HELLBOY: THE DICE GAME
Red Means Stop!... or roll again, possibly
Designer: Rob Burman & Matt Gilbert | Publisher: Mantic Games
Before I can really explore this game, it’s probably best to explain a little of the theme of Hellboy. Many of us have seen the comics and the films, but for the uninitiated, in the world of Hellboy, the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense is an international agency that sends investigators into unworldly situations to gather clues.
When things get too tough, and an operative bites off more than they can chew, the B.P.R.D. can revive them, and send them on another mission.
Hellboy: The Dice Game is a competitive push-your-luck dice game built around the theme of these investigative forays. Each player, on their turn, draws a card, then rolls a blue special dice with as many of the variously coloured attack dice as they wish. The aim of the dice roll is to match or exceed the number of Frog Monster icons on the revealed card. Beat it, and keep the card and its clue points. Get beaten, lose a wound. Lose all your wounds and all your accumulated clue points are lost.
Seems almost childishly simple, so far, right? The twist is that each of the attack dice have different amounts of pips. Yellow dice, at best, can give you one point, orange two, and red, occasionally, three. The black dice is covered in cross-shaped pips, scoring a maximum roll of four. So, you need to beat three Frog Monsters? Do you roll three yellow dice? Just the black one? All your remaining oranges? The black dice scores, on average, 2.5 pips, whereas the yellow score just 0.5. But luck, tricky beast that it is, means that the one time you rely on black to deliver, it’ll just give you one pip and the Frog Monsters will destroy you.
Every dice you use is passed left to the next player, meaning your pool of dice rapidly shrinks, and worse; every good dice you choose is sent straight to your opponents to equip them to score well. The decision of how many dice to roll, and when to stop rolling and bank your clue points is not one that’s possible to completely master; watching others miss the mark is extremely satisfying, especially since they are handing you their dice as they do it!
One friend commented to me that he’d had a lot of fun, and that this is rather neatly designed game, but that if I’d asked him if he wanted to play “Hellboy: The Dice Game” he’d have said no, because he had no knowledge of the franchise, and he’d assumed it would be bloody or violent.
The illustration here is splashy cartoon noir, as you would expect from any creative work linked to Hellboy’s artist Mike Mignolai. There is maybe a touch of repetition on the cards, although the investigative setting, with its constant hunt for just one more clue, means you don’t spend much time focusing on them anyway. It’s all about the results on the dice!
There’s no denying that the pushyour-luck mechanics here would work equally well in a lightly themed abstract setting too - and perhaps that would open this surprisingly feisty little puzzle to a wider audience. For lovers of Hellboy though, this is a rather rewarding, practically mandatory purchase.
CHRIS LOWRY
WE SAY
Surprisingly more-ish, this game gives to everyone else as it takes away from you. The satisfaction of out-rolling your mates with the same dice they gave you? Fabulous.
WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
◗40 Exploration cards
◗3 Red plastic wound cubes
◗3 Orange attack dice
◗6 Yellow attack dice
◗2 Red attack dice
◗ Black attack die
◗ Blue special die
◗ Dice game bag
◗ Rules sheet
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED KING OF TOKYO
…There are no giant monsters here (apart from Hellboy himself) but the chunky custom dice and the take-that vs style play will have cross appeal.