There were two HeroQuests and a tussle over trademarks. Chaosium sold their control of the name to Hasbro, renaming the HeroQuest RPG to QuestWorlds.
That allowed a crowdfunding campaign to make millions for Hasbro to bring the game back. The multinational’s use of crowdfunding was, of course, controversial and surprisingly restricted in geographic scope. It was the US and Canada only. But retailer Zavvi stepped in, coordinated a bulk order and now you can pre-order the £99.99 box set from them.
But, it’s still more complicated than that.
For a start, you can also pre-order the game from Amazon. It was never an exclusive deal with Zavvi.
Additionally, there’s not very much difference between this HeroQuest and the original board game which you can find on eBay, although that’s not the same retail experience as a Zavvi pre-order.
Ludofilia renounces Trademarks
Perhaps more significantly, yesterday GameZone Miniatures had the news that Ludofilia was renouncing their European trademarks.
It’s perhaps a sign of the atomic trademark system that no commentator I follow even noticed a third player in the party.
Enter TseuQuesT.
Ludofilia’s tabletop game is being rebranded as TseuQuesT.
Ludofilia, in an accord with Hasbro, has renounced all its valid Heroquest trademarks throughout Europe. Ludofilia – used those trademarks to cover its version of the board game that it offered in crowdfunding and pre-sale. From now on the board game will be RENAMED TseuQuesT. The exact contents or the game itself will remain unchanged.
– It only the name has changed, all of the board game content remains unchanged, except for the use of the new brand TseuQuesT to encompass all its components.
– Both Backers and pre-sale customers have had to endure with extreme patience the continuous delays of the official launch of our board game. Finally, the foreseen delivery date by the European-based printing company is for the end of the first quarter of 2022. If all goes well, from that date we will start shipping your games.
– Optionally, Backers and pre-sales customers will have the chance to exchange their reserved copies of the Ludofilia game for copies of the Hasbro version of Heroquest: ONLY 1 FOR BACKER (more information on CANJE HQ)
-This exclusive exchange offer for crowdfunding backers and pre-sales made by customers until the day before this announcement -November 15, 2021-
– From this moment, any new client who wants to pre-buy the TseuQuesT board game can do so here.
– The current price of the TseuQuesT is the same as offered during the crowdfunding campaign, and will remain until the day of its official launch, at which time its price will be adjusted upwards.
We greatly thank Hasbro for their professionalism and cordiality since our first contact at the beginning of 2013 until now.
Gamezone did try and run a Kickstarter for HeroQuest in 2013. It made $540,000 and more in pledges, with $153 the average backing before Chaosium’s lawyers took it out.
At the time, Moon Design, the company that owns Chaosium said;
The trademark “Heroquest” is registered by Francis Greg Stafford with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (Registration Number 4082281) for use in game book manuals. Moon Design Publications LLC has the exclusive license for use of that trademark. For some time now we have been working on creating a board game called “Heroquest” pertaining to the mythology of Glorantha and an updated version of our Heroquest roleplaying game.
The project by Gamezone, a Spanish game company, proposes to remake a role-playing/board game originally produced by Milton Bradley and Games Workshop in 1989. The project calls their game “Heroquest” which is identical to our registered mark and easily confused with it.
Gamezone initially asked us for use of the Heroquest trademark on July 31, 2013. The next day we asked them if they could provide us with a copy of any written agreement with Hasbro to produce a 25th Anniversary Edition of Hasbro’s board game. Gamezone did not provide us with any written confirmation (and as of this date still has not done so). On August 26, 2013, we informed Gamezone by email that we must decline their request.
Despite being explicitly refused permission to use our trademark, Gamezone went ahead and launched this Kickstarter. As a New York State corporation, Kickstarter is subject to US trademark laws and the use of our trademark in the campaign was a violation of those laws.We told Gamezone that they needed to immediately get a licensing agreement from us (which, among other things, would require that they pay us for the rights to the name since it would mean foregoing our opportunity to release our game using our trademark and to compensate us for that lost revenue).
Now there’s TseuQuesT, which is a new palindrome member of the games-that-use-quest family.
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