Lego Heroica: fun adventure gaming for kids

In episode 34 of the Gweek podcast, I mentioned Lego Heroica and how much my 8-year-old daughter enjoys it. It's a simple-rule-set role playing game that uses Lego pieces for the characters, board, and even the six-sided die. We have the 101-piece Draida Bay ($14.99 on Amazon).

It took Jane about 15 minutes to put the board together and we were off and running. Jane played the barbarian (special skill: kill all adjacent monsters) and I played the wizard (can kill a monster up to four squares away, including around corners). Our quest was to defeat the Goblin General and make off with his beloved Golden Crystal of Reflection. Game play was about 10 minutes.

The Heroica line consists of four different games, which connect together to form a super Heroica game. Draida Bay is the smallest of the four games. There's also Waldurk Forest, Caverns of Nathuz, and Castle Fortaan. The complete series connected together looks like a lot of fun. I know what I'm getting Jane for her birthday in a few months!

• [Anne K.]

  My youngest nephew, a 5yr old, loves the Castle Fortaan set!

  I babysat him and his older brother last week and he wanted to play first thing every morning. He spent lots of time making up new rules and putting all the gold on the board. He would make up new scenarios as we approached the end of the game just to make it last longer. When I moved on to something else, he happily sat at the kitchen table and self narrated his continuing castle adventures for an hour.

  The only time he got upset was when I insisted on calling it Castle “Fortran” just to bug the shit out of him. Heh heh, I love being an aunt.

  • [dawdler]

    I was just going to ask if anyone had tried it for a 5-6 year old.  I’m always on the look out for games to play with my son.  I think he might like this – thanks.

• [davidasposted]

  Interesting. I use LEGO figures as avatars when my friends and I play D&D. Each player creates a much more unique representation of how they view their character than the predetermined (and quite expensive) miniatures sold for that same purpose. It’s almost as fun as rolling up a character…

• [Nathaniel Akin]

  “I know what I’m getting Jane for her birthday in a few months!”

  Now she knows too.

  • [Ælfgifu]

    You let 8 year olds surf the net unsupervised?

• [Matthew Wong]

  The Waldurk Forest set is pretty good. 
  The magic doors add a pretty good game mechanic 

• [telechi]

  I deem this fantastic

• [Crunt]

  My son has all four sets (7 year old b-day scores) and he loves them. He’s very process oriented and more about building and developing the game than playing it. He likes to change and add rules and create new items and scenery with his other legos. The game is very accomodating to that kind of creativity, which is a nice plus.

• [Al Billings]

  When I got my Castle Fortaan game, I had to make a flickr set as I put it together.
  http://www.flickr.com/photos/albill/sets/72157627737623638/

• [Stefan Jones]

  This is so damn cool. The Lego people are just so damn brilliant.

  But its coolness makes me feel bitter about not having had a chance to have stuff like this when I was a kid.

  I mean, MAN, what a time to be a geek! Back in high school I made paper covers for my D&D books (the three little tan booklets in a white box), somewhat to avoid getting beat up, but mostly so I wouldn’t have to EXPLAIN myself. Getting beat up would almost be better than the slightly scornful WTF? expressions of teachers and students I’d described D&D to.

  Now you’ve got the most powerful toy brand in the world being used as a gateway drug to full-bore roleplaying.

  • [RyanMcFitz]

    Embrace your inner geek.  These games have *minimum* recommended ages.  They don’t have *maximum* recommended ages.  Go get ‘em!

• [Greg]

  These are a huge hit with my five year old son as well.  A lot of thought must have gone into determining the scope of this game system, and it seems LEGO really hit the sweet spot. The rules are just complex enough to keep things interesting, but simple enough that my son was able to remember exactly how everything works, long after I myself kept referring to the rulebook. Also, the sets are relatively inexpensive for LEGO, and aside from the character figures, do not rely on a whole lot of special pieces. The maps and treasures are constructed from some very common brick types, so if you’ve already got LEGO sets, chances are you can seamlessly expand the world with what you’ve got lying around. I was joking with friends that there must be some parents on the Heroica design team, because of how well these particular sets manage to avoid the endless buy-in syndrome of other LEGO systems (cough-STARWARS!-cough).

• [Jim Radford]

  I have a couple of sets and my 4 year old loves it (which is an excuse for me to buy more).

