Ham Helsing is a cooperative boss-battling board game from Fireside games.  I had heard about this game various places online, and I was excited for it!  I ended up ordering it off the Fireside games web site and had it shipped directly to my house: It delivered in the first week of October 2025.

So, this game is based on the Graphic Novel Ham Helsing by Rich Moyer.  I literally know nothing about the graphic novel!  Luckily, you can play the game without ever having read the Graphic Novel!  I am sure there are references and funny callbacks which would make the game more enjoyable, but you don’t need any of that to enjoy this game.  Spoiler Alert: I really liked this game, despite not knowing anything about this world.

What is this game?  This is a cooperative card-crafting and boss-battling game.

Let’s take a look below!

Unboxing and Gameplay

This feels like a little smaller game than a Ticket to Ride size box.  See Coke can for scale above.

The components are all very nice and cartoony.  They seem to fit this world … which I know nothing about.  But the art is all very consistent with the cover and the cartoon pigs.

Each player takes the role of one of the main characters from the comic book (left-to-right): Malcolm, Lobos, Ham, or Ronin. See above. I LOVE the acrylic standees!!

The players choose one of the 4 bad guys in the game:  Hen, Chad, Robo-Knight, or Silk (with Silk being the hardest). See above.  The players must defeat that bad guy to win.

Players move around the world of Ham Helsing on the map above.

Little minions cover this world: you must keep these minions under control or they will “destroy” locations on the board!

Each Location has an upper limit of how many minions can be there: note the 3 above on Gigantovia … if more than 3 minions ever end up a Location, it is lost and much more expensive to deal with!

In an interesting twist, the minions come out (from a bag; see above… it’s quite nice and big) and attach to all Locations adjacent to the player!  This is an interesting way to have the minions overrun the board! You kind of control where the minions come out by the nature of where you end up at the end of your turn!

How do the heroes operate?  Each Hero (see Ham above) gets their own character board and their own unique deck of cards.  See above how Ham has his own deck of specialty cards!  (Yes, they are sleeved, yes, you need the sleeves, but yes, they do come with the game!)

See above as Lobos has slightly different cards!

Players each have  deck of cards that can do things like fight, move, get gold, and invoke Knuckles! See above!

Players play these cards to get stuff done: see above.  The icons on the left of the card are the actions you can do (attack a blue or yellow enemy above).

This is called a deck-crafting game (or you might hear card-crafting game if you have played Mystic Vale) where you can add little clear sleeves to improve the cards as you play!

The bad guys also does bad stuff … see his cards above.  This is a quick game; you only have 5 rounds to take out the bad guy!  This is a boss-battler game!  If you fail to take out the bad guy after 5 rounds, you lose!

I really like the way this game looks.  See a 2-Player set-up above!

Rulebook

The rulebook was okay.

The form factor is a little off—it doesn’t fit well on the chair next to me.  This gets like a C+ on the Chair Test; you can use it on the chair next to you, but it could have been better.

The Components section made me very grumpy.  There is a little list of components at the bottom of page 1 (see above), but it has NO correlating pictures! I had to figure out what-was-what from context as I set it up!  That made me a bit grumpy.

The Set-up spanned 3 pages?  And you had to cross page boundaries?  I feel like this Set-Up could have been on two pages facing each other making it easier to read.  This rulebook feels very “crammed” in there, like there were trying to get page count as small as possible.  I appreciate not wasting space, but this rulebook feels very cramped.

I feel like all the rules were in here, but for some reason, the flow seemed “off” to me.  I found rules, but not always where I expected them.  But they were in there.

The rulebook does have an Index, but it’s not that useful?  I hate saying this, because I applaud Ham Helsing for having an Index!  … but I just didn’t find it useful?  I went looking for a few terms and found them in SO MANY PLACES (Health track pretty much lists all pages of the rulebook) that it was almost useless.   This index needed to be curated a little better, and use italics or bold to distinguish mentions vs definitions.  Sigh.   I really like that they tried using the Index.  It didn’t quite work.

I found all the rules, I was able to get the game played, but the rulebook “flow” seemed off; I think it just felt too cramped.

The rulebook was just okay, but it does teach the game, so I guess that’s all that matters.

Deck-Crafting

I think the reason I was so excited for this game was the deck-crafting (or card-crafting, since you are constructing a better card … I wonder if Fireside Games can’t use this term because Mystic Vale copyrighted it?).  This is where you upgrade the cards in your hand to make the cards better and better (by allowing each card to do more stuff).

For example: Take a look at Pig Up The Pace above.  All the base card does is move 2.   (And yes, there are a LOT of pig puns in this game.  Get used to it).  Pig Up The Pace is a pretty minimal card. BUT!  I am about to card-craft!

By putting the clear upgrade into the sleeve, I can add more actions to the left side of the card! I can attack red +1, and attack a yellow for +1 now!

By the time I am done “upgrading” the card,  Pig Up The Pace not only moves Ham twice (the original action) but also can attack with +1 red and +1 yellow attacks!

Players can buy these upgrades every turn; the cost is on the upper right.  Players cooperatively figure out who should buy what when they buy … this is a cooperative game after all.

There are two types of upgrades: mostly attack (see above for that deck) …

… and specials (which have special text).  Usually, the specials are more powerful but more expensive.

You gotta upgrade the heck out of your cards if you want to win!  See Thwip above with 2 or 3 upgrades in it!

Solo Game

So congratulations to Ham Helsing for following Saunders’ Law and having solo rules!

Unfortunately, the built-in solo rules are half a page of exceptions.  And they aren’t even true solo play rules!  You still have to play two characters in the official solo mode; the only real savings of the built-in solo mode is that you have one deck to manage (instead of two).

