"No Rain but Thunder and the Sound of Giants" - Hellboy Board Game

Happy Friday, and welcome back to The Art of Caesura!

I hope you're all geared up to have great weekends. I'm on holiday at the moment (and next week too! Yippeee! - but don't worry that won't stop next week's post from coming out on time!). As I mentioned last week, we're going to give my Kharadron Overlords a break of a bit (even though an exciting new thing just arrived in the mail!!) But excitement abounds, and this week I want to share with you something else that only recently arrived: Hellboy: The Boardgame!!

Having previously devoted a whole post to Hellboy, it would be remiss of me not to show you the board game now that it has just arrived! The communities around this game, on Board Game Geek and Facebook are really super fantastic! There is some incredible fan-made content, cheerful and helpful fans...and...the rules designer for the game, James Hewitt is a constant presence - clarifying rules queries pretty much in real time!! Unbelievable. 

God, I need to get a new camera...

The game is divided into a bunch of stand alone missions (case files) that can be played as any of the included Hellboy heroes ("agents"). Each mission begins with an investigative part where the heroes explore various creepy surrounds, battling frog monsters / Nazis, and looking for clues that will help them fight the big baddie. 

All the while, The Deck of Doom introduces random elements and advances a Doom Track which, if it reaches its end, will thrust the agents into the boss battle un-prepared, and at some kind of disadvantage. 

As I've alluded to, each Case File ends with a boss battle and there are a bunch of different ones included in the game (such as Rasputin or the Conqueror Worm). And they are proper boss battles. They remind me of old school video games where it was almost as likely as not that you would die. And death had real consequences (in Hellboy if all the agents are knocked out, that's it - game over!). This gives a fantastic sense of tension!

I've only played through the "tutorial" mission a few times (once with my wife and with different agents each time) and each time has felt very different. 

A really nice mechanic is that while each agent has their base level of attack, it can be upgraded (and downgraded) by loads of different things: a fellow agent using one of their actions to give an assist, an enemy in your area, gear load-outs...the list goes on. Currently, the list goes on a bit too far for me, and I'm finding it a bit tricky to remember all the things that up and down-grade dice. This gets easier with each play through, so I'd say it won't really be an issue. 

Most of the art style in the game is ravishing! Look at the game boards for example - very in keeping with Mike Mignola's style. 

While the rules have been fantastic, I've had a few little niggles, in terms of the components; some of them just feel a bit generic. I'm really not a fan of the enemy wound counters (those little red disks in the lower right of the picture below). They're generic and cumbersome. Most enemies have 6 wounds or less, so custom dice (maybe small black dice with red blood drops instead of pips) would have worked much better. Likewise the action cubes (seen on the character boards above). A great concept, but for me there was so much more potential for character; keep the colours, but change the cubes to...almost anything else: skulls, hellboy face tokens, even just coloured glass beads would have felt nicer...actually maybe that's what I'll do. 

Anyway those were just a couple of niggles in an otherwise excellent gaming experience so far. 

I don't really want to give a "review" as I have only had a chance to play such a small part of the game, this was more of a summary of what the game is to give people who are on the fence a nudge either way. I will say that I'm having an absolute blast so far!

"aw crap..."

One last little tidbit to increase your immersion while playing the game, there's this website where people put together music playlists for board games. They're pretty great, and the one for Hellboy is here!

I hope you enjoyed that first look at Hellboy: The Board Game. There will be much more to come, right here on The Art of Caesura!


Watching: Avengers: Endgame
Listening: What Once Was - Her's


Next Week:

BLAM BLAM...