>"I don’t feel nostalgia for many things, but when I fire up HeroQuest and the music suddenly flips into Golden Brown (imagine being a composer, told you only have 30 kilobytes for your entire musical score and thinking, “Cool, that means I can fit this harpsichord solo by The Stranglers in”), I feel a full-blown Proustian rush.The ad for the board game version of HeroQuest has the same effect. Like a whole generation of baby dorks I saw those kids saying “I’ll use my broadsword” and “Fire of Wrath!” and immediately asked my parents to buy it for me when Christmas rolled around. Then I played it with my parents, my friends and my babysitter until everyone was thoroughly bored. Even my babysitter didn’t want to play it anymore, and she was paid to spend time with me. I kept playing by myself, keeping the board set up on a tiny table for one under the stairs, controlling all the monsters as well as a full suite of four heroes. Now that I think about it this is actually quite a depressing memory. What was great about the board game was that it came with such an excellent set of dungeon furniture and miniatures. That manic, grinning goblin is still the first thing I think of when goblins show up as level-one enemies in any game. The one-eyed fimir, right out of Warhammer, looked like a Ray Harryhausen monster. I still have a bunch of the plastic skeletons and mummies, which later became the core of an undead team in tabletop fantasy sports game Blood Bowl. The cards were lovely too, with their dopey, overconfident adventurers who’ve just cast Rock Skin or swigged a potion of strength.  "