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Encouraging new players

Lucky are the gamers who have family members with whom they can share in this crazy hobby.

The wife and I don't have children but, we have been blessed with a large amount of nieces and nephews. I've considered trying to encourage the hobby among the kids but I'm not sure which games would be successful with them.  The nephews are generally older teens and are in the "chasing girls and driving trucks" phase. They haven't shown much interest in my hobby no matter what the game.  That leaves me with lots of nieces. They are definitely not the ideal recruits for the war game hobby. Honestly, they would probably rather watch a Disney Sing-a-long marathon. Never the less, I started to think up some ideas for a game that they might like.

I dove into my storage closet and found my venerable copy of HeroQuest! Feelings of nostalgia overwhelmed me. I remembered what a great game this was and how much fun I had playing it as a kid. I decided that this was the right game and opened the box to inventory the contents.

Then I noticed something I had never considered before.  All the heroes depicted in this game were all male!  While this is not an issue for me, this might be a problem for the nieces. They are growing up in a age where girls are expected to be treated the same as boys in all aspects of life. I figured they would find the game more interesting if they had female representations on the board instead.

So, I went out to the Reaper website to see if there were some suitable figures to replace the standard male figs (Wizard, Elf, Barbarian, and Dwarf).  There were plenty to choose from. I picked out a few that I could use. I eliminated from consideration any overtly sexual figures for obvious reasons and decided against using any female dwarves as they just looked ridiculous.

Here's what I found, all minis from http://reapermini.com



03547 - Juliette, Wizard

60042: Shalelu, Elf Ranger 


77062 - Deenah, Barbarian



77164 - Elliwyn Heatherlark, technically a Gnome but would replace a Dwarf

I'll probably never get a chance to coordinate such a game but I may purchase the figs anyway just to have a fun painting project for myself.

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