Avalon Hill on Display at Gen Con 2022

Just ahead of Gen Con 2022, Avalon Hill surprised the gaming world with the announcement of HeroScape: Age of Annihilation, a new standalone "Master Set" for the beloved HeroScape game line that last saw new titles released in 2010.

At the show, I spoke with design lead Craig Van Ness, Tanya Thompson (Senior Director of Inventor Relations and Innovation for Hasbro Games), and Angus Walker (Head of IR & External Innovation) about plans for HeroScape: Age of Annihilation, and the information they could share was minimal:

—The miniatures will come unpainted, but they will be created in different colors to match the generals.
—The miniatures will be backwards compatible to everything released previously.
—No release date has been set, and no method of release has been announced.

Board Game: HeroScape: Age of Annihilation

HeroScape display at Gen Con 2022 with painted miniatures

Despite that last line, the sense I got was that you will find the project going live on Hasbro Pulse, the company's direct-to-customer sales platform, before too long. Everyone agreed that painted miniatures would be great, but one thing Van Ness pointed out is that the current tools for miniature creation allow for more detail than in earlier releases — and that level of detail makes painting more of a challenge, i.e., costly.

As for what's coming in the box, that's still to be announced. I imagine Hasbro execs have laid out a chart of possible figure counts and cross-referenced those numbers with what the resulting retail price would need to be in order to maximize what's possible without turning off potential buyers. We'll see where that dart lands.

• Avalon Hill showed off several other titles as well, such as Dungeons & Dragons: The Yawning Portal, a 1-4 player game designed by Kristian Karlberg and Kenny Zetterberg that works as follows:

Quote:

The Yawning Portal is an iconic inn that attracts fascinating adventurers with two things in common: They're famished, and they have unique tastes in food.

As part of the tavern's staff, you need to feed them by matching up food tokens with the orders pictured on their hero card. You earn colored gems (and points) for every matching food token, and a bonus for completing an order. The colored gems that appear most frequently on the board receive the highest value, so strategize to tip the scoring scale in your favor — and don't be afraid to use potions to make patrons love your food! Collect more points if you're the first to achieve an objective challenge or earn an endgame bonus. The player with the most points at the end of the game wins.

Dungeons & Dragons: The Yawning Portal is already listed on Hasbro Pulse with a March 2023 release date.

• Risk: Shadow Forces, a legacy game for 3-5 players, was released at the start of August 2022, and that game sprawls across a display case as fine as any other.

• Betrayal at House on the Hill: 3rd Edition was another early August 2022 debut from Avalon Hill, and a small expansion that contains one new character, two new miniatures, and five new haunts is due out later in 2022. That expansion is Betrayal: The Werewolf's Journey – Blood on the Moon.

• Finally, Avalon Hill announced a December 2022 release date for The Rogue Heir of Elethorn, a small expansion for HeroQuest that consists of two miniatures, a story card, and twelve game cards.

It's interesting to see Avalon Hill acting like a "regular" game publisher — announcing expansions of popular titles, using direct sales to bypass the retail market — but these moves make sense for a company that sees a market for which it can provide games on a scale that's below Hasbro's normal level of operations.