This is a fun idea! Thanks for starting this thread
My introduction to Heroscape was a pretty similar to yours. Back in, I think, 2005, my uncle got me Rise of the Valkyrie for Christmas, and my brother, my dad, and I had a bunch of fun playing around with the base set maps and figures before beginning rack up expansions and wander into customization. I liked the game so much that I got several of my friends into it (including Superfrog, who ended up getting much more involved in the Scape community than me). Now, almost 15 years later I still play Heroscape with my brother when I'm back home for holidays and this year, thanks to the pandemic, I've gotten into playing online in the OHS events
~KoS, who has a lot of fond childhood memories of completely wacky Heroscape games