Ham Helsing

About this board game

Ham Helsing is a cooperative adventure board game for 1–4 players, with games lasting around 90 minutes. Based on the graphic novel about a reluctant monster-hunting pig, it challenges a team of heroes to defend locations, improve their decks, and defeat a villain before Mud Canyon is destroyed.

Choose Ham, Ronin, Malcom, or Lobos, then take that character’s starting deck and special ability. On your turn, use the symbols on cards in your hand to travel, take special actions at certain locations, defeat minions, and call on Knuckles, the fearless mercenary bear, to scare enemies away.

Combat depends on matching the color of your attack to the color of a minion. There are four colors to consider, and some minions require two colors to defeat, making careful card play essential. Enemies may bite back, so managing your health is just as important as protecting locations from being overrun.

• Deck crafting: Add attack and special cards by spending money at the Rat Market.
• Transparent upgrades: Slip upgrade cards into the sleeves of starting cards to improve them for future turns.
• Growing rewards: Defeated minions provide skills and money, while enough skill points unlock free attacks.
• Variable villains: Four villains feature different starting health, special abilities, and power-ups.

The buying phase is a free-for-all, so players must decide whether to claim useful cards quickly or help the group plan the strongest additions for each deck. Special cards can create combos, shared bonuses, and damage boosts, while attack cards may provide extra damage, movement, healing, and more.

After each round, the villain advances one location toward Mud Canyon. Losing a location powers up the villain, and the team must reduce its health to zero by the end of the last player’s turn at Mud Canyon—or the heroes’ bacon is burnt.