Playing Hellboy board game

A month since last update. Sigh [Please insert generic excuses about real life here, blah blah, whine whine. OK; that's enough].

I had the chance to play the Hellboy board game. My pal got it from the Kickstarter campaign and invited me over to give it a try. Besides, first time he paints a full game set, so kudos to him on the achievement!

You can easily find the rules online and the game isn't particularly difficult to grasp, so I'll just try to give a general overview of my impressions.

We played the introductory scenario, so I'll use it for the basic explanations. The game allows you to play coop against the AI, which is becoming more usual nowadays. In this case there were three of us: Hellboy himself, Johann Kraus and Abe Sapien (played by myself).

The board is set by individual tiles

If you are into the Hellboy comics world, you'll get a lot of references at once. The aesthetics of the game, the way the scenario is presented, that kind of stuff. It's all pretty narrative, which also helps with the whole experience.

You have to explore the tiles and solve the Encounter Cards you will find on them, as well as get clues on your current investigation (the yellow tokens in the pic below).

Of course you will have to face some enemies

The enemy minions are all different kinds of Frog Monsters (Rampaging Frog Monsters, Venomous Frog Monsters, Armed Frog Monsters and Transforming Frog Monsters). There are also Frog Swarms, which act not exactly as enemies to face, but more like tokens downgrading the heroes skills.

Another quite a common thing nowadays is the use of different dice (you know, colours and stuff). The novelty here is the use of another special die, which will act as a modifier of the roll):

In this case the skull meant that I had to discard the highest scoring die from the roll. Besides, I run out of ammo

While my character is best used in range attack with firearms, Johann Kraus has quite interesting psychic abilities and Hellboy prevails by the use of sheer brute force.

Which was clear since the beginning

Each character has a number of activation points each turn, so it's up to you how you use them -and how you interact with your team.

Hellboy could re-roll any dice here, which obviously was not necessary

You discover new places and clues as you move forward.

That piece of card represents a table

Which Hellboy uses to smash the Frog Monster

The fight goes on and new monsters arrive

Johann Kraus is severely injured

But the situation is soon under control

There is a Rest Phase each turn, during which the characters can recover from wounds, exchange items and so. A good use of that phase can be critical.

So OK, let's move forward

Quite a punch

There's a clue over there, but Hellboy and Abe have run out of actions

Johann uses his abilities to leave his body, appear close to the clue and inspect it

Oooops! Now you get back to your body? Now? Seriously?

We tried to get rid of the minions first

An event card got us stunned

The event cards each turn add some uncertainty, as they can turn any situation from one side to another!

Fortunately we killed the minion...

...and the giant frog monster after some hard struggle!

We won!
The game itself is easy to learn, the core rules bear no difficulty. The scenario is atmospherical and delivers some fun, but it was just the introductory tutorial. As it had taken us less than an hour, we decided to run a second game.


BEWARE. If you plan to play this game, you may want to skip the following pics, there are spoilers about the scenario.

Ye be warned.

Same players and characters, new challenge

We got some action pretty soon

Fire! Those are Inferno Markers

That's a special rule, areas set in fire causing damage to the characters if they stay there. Can be removed just the same way as the frog swarms.

This scenario is clearly more challenging than the previous one

However, we managed to keep moving forward

Abe was the quickest of the three, so he was the explorer

Kind of crowded place to be an abandoned mansion!

Activating a determined token we made a discovery...

A secret room!

Hellboy explored it...

...while the others kept the enemies at bay

Which wasn't that easy!

We even got some backup!

You can get some remote support from other BPRD agents (or even direct support). We had some help from Bud Waller this game. The agent is assigned to a determined character.
Whatever the case, we made some progress on the investigation and we found the agent that was missing (the reason for the whole scenario!). But suddenly...

That's Rasputin as a ghost! Glubs

Things get wild in a minute

Rasputin's Ghost cannot really be destroyed...

...but can be temporarily stopped

We could only run towards the exit

Looks easy, but we all were severely injured

Oooops, he got up again

We were not leaving that easily

Uhh, guys, we better move fast

We 'knocked' Rasputin out again, just to bauy us some time

But certainly not enough!

Finally, after some struggle...

...we reached the exit with our injured agent. The rescue was a success! Hooray!

This scenario was much a better experience than the tutorial, and I think it served as a real measure of the game itself. It's quite a narrative experience. It sometimes reminded me the kind of Mansions of Madness storytelling (well, but this one is of course waaay more simple!). It's immersive and all the aesthetics and the way the game is developed clearly takes you to the Hellboy comics universe.
The game is easy to learn, making it accessible to all the comic fans that are not so used to this kind of board games; yet it provides fun to those more veteran players. I regret the lack of variety of the enemy minions, but those in the game give some good moments. The way they are activated or the frog swarms being more an impediment than a real enemy is also a good point.
On the whole it was really fun, we had a nice evening and managed to play a couple of games in maybe about three hours. Cannot ask for more!