Instead of the built-in solo mode, I recommend that you play 2-handed solo with all the normal rules: take control of two characters and alternate between them as if you were playing a 2-Player game!!  The 2-handed solo mode is much better than the built-in solo mode!  In the 2-handed solo mode, the game plays as it’s mean to be played, without any special exceptions.  See my 2-handed solo mode play above.

I really enjoyed my first solo play, but boy did I get crushed!  I even played the simplest Villain, Hen!  I just couldn’t do enough damage to Hen before the end of the game!

There’s quite a bit of strategy in how you handle the minions across the board!  See above! Get too many minions in a region, and you may lose the region or have have them bleed into your regions and do damage! You WANT to kill the minions yourself, because you get gold and experience … which keeps you upgrading as you play! But you also need to keep the minions on the board under control!

You can use Knuckles (see above) to help you keep the Locations clean of minions, but then you don’t get that much needed gold and experience!

My second game was MUCH better as I started to get the hang of how to balance all the different systems in the game!  See above as Ham and Lobos take out Hen!

I had a BLAST playing this game solo.  It was so much fun upgrading cards, figuring out strategies, keeping minions under control, but still trying to get enough gold to keep upgrades happening!  There were so many delicious decisions!

And the game is just adorable.  I think the look-and-feel made this solo game even a little more light-hearted and fun.

I could have done without all the pig puns, but it made it more fun.  EDIT: That’s not true.  I loved the pig puns, but I couldn’t admit it without some therapy.

Great decisions, great upgrades, great fun.

Cooperative Game

I may have actually done my friends a little disservice by discussing all the strategy up front! I didn’t give them a chance to discover all the repercussions themelves!!  Still, we had a full 4-Player game and has a great time!

The cooperation was great; we worked together to keep the minions under control, all the while getting gold for upgrades!   I didn’t use the trade action to any effect when I played solo, but I did see Madelyn and Andrew use it very well to make sure they had the right attacks and cards to deal with the minions!

Although ending up on the same Location at the end of your turn as another player allows the player to draw an extra card, sometimes that comes with a cost! At one point, we accidentally lost the Swamp `O Lies because we tended to congregate there!  And the minions swarmed up! GULP!  We saw yet another delicious trade-off … stay together to get more cards, but disperse to keep the minions away!  Neat tradeoff!

One thing that seems overlooked is the question: Can you share gold in the Market Phase?  Players are all together buying cards!   Can you share?  It’s not addressed in the rules!!! There is a trade action players can invoke during Play Cards phase which allows players to share gold, cards, shield, and katana. But the rule is very clear: only during your turn!   Since it’s not specifically addressed in the Market Phase rules, it seems clear: you can’t trade/share gold!!

This problem reminded us a little of The Secrets of Zorro (see review here) when, even though we were all together in an end phase, we couldn’t share gold!  See above.  We house-ruled The Secrets of Zorro to allowing sharing then, and that little change made the game more cooperative and more fun!   So, we are house-ruling that here as well: you can share gold (or  cards or normally sharable stuff) in the Market Phase … and it even feels like it makes sense thematically!  We are all shopping together at the same time at the same Rat Store!  (Seriously, rats are selling us stuff.  I am not making that up).  It makes sense to say “Hey Lobos! Can I borrow 1 gold??”  And to allow it … “Sure!”

In the end, all of us took turns beating up the Hen together! So, we all participated and we all felt we mattered in the final rounds of the game!  And we won!

There was a lot of cooperation and a lot of fun.

Reactions

Positive reviews.

Andrew: 6.5/10 (which is actually high for him).  It was too easy, but we also only played the easiest of the villains AND I may have helped too much in getting strategy going!
Teresa: 8/10
Madeyln: green (doesn’t have numbers; she either likes it (green) or doesn’t (red))

Rich:  Wow.  I loved this game.  I would love to play it solo or cooperatively.  9/10 because there so many delicious decisions AND you get to card-craft!

A Worry

After two games (just TWO), you can already see fingerprints on the clear sleeves.  I worry that this might become a bigger problem the more you play.  At some point, I might have to go in an windex/clean all my cards?  That doesn’t sound like fun!

The Randomness

There are two dice that you roll occasionally; usually for when you fight the big bad guy.  The bad guy, in the final combat, BLOCKS the color of attack you roll.  With four colors of attack, you are guaranteed that at least 2 of your attack types will get through, maybe more?  So, you always have a sense of how much damage you will do.

The other major source of randomness is pulling the minions from the bag.  You can only take out minions you have matching attacks for, so you can get screwed if the wrong cards or wrong minions come out.

But, I never felt like the randomness was too much.  You had a lot of control on how many minions came out, based on where you ended your turn; this was a unique way of dealing with “where do the minions come out”!  It is completely deterministic where they come out!  I really liked that choice, as it gave us yet another delicious thing to think about!

And Knuckles was always an option to keep the minions under control too … couldn’t fight anything?  Let Knuckles go disperse those minions for you!

I always felt like I could do something on my turns.  I did not think the randomness was unhinged by any means.

Conclusion

Wow, Ham Helsing is a great game!  The toy factor is high with the card-crafting system and the super cute art!  The components are just great!  The solo and cooperative games were super fun with lots of delicious tensions about how/when to keep the minions under control, balanced with keeping gold coming in so you can perform upgrades!

My only concern is that this game may be too much for younger audiences; the game says 10+ (which is probably the age range of the graphic novel), but there are a lot of rules to keep track of, and a lot of subsystems to keep operational as you play.  I worry that a couple of 10 years olds trying to learn this game without anyone present might really bounce off this game.  Ham Helsing is a lot more complicated (there are a lot of rules and a lot of interaction) than it looