Developing Hellboy: The Board Game – Agent Cards

It’s Hellboy Week(s) on the Mantic Blog. Over the next few days we’ll be delving into key gameplay elements ahead of the retail launch on April 27th. We kicked off the blogs earlier this week with an overview of the early development stages. If you missed those, make sure you read part one and part two.

For today’s rules focus, we’re looking at an Agent Card. In Hellboy: The Board Game you and up to three others (although you can play solo too, don’t worry) will choose your BPRD agent and then head out into the field. In the core game you’ll find four agents to choose from: Hellboy, Liz Sherman, Abe Sapien and Johann Kraus. Each agent has their own unique card with their own special abilities.

For now we’ll look at Hellboy’s Agent Card and explain all the various parts. In some cases we’ll give a brief overview as we’ll be expanding on them later in the week. This is just to whet your appetites. A rule aperifit, if you will.

SKILL LEVEL ICONS

First up in the top left are your skills. Starting from the left you’ve got:

• Fight (used when attacking enemies in the agent’s area)
• Shoot (used when attacking enemies in other areas)
• Explore(used when examining clues and points of interest)
• Defend (used when defending against enemy attacks)

The different colours represent the colour of dice you’ll be rolling when making that test. We’ll be covering this in further detail later in the week.

SPECIAL RULES

Next up you’ve got the special rules for the agent. These are abilities that are always active for that agent. As you can see from Hellboy’s card, he's pretty handy (ba-boom tish) at Fighting because he can shake off any damage. However, he's also good at helping fellow agents with the Seen it all Before rule.

THREAT LEVEL

This is important for the start of the game. Ahead of the mission, you place character icons on the target priority tracker. During the enemy phase, the character in first place will be the target of enemy attacks. Thankfully this changes during the course of the game, so poor Hellboy won’t always be suffering damage.

UNIQUE ACTIONS

Here’s one of the most exciting elements of the card! These are the Unique Actions the agent can perform as part of their turn. Each costs a differing amount, so you’ll have to choose carefully when you want to perform them. We’ll be going into more depth about Agent Actions in a future blog. For now just imagine how much fun it will be to throw furniture at a frog monster. Answer: lots of fun.

STARTING CARDS

Agents start with their own unique pieces of equipment or abilities (for example Liz’s Flame Tracker). In this case it’s Hellboy's Pistol and some deep pockets! Hellboy is always rummaging around in his coat to find something useful - whether that's a charm, weapon or something else entirely - and that's represented by the Deep Pockets card.

HEALTH TRACK

No one said fighting the harbingers of Doom would be easy and the agents are likely to take damage during the game. We'll be covering damage in a future blog, but just rest assured that if this fills up, then bad things will happen.

And that concludes our quick review of Hellboy’s Agent Card. As mentioned above we’ll be exploring some of the elements in closer detail over the next few days. In tomorrow’s blog, the dashing James M. Hewitt will be here to explain what Case Files are… and you definitely don’t want to miss that!

Hellboy: The Board Game is available to order NOW from the Mantic website.