by Deroche
In my opinion, because Heroscape is a giant game of Rock-Paper-Scissors when comparing one army to another, balancing is hard to achieve when you build your army by trying to take all possible opponents and scenarios into consideration. Can your scissors navigate through successive matches when you don't know if you are facing paper or rock? Hard to do, so a "meta" dynamic starts to appear and you end up going with something that tends to win 80% of the time and simply hope you don't end up against the one army that does well against your build. It's a fairly effective approach in your typical double-blind, Swiss format tournament.But in a structured three player match (best played with the "kill-the-player-on-your-left-to-win" format), things become quickly lopsided if all three aren't balanced pretty well. Easier said than done.
I dealt with the same issue when trying come up with a three player match for myself and my nephews. In the end it ended up pretty well, and I even did a test run with my gaming friends first who were new to Heroscape. With hindsight, my efforts to make the game more balanced ended up making the game more complicated than necessary for a first time player. I wrote about the experience here: http://www.heroscapers.com/community/blog.php?b=1903
Real quick -- three player games should use the "First player that kill the opponent on their left wins it all" rules. This avoids kingmaking and makes for interesting decisions the whole match. How often should you attack the player on your right instead of your left because he/she is coming after you and thereby help out your main opponent as well by doing his/her work for them? You might want to consider going with only one glyph, but make sure it is one heck of a glyph in the middle to act as a honeypot and force the action (like the +1 to your attack dice glyph for all your army cards, or maybe Wannock, the auto-wound glyph). Simply remove that center tree and replace with a normal tile of some kind for the glyph.
I *think* these armies can work:
Player A
Heavy Grutsx4 - 280
Grimnak - 120
400 points
Player B
Roman Legionnairesx5 - 250
Marcus Decimus Gallus - 100
Me-Burq-Sa - 50
400 total points
(or, you could drop a squad of Romans and Me-Burq-Sa and add Ne-Gok-Sa and either Isamu or Otonashi for the last 100 points, but Romans benefit from numbers, especially if Grimnak is their primary enemy)
Player C
Knights of Westonx4 - 280
Sir Gilbert - 105
Isamu or Otonashi - 10
395 points
(or instead of Gilbert, run Finn (80), Eldgrim (30) and Isamu/Otonashi for 400 total)
Have the Heavy Gruts player attack the Romans as his/her main target, have the Romans focus on the Knights, and have the Knights in turn go against the Gruts. The one issue with this might be the Gruts ability to disengage, which completely nullifies the Knight's Coward's Reward ability, but if you use Gilbert (or Finn instead and thus gain the road bonus benefit), the Knights can keep up with Gruts anyway and hence you maintain the whole three-way-circle-of-death gameplay aspect going on.
You'll notice all three armies have bonding heroes. That's intentional. I personally believe that one of the hardest aspects of Heroscape for a new player is knowing where and when to place their Order Markers. Poor OM management will often cost you the game. Bonding mostly eliminates incorrect OM decisions because you simply dump all three OMs on your main squad. All they need to additionally learn is to first take a turn with their hero before taking a turn with their squad.
If you don't have enough of the figures listed (or any) simply proxy. In a casual game, it's the card powers that matter, not the sculpt. If you don't have the cards, they're all listed on heroscapers.com and you can print them out.
Either way, share the experience with a session report perhaps...I'd love to read about it!
(edit: added the part about the glyph)