Last week someone on Hacker News linked a site dedicated to HeroQuest. This quickly resulted in me buying Warhammer Quest: Shadows over Hammerhal to play with my kids. I've not dabbled in fantasy miniatures for 20 years, but Hammerhal looked like a self-contained dungeon crawler in the same style as HQ, and indeed that's what it is: a gamemaster arranges a dungeon for a party of 2-5 adventurers, who then proceed to clear 8 levels full of bad guys.
The box includes 31 miniatures; one will need some decent glue, a sharp boxcutter, and a few hours to assemble them... but it's worth it. The kids loved it so much, we're now playing it every day before bedtime - it's a great incentive to get them to do homework, clean up their rooms, and brush their teeth quickly and without fuss.
The game requiring a gamemaster is good in the sense that I can tweak the game and keep the fun flowing. My son is 5 and doesn't really enjoy complex rules, so we started with a simplified set: one move+attack turn for each character, all characters moving 6 spaces, no hero dice or destiny dice, rolling only to hit, and rolling for unexpected events only when they enter a room. I used the Gryph-hound character as an NPC to show them these mechanics, and I'm slowly replacing introducing a few real rules every couple of sessions. So it's all great, right? Well, kinda.
Being a classic dungeon master inevitably involves some dice-rolling. Hammerhal is not too bad in that regard, leaving most of the rolling to adventurers, but one notable exception is ambushes. *Every* turn an adversary is not on the board, the gamemaster is supposed to roll for ambush; if the ambush happens (1 in 6 chances), he has to then roll further for character quantity and behaviour, which means between 2 and 7 throws depending on level and results. That can significantly slow down proceedings, and I found myself "forgetting" to roll quite a few times to keep things going.
So I did what any geek would do: I automated it away. The result was Ambushwhack, a simple and mostly self-contained webpage that does all the rolling for you. I made buttons big enough to be usable on phones and tablets, added a few pics of my unpainted miniatures (since Games Workshop are infamous for aggressively defending their IP, they would likely come after me if I used their own pics), and now I use it every day.
I posted it to a few Warhammer Quest forums (boardgamegeek etc) and people asked to support Silver Tower, the other version of Warhammer Quest currently available, which has a similar (but different) set of ambush rules. A kind soul sent me most of the necessary details, so here it is. It lacks pictures and action titles but it's usable, at least until I can justify splurging on another big box of toys :)
I hope someone else will find it useful and maybe volunteer to redesign it a bit - my CSS skills are almost as bad as my miniature-painting ones. Because I'm lazy, I've only tested it on Firefox and Safari, but my javascript style is so '90s (no jQuery!) that it should work flawlessly everywhere these days. Each page is entirely self-contained (except for pics) so it can be used offline, and I slapped in an iOS icon so you can add it to your home screen. I will probably put it on github when I get some time. Have fun!
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