The game play experience of HEXplore It is largely driven by a couple of decks of cards known as Quests and Circumstances. What makes HEXplore It truly exciting is the combination of heroes that will face him and the adventures that they experience along the way, each of which are highly, highly, highly variable. In every game (without fail) the Dead King himself will appear in order to wreak havoc across the map and place pressure on the players by sacking cities and so on. It is literally an RPG toolkit that can be played by anyone, anywhere, in perhaps as little as two hours.īoiling it down to the simplest level possible, HEXplore It is a single, highly variable choose your own adventure that is built around the titular Valley of the Dead King. Clearly, the HEXplore It team has built a game that is far more accomplished than my childish scribbling could ever have been, but even so, what strikes me most about this game is how it is both incredibly straightforward and yet so powerful. I can’t help but wonder if HEXplore It designer Jonathan Mariucci and his team were kindred spirits of mine, because this superb “hero crafting” game is literally my childhood dream come true. Imaginative as I was and with time on my hands, I remember pinching A3 sheets of graph paper from my dad and drawing out hex and square based maps complete with forests, streams and treacherous mountains. As a (young) child of the eighties, I missed the peak of the Dungeons & Dragons style of tabletop gaming by about five or maybe ten years, but even so, adverts on TV and in magazines (not to mention the popular children’s cartoon) gave me an insight into the kind of adventures that older kids all over the world were having.

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