Ham Helsing – Power Up and Pig Out

Ham Helsing is a popular graphic novel series for kids written by Rich Moyer about a reluctant monster hunting pig and his friends. On its face, it sounds absolutely ridiculous. But that’s what gives it charm and makes it hilarious. Of course, it’s also ripe for puns and jokes.

Fireside Games seized on Ham Helsing’s popularity and released Ham Helsing, a cooperative game for 1-4 players age 10 and up. Ham Helsing is a pretty involved game that takes about 90 minutes to play.

Setup

The Boards

After setting out both gameplay boards, put a random minion token on every space on the board save two. The rest go in the minion bag. Put the Shiny Shield and Knuckles tokens in their respective spaces.

Set the deck of Attack cards on the top row of the Rat Market and the deck of Special cards on the bottom row. Deal three of each out in the market.

The Players

Each player chooses a character and takes the character board, ten cards, figure, and six cubes, all related to their character. Arrange the cubes on the player board: one each on the money, health, and skill tracks, in the appropriate starting spot. Put the playing figures in Mud Canyon. Give Ham the Wood Katana of the Dead. Each player draws four cards from their deck.

The Villains

Pick one of the four villains to play against. Choose Hen for your first few plays. Randomly choose one each of the levels 1-3 cards. Stack them in order and place the level 4 card at the bottom. Cover the text boxes with spiders on the villain’s board with Spider Nest tokens and set the villain’s health appropriately.

There are many other small setup steps like placing tokens and decks in certain locations, but this will get you ready to go.

Gameplay

Ham Helsing lasts five rounds, each with three phases: the Player, Market, and Villain phases. The players’ goal is to defeat the villain before the end of the fifth round. All the while, the villain marches across the board. If the villain spends more than one turn in Mud Canyon, the players lose. Players can also lose if there are more than eight minions in Mud Canyon, or if all of the players are KOed at the same time.

But how do you defeat these villains with dozens of hitpoints? So glad you asked.

Player Phase

During the player phase, you’ll go through six steps on your turn:

1. Play cards
2. Gain Money
3. Draw
4. Place Minion Tokens
5. Check Location Limits
6. Take Damage

Play Cards

You can play as many cards from your hand as you want. These cards allow you to move, attack, gain money, restore health, or perform some kind of special action. The various icons on these cards create a general pool to draw from. This means you can apply moves and attacks from your cards in whatever order you like.

Attack icons allow you to kill minions, which you’ll need to do to upgrade your player cards. Each colored attack icon deals a damage to a minion; if a minion has two colors on it, you’ll need one of each color to defeat it. Keep the tokens for minions you’ve killed.

Attack icons also allow you to deal damage to the villain, if you’re in their space. In addition to dealing damage, the color of the attack may gain you other rewards as defined by the villain’s level card.

Star icons are special abilities listed on the card. Once again, you can resolve your icons in any order, so be sure to set up the perfect situation for that special power!

Most of the other icons are self explanatory. You can find details on upgrading skills, re-rolling dice, or performing other actions in the rule book.

Gain

Gain $1 for each single color minion and $2 for each two-color minion you’ve defeated. You can also move your skill markers one space to the right for each color on each minion you’ve defeated.

There are two kinds of minions: regular and biting minions. Biting minions deal damage to you even as you defeat them. During this phase you also take one damage per color of each biting minion you’ve defeated this turn.

Draw

Draw to fill your hand to four cards. If you share your location with another hero, draw a fifth card.

Place Minion Tokens

Place one random token from the bag on each location connected to your character’s location. Resolve minion effects.

Check Location Limits

If a location has more minions than the number to the right of the location name, that location is permanently lost. Heroes moving into a lost location take one damage. Remove the top spider nest token from the villain and put it on the lost location.

Take Damage

Take damage from any biting minions on your location, once again one damage for a single color minion and two damage for a two-color minion.

If a player runs out of health, they are KO’ed and must put their character token on its side. Another player can move to your location and discard a card to revive you, or you can reduce each of your skills by one to revive yourself at half-health.

After all players have taken their turn, proceed to the Market Phase.

Market Phase

During the Market phase, players spend the money they got for killing minions to buy card upgrades in turn order. These card upgrades slide into the sleeves of the cards in your hand. You can’t cover another icon, so choose your card upgrades carefully!

Villain Phase

It’s time for the villain to act. Draw the top card from the villain deck and follow the steps from top to bottom.

1. Move the villain to the described location.
2. All minions of the chosen color move toward characters on connected locations.
3. Add one minion token to all locations with spider nests.
4. Follow the instructions in the Skull area of the Villain board, including any uncovered text boxes.

If the villain completes a full turn in Mud Canyon, you’ve lost the game. If your team manages to reduce the villain’s health to zero, you’ve won!

Impressions

I really like Ham Helsing. I love the transparent card upgrades! For years the only meaningful way to upgrade cards like this was by replacing them or by playing a digital version. Transparent cards were first introduced in Gloom but this is by far my favorite implementation of them. I also love the intellectual property and, of course, all of the fantastic dad puns throughout. Ham Helsing is also a well-crafted game that actively encourages cooperation and coordination.

But this is where I run into trouble with this specific blend of IP, game construction, and more especially, the complexity and difficulty.

Ham Helsing is an incredibly hard game. The back of the rulebook does include a series of recommendations on how to ratchet down the difficulty if your game group can’t manage to win. But player turns have several steps making them complex. Plus there is the balancing act of beating the minions back to grind improvements, while needing to defeat the villain in five turns or fewer. These make this a game that is either massively prone to quarterbacking, or the variations would make it feel like a completely different game.

I really love this one and I can see taking it out with a group of experienced gamers, but otherwise I’m worried mom and dad will be running the show if we actually want to win. I’m concerned this mismatch of expectations may lead some parents to choose the game based on the cover without realizing what it takes to be successful and win.

But if you’re a group of gamers who are looking for a rip roaring good time with a soft side for some YA humor, you should definitely think about giving Ham Helsing a try.

You can pick up your own copy directly from Fireside Games, on Amazon, or ask for it at your friendly local game store!

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Fireside Games provided The Family Gamers with a promotional copy of Ham Helsing for this review

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