An itch that had to be scratched: Daniel (@dungeondive) revisits Hellboy: The Board Game after a week of plays and confirms its odd status as the game that forever flirts with his top ten without ever cracking it. He reads it as Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower crossed with HeroQuest — fitting lineage, since designer James M. Hewitt built Silver Tower. The negatives come first: the painful gap between the loaded Kickstarter edition and the leaner retail box, and map tiles he finds flatly boring — he’d rather the game had leaned into its HeroQuest roots with one big double-sided board. Then five loves, argued with feeling. The adaptation nails the comic’s folk-horror-meets-pulp vibe, where Hellboy can punch a Cthulhu-sized horror and characters genuinely play as a team, boosting each other’s dice. The BPRD Archives expansion assembles random missions from sub-decks — with fifteen possible bosses. Encounter cards turn single rooms into miniature puzzles rather than pure fights. The colour-graded dice system (yellow to black, boostable by spending actions) is one he wishes more games would steal, and injuries flip into stat-lowering wounds that change how you play. Above all: it’s one-and-done — a complete zero-to-hero crawl in an evening, no campaign required.
Hellboy has hovered just outside Daniel’s top ten for years. What’s your eternal number eleven — the game you adore that somehow never makes the final cut?