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On the face of it, digital versions of beloved board games offer a special kind of opportunity. Freed from the need to hunt down an overpriced copy of a long out-of-print title, they offer an affordable link to the past. They conveniently alleviate the burden of space that's required by dozens of board pieces and hundreds of cards, counters and fiddly plastic miniatures, allowing us to dip in and out with minimal fuss and they also bypass the barrier to entry represented by a hefty rule book. New players can quickly get their bearings while veteran players are enveloped within the comforting folds of nostalgia. Warhammer Quest achieves this in fits and starts. To its credit, Rodeo Games has clearly thought long and hard about how best to translate the hundreds of pages of role-play minutiae of Games Workshop's 1995 physical board game into a streamlined digital product. The result is a turn-based, top-down affair that keeps things clear and uncluttered, with a simple point and click interface that works just as well for PC as the touch controls did for the iOS release on which this port is based.
However, while Warhammer Quest is a prime example of so many of these positive traits, it also falls foul of the downsides that come of such streamlining. In tidying away the dice rolls, tables and stat sheets that we once pored over and cross-referenced, Warhammer Quest loses some appeal and takes on some cold, hard edges. Where once we might choose to push our luck, accepting that fate could conspire to produce several duff dice rolls in a row, making the rolls invisible can leave you feeling like you've been cheated.
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