Daniel (@dungeondive) arrives at A Hero’s Journey Home by way of defeat. A week with Miskatonic Tales: Journey to Endmouth left him no closer to understanding it — a rulebook he rates poorly, a brain already full of other games’ rules, and days of playing time spent watching Paul Grogan explain it instead. He needed something simple on the table, and Graham Cranfield’s card game was the cure.
The premise inverts the usual: you have already slain the demon king and taken his crown, and the game is the walk home. Your completed quest’s point value is your party budget — nine points buys the eight-point bandit and the one-point fool, whose wacky antics subtract three from every monster’s attack roll. Expansion race cards make that fool a dwarf; a god deck grants three prayers for healing, gold or enchantment. You work through a journey deck with the home card shuffled into its bottom half, and there is no press-your-luck: he is explicit that this is not Iron Helm. At heart it is a resource game — hit points, gold and the adventurers themselves are all spent.
Two things drive the video. The art, which he loves enough to have considered a tattoo of it. And the game’s being out of print — one used base-game copy on Noble Knight, the expansions nowhere. It is decks of cards and a few dice, he points out, which makes this partly an open plea to the designer to put it on DriveThruCards.
Daniel kept inventing house rules to make the journey deck’s exploration more meaningful, and abandoned every one because it fought the game’s simplicity — when does adding choice to a light game improve it, and when does it just make it a different game?