Depending on your perspective, we’re either spoiled, or deprived.
I know I’ve written about this before, but here we are again. This is more of a comparison to the release of other GW dungeon crawls.
We’ve been spoiled for past ten years. GW released five major dungeon crawls in that time.
Though… we had all those games in the first seven years, and none since.
The Timeline
- 1990 – Heroquest (U.S. Release)
- 1990 – Advanced Heroquest (U.S. Release)
- Three year gap from Terror in the Dark, two from the Elf Quest Pack
- 1995 – Warhammer Quest
- The Void: A full twenty years pass
- 2015 – Warhammer Quest Card Game
- 2016 – Silver Tower
- 2017 – Shadows Over Hammerhal
- 2018 – Blackstone Fortress
- And the very next year from the release of Ascension…
- 2021 – Cursed City
- ???? – What now?
Note: I’m starting with Heroquest and I’m not counting Space Hulk since there isn’t a roleplay aspect to it. Nor am I counting video games or Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, since I don’t play either. So there! I’m also not counting Warhammer Quest: Lost Relics because it’s not a big box release.
I’m counting the card game since it effectively relaunched the WHQ franchise.
We’re approaching the time gap between Advanced Heroquest and Warhammer Quest. We’ve already blown past Blackstone Fortress to Cursed City.
In some ways, I’m thankful for a bit of a gap to get caught up. A person can only assemble, paint and play so much. I don’t like having projects pile up, even if they look like a ton of fun.
GW tends to front-load specialty game content:
The original run of Heroquest was done in three years. Advanced Heroquest was done in two!
WHQ95 was 100% complete in 1995. Yes, articles appeared in White Dwarf, Citadel Journal, and Deathblow until 2000, but there were no more retail expansions. The champion of this competition, done in six.
The Card Game lasted two years, with two character expansions in 2016. A rare overlap with another game…
Silver Tower and it’s cousin Shadows Over Hammerhal were each one-and-done.
Blackstone Fortress fared better, with some satisfying expansions. All wrapped up in three years.
Cursed City came out in 2021, and both boxed expansions came out the following year. The final content appears to be the Grombrindal card in White Dwarf 500 in 2024. Done in four.
It’s interesting that Cursed City out-lasted almost all its predecessors, including the original run of Heroquest. And the contemporary run of Heroquest has blown the original out of the water! I feel like “time inflation” is a factor here. The years were bigger back then!
It’s looking like 2025 will be the first year without GW dungeon crawler content since the WHQ Card Game came out in 2015! Ten years was a good run, I’m glad to have caught the tail end of it, returning to the hobby in 2020, but what a shame! I hope we see something new in the future, and not another big gap between games. Regardless, we’ll keep playing the old stuff!