• [Ev]

  Also there is an awesome box with faux leather case that you get to keep the partially built pieces in once you have several kits. It’s fantastic and adds to the theatre of playing it, a bit like bring out out an old chess set. 

• [nanner]

  my 10 yr old son enjoyed Heroica the first time we played it. He got Castle Fortaan for Christmas…but he also got the Munchkin card game. After playing Munchkin a few times we played Heroica again and it was just a bore. He abandoned it mid-game, “Let’s just play Munchkin again”. Heroica is cute and anything Lego is awesome but I doubt it will get played much.

• [SamSam]

  How much does the game expect you to re-arrange the maze, use other Lego pieces, etc?

  I mean, I know many kids will think of this (Anne K.’s comment above), but do the rules encourage and account for this?

• [TheKaz1969]

  I somehow got into a discussion about D&D with my 7 year old daughter and she wanted to play it. I dug around for my (2nd edition) books in the attic and proceeded to help her build a character.. after about 10 mins of character sheet stuff, she seemed to lose interest.

  Something like this might be a good way to ease her into it.

• [CyberIstari]

   My almost-13yo autistic son also has Draida Bay and Castle Fortaan  (and a sweet case that his grandmother scored that will take all the games, rules, etc., and has boards to play on – it’s either an import or they’ve already quit making it) and loves them, the rest are coming for his birthday. For him also, it’s more the building and rule-making than the playing, but I don’t really care. :)

• [Dave X]

  My 7 year-old son and 12 year-old daughter enjoy playing them. We’ve got all 4 hooked up, and have been making additions to the rules. My daughter came up with an “invisibility” cloak, and my son invented additional rules that allow for revenging yourself on another player. We’ve tweaked the rules slightly until they worked out right, it’s been lots of fun.

• [MarlboroTestMonkey7]

  NetHack anyone?

• [Dan B.]

  Our experience:

  Good for a five-year-old? Definitely. Especially rules-oriented, must-learn-every-detail kids.
  Good gateway role-playing game? Definitely. Introduces a lot of the concepts but in the form of a board game. My older son is already expressing interest in more sophisticated gaming.Good geek cred? He knocked the socks off a geek couple at the next table at our local coffee shop describing every last nuance to his godfather.

  Self-contained? The sets are self-contained, and require no additional pieces, but each set adds further rules and upgrades.

  Expandable? Some great stories in the comments here. We also added the shield from a Lego Kingdoms set.

  Good next step? We’ve adapted the rules into “Heroica Live,” an RPG that rewards household chores. (More sophisticated than HighScoreHouse.com, but simpler and more accessible than the rules in Geek Dad.)

• [Greg]

  Each set includes a small red crowbar for prying the tiles off of the rubber die. We made it the Skeleton Key, which will let you pass freely through any locked door until you take damage from a monster.

• [PrettyBoyTim]

  My Son (7) has Waldurk Forest and Draida Bay. I would say that Waldurk Forest is the better of the two sets, although it is a little more expensive. Obviously having both is even better as you can mix them up.

  The rule booklet encourages you to make up your own maps and rules, but the basic rules are a good starting point, my only complaint with them is that the rules as they stand are competitive between the players which feels a little at odds with the idea of a team of adventurers attempting to loot a dungeon together.

• [jandrese]

  This looks cool, but I can’t help but to think that this isn’t too far removed from building D&D dungeons out of legos, really just the very stripped down combat system that you could have probably come up with yourself. 

  In fact I think I just came up with an activity I’m definitely going to do once my children are a little bit older (2 seems a bit too young for lego). 

• [Zig]

  This is awesome!

  One of my favorite things the past handful of years has been that I’ve gotten to DM for my dear childhood friends’ (chosen family) children. A couple of teens and some younger.

  It’s really brought me a lot of joy introducing them to pen and paper role playing games. I love that I’ve learned to, more than ever, just toss rules out left and right and rolling with anything and everything to make the game fun for them.

  I don’t care that maybe a unicorn isn’t something a 1st level mage should have for a mount, but if it makes the game awesome for the young lady I am going with it!

• [Ælfgifu]

  Lego’s games inspired my son to design his own. He’s a 9 year old building machine. If there’s one thing we know, come family game night, he’ll participate if we break out the lego.

  The best part for us is if a piece goes missing, we have an 18 gallon tub full of possible replacement parts.