 We're James and Sophie from Nidicat Games and we designed Hellboy the board game. That we did and here we are at Mantic HQ to tell you a few things about how to play the game itself. We thought we'd come over and record a few videos so that people that prefer not to read a rule but to watch people teach them have got just as much of a chance of getting the head around the rules as anyone else. We are going to show you how to set up a case file, how to play through the different phases of the game and then we'll do a last kind of roundup of any bits that might seem a bit more tricky but really really aren't. So Sophie where are we starting? Right first of all it's set up so the first thing you need to do is to find the case file that you want to play. We're starting off with the hey you read this first! This is actually so the case file is called eviction notice but you wouldn't know that looking at it. So when you open your box at Hellboy you'll notice you've got a whole load of case files. They're in these sealed packets and these also say stop don't read this side flip them over and they have a little description of what the case is. Now there is no set order to play these. I'm sure that crackling noise is really handy so I'm going to move these over here at the way. There's no set order but we do recommend that you do this one first. It's the most straightforward easy case file. Don't get me wrong you're not guaranteed a win but it's the easiest to get your head around. And it would be a really easy one for us to just talk through all of the different phases of the game. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to go through the case file in order. So get rid of that one and we've got a fiction notice. So this is case file number one two six seven seven nine. The numbers all mean something honest. I've had someone asking me actually do the numbers are they relevant should you play them in order? No play them however you want. There's no order. It's no order. You'll get like a whole load of color text here. We'll let you enjoy it and read it. I mean I'm sure we can flash stuff on the screen and you can pause the video and read it yourself and you're best might be in your own style. But the key point is, so I've talked about the challenge rating. Okay so at the bottom we've got a challenge rating. This one is challenge rating as easy and duration is short. So this is a relatively easy and relatively short game. All the different case files have different challenge ratings and lengths so you can pick one to suit your gaming needs. The idea is you don't know what's gonna be in the case file going into it. That just gives you an inkling of the kind of game you're gonna play. One thing as well you'll notice that each case file in its bottom corner does have a small icon which tells you which case file it comes from. So if for any reason you shuffle your cards together you're ready to get them back in order. Also importantly these cards are in a set order. You notice as well there's a number that says one of five. The card should be replaced at the end of the game back in that order because as you'll see you play through the case files one card at a time. Sure enough that's the front of the first card done. So we flip that first card over. So we're gonna place that on our case file area. Oh yes this is our HQ board over here. Let's bring this into shot slightly. And what we have here this is the turn it towards the camera. How's that for some fun stuff. We've got the HQ board here is kind of the nerve center of your board game. This covers all the information other than what's going on on the board itself. So at the top here you've got the the impending doom track which is well generally there'll be a marker on it somewhere and you'll place this the impending doom tracker that all that will sit on there and it will advance along generally up to once a turn sometimes more. And when it hits the marker the confrontation begins that kind of figures the end game. You then have the information gathered track which is which starts there and again as you investigate clues you'll pick up information. Yeah tracks all the sort of different clues that you'll be getting throughout the game which can be quite important depending on which game you play. Absolutely every case file uses the information gathered track differently. Generally there will be these insight markers placed onto here and as a note these are all the upgraded plastic components from the Kickstarter edition. The retail version of the board game has cardboard tokens for these. There are some graphics floating around which we've made which show you which one is translated to which. But yeah generally you'll have insight tokens when you move this tracker along you'll hit an insight token pick it up and then that will help you out in confrontation in some way. Key point here is that you always start off with one doom and no information. That's how every case begins. Something bad's going on and you don't know what yet. Also the kind of the last important part that isn't a card deck is here. This is the target priority track. It will come back to that in a moment. So I think the first thing we need to do is to show you what else we do with this board. So we're gonna flip this card so you might notice I haven't moved it off because we're going down through the deck in order. So the first thing we do is we follow the instructions. So the deck of doom consists of all the cards with these icons. So the deck of doom is a deck of poker sized cards. The top left corner has got a set of icons in. You will find