Inspired by the legendary tales of horror, myth and folklore by Mike Mignola.
I love the character of Hellboy, the artwork, and the stories, so I was very excited to see a board game on Kickstarter that promised to bring the universe to the tabletop. Less so, that it was done by Mantic, who hadn’t impressed me in the past with Deadzone. But what a pleasant surprise when I finally got the game and opened the box! Everything is very well done and beautifully presented, and the miniatures are very good boardgame quality. I was even more impressed when I got the game to the table.
What I at first thought was a relatively simple dungeonbash system turned out to have heaps of character and lots of interesting decisions. And all the characters felt unique: Hellboy threw frog monsters around, Liz lit everything on fire, Abe backed everyone up, and Kraus explored.
So if you’re a fan of Hellboy—hell, if you just like a really good dungeoncrawler with a bit of exploration and story thrown in—grab yourself Hellboy: The Board Game. And then grab yourself this rules summary and reference to make the whole thing even easier to learn and play.
And make sure you print out some of the incredible fan-made replacements on Boardgamegeek for the enemy cards, agent boards, and especially the case files (you can print out nice case file envelopes too). They’re vastly superior to some of the lacklustre design work in the published box.
