean each game should play out a little differently, and I am broadly a fan of integrating deckbuilding into other systems that give players a more tangible sense of interaction. Still, I'm skeptical.
Board game versions of videogames tend to buckle under the weight of replicating videogame systems that can wind up feeling both simplified and more fiddly. You tend to be better off going for games that are tying to do similar things but aren't burdened by the same misplaced ambition, or games that focus in on one specific element. Seriously, check out Summoner Wars, it's great. (There's a neat free online version too.)
My main concern here is the inevitable tedium involved with sitting around while your friends play out combat encounters. I'd be very wary of playing it with more than one other person.
All that said, I haven't played it, and at least some of the people that have do like it. Here's Adam from WeeklyGameNight with his opinion, alongside a rundown of the rules.
Heroes Of Might And Magic III: The computer game made it into our list of the 50 best strategy games of all time. If you want a Kickstarter copy of the board game, you'll need to stump up €75. You can back it here.