that pretty much every case file includes this grey icon. They're like your core set. So they go in. And then what else do we have to surf? Well we're after the red sort of backwards P. That's these two. Yeah. We've got a blue T. A blue T. These two here. Yeah. And all of the agent. The relevant agent. So every agent has their own deck of doom card with their picture up in the top corner and that's something which just applies to them. Now we've decided we're gonna play Hellboy and Liz in this scenario. So put those two cards in there. That is a good shuffle. So the deck of doom is it's gonna throw a lot of spanners into the game. So to speak. You're gonna find different enemies jumping out. You're gonna find different things happening. Hellboy might go a bit crazy. Liz might go slightly on fire more than normal. The point is the deck of doom means that every time you play a game it's different. So this case file even though it's dead simple. We've played it. I mean how many times. I've actually lost. And it's different every time. It really is. Every case file. There's only six in the box but everyone is endlessly replayable. Yeah. So don't go thinking. Oh there's only six things. There's a lot of stuff in here. The deck of doom gives you replayability and using different agents gives you replayability and the unpredictable nature of how the enemies behave gives you replayability which we'll go into later. And actually another thing that gives you replayability is the encounter deck. Yep. So now we're setting up the encounter deck. So there's two agents. That's me and James. So we've got one of these blue eyes. So we go for the icon at the bottom of the encounter card. So I'll get one of those and two of the red ends. So what you generally do is you would get all your blue cards, shuffle them together and then draw one of those at random and then draw two red ones at random. So you get that. You shuffle those. You don't look at them. Don't look at them in too much detail. No. And then we're just going to pop them there for the short term. That means our deck is prepped and good to go for now. So we'll come back to it in a minute. But for now we'll just put it over here off to one side and so if you can reach and put those on there, that'd be great. Yeah. I've sent those cards just completely off kilter. Oh they're just so bad. Then it gives us a board layout which we can quickly do here. Conveniently we have all these tiles ready. It's like we planned it. So we just replicate what is shown on the board, on the card, sorry. Incidentally, this just playing on a non-slip gaming map is awesome. Although it's actually got to be said that the tiles are really chunky. Don't slip around anyway. So these are what we call room tiles. Each room is made up of a number of areas. We've got a one area room here. This is a two area room and a four area room over here. Generally things in the game will affect rooms or areas. And doors are what link the rooms together to place those there. And finally we place the starting area marker as shown in there. So we have now set that up as shown on the case file. Fantastic. So now what we're going to do, as it says at the bottom, it says, discard this card after placing the encounter card. So we've placed the encounter card. So those three cards, we put one into each room that is not the starting area. So some case files will tell you two different things. But unless otherwise stated, you always do that. You deal those out to there. And what these have in them is will tell you the contents of that room. So it will tell you whether there's enemies, scenery, clues, different things. And again, that means that when you play it, you're hitting different things in each room. So now we'll discard that card. And then we read the next card down. So this says put an insight marker on spaces two, four and eight of the information. There are those. And then it says put a reaction marker on this card. And the matching trigger marker on the following space will be a hidden theme track. Brilliant. Forgive the noises. I forgot to get the trigger and reaction marks down. So trigger and reaction markers are easy to spot. They are small round tokens with letters on which my giant hands. Come on, we can do this. These are tiles with basically you can use to connect different game components together. So here we'll use two of them. There we go. Two letter E's don't really matter which letter you use, as long as they're both matching. And what you'll do is you'll generally put them like shown here one on a card, one on a track, for example, this is move this card to the in play area and discard it if the confrontation is the in play area is the area above the HQ deck, HQ board, sorry. And yeah, so basically, that is our trigger point for the impending doom track. So when the impending doom marker reaches the the trigger marker there, we'll flip over to the reaction markers on that car and they'll tell us to flip back hard over. Generally, in any case file, you're going to follow up kind of a standard sequence of events. You'll play through an investigation where you're wandering around looking for clues, you might have additional things you're trying to do turning on the case file itself. And at some point the confrontation will trigger at which point you'll generally fight a boss or that's not always the case. And there are usually three ways to reach that confrontation. Three of them got so all three. So sorry, I put you completely on the spot there. So three ways to reach the confrontation. Yes, it's okay. So the first thing is that you complete your investigation, you get to the end of the case file, and you naturally come across whatever the confrontation be, be it a big boss. So you're just doing some evil nefariousness in a lab, you find the lab. Exactly. Then you've got that you run out of time. So that's you know, rescue does whatever it is he's trying to do. That's when the impending doom track hits that marker. Bad things happen. And that generally is worse because you've had less time and you've had less opportunity to gain clue tokens that may help you in the final final confrontation. And also what it does is it stops you from being able to maybe get any additional cool things that might be that sort of laid around the investigation in a way that might support you having that. And sometimes it means the boss gets more of an upper hand because they're ready for you. Exactly. And then the third way is that they all get knocked out. So yeah, there's generally there's no play at elimination in this game. If your agent gets knocked out, you're down until the enemy's been cleared off the board and get back up. But if all the agent is down at once, that's bad. And that triggers the confrontation in its own way. So what's quite cool is you always get to play the confrontation. It just comes down to how you get there. Yeah. And ideally, you don't want to be, you know, caught when you're completely unconscious by whatever the big bad thing is. There are several moments in the comics where you know, he'll be wakes up in a place having been dragged somewhere. That's kind of what we're going for with that. So the next card down, it says move this card to the in play area. If the agents take time, put this card immediately after advancing the enemy. So taking time is a mechanic you can do. If there are no enemies on the board, you can rest up. That's where you knocked out agents get back up. And you can generally, you know, look for clues in a more effective way. It represents the agents slowing down, taking time, maybe recovering a bit of damage, all that kind of thing. Okay. And we need to move this a little bit more to this side. That's shuffle things. You know, I was saying how great the non-slip map was a minute ago. It's fine. Speaking of awesome maps, big shout out to Matt behind the camera, who's doing great work as always. There's a lot of maps around Mantic. A lot of us, yeah. It's just like a mystical, yeah, my adverb of maths. It doesn't mean to say plague. That wasn't the word for now. Plague of maths. I was thinking more like a locus. Wow. But I didn't mean it in a bad way. What's the opposite of a plague? I think it stopped talking. Should we maybe reset? No, no, I think we carry on. We push on. This adds to the charm. So we moved that into shot here. We've got the next case file gives us a little bit of color text telling us that we're heading underground, we're on the hunt for a big frog monster. And now we're going to set the minion slots. Tell us about the minion slots, Sophie. Well, so the minion slots here, say, prepare the minion slots as followed. There's A, B, C, D along bottom of your HQ board. And what you do is you put the relevant minion into the relevant slot. And those are going to be the way that you interact with those minions throughout the rest of the game. Now, in the core game, it's largely frog monsters. As you get expansions and the Kickstarter exclusive stuff that adds more minions in, that you can always add in for a bit more flavor and generally the board, the game cards will not refer to specific minions. They'll refer to one of the slots. So in a room, you might find a minion, A and a minion B. So for this case file, that would be those two minions that are there around paging frog monster and a venomous frog monster. In a different case file, that could be a harpy and a witch or it could be, well, anything. There's all sorts of different things it could be. And in the BPRD archives expansion, there is a mode where you can literally shuffle all your enemy cards together and lay out completely random set. And it's kind of the wacky arcade mode where you can fight just about anything. Oh, that's not the right one. Yeah, giant frog monster is not the minion that you were able to look upon. See, so we've got our four minions set out here. And this tells us then, if all the rooms have been explored, so all these cards have been turned over and there are no minions on the board in the end phase, flip this card. Okay. And then it says begin the first round. This round. Oh, you know what else we should do? We totally forgot to do. The other, when we set the encounter card as part of setup, we should also put our agents into the starting area. Into the start. So you know, we've got the coloured base clips on these here. The, I believe these are pre-production resins, which are quite fragile. So I'm hoping those base clips come off again. But with your ones you've got in your box, the idea of the clips is they clip on, show which colour you are. And that matters when you're looking at your action cubes and also your target priority marker, which is here. Or again, if you've got the awesome Kickstarter edition, these busts that we're using. Now these need to be put onto the HQ board in order on your agent board. And we'll do a little section later on what the different agent boards have on them. But we've all got a threat value. My threat value is seven. Yours is 10, which means you go further forward on the target priority track. And with that, I believe we are ready to start playing. So I think we'll cut the video there and we'll start talking next about how the enemy phase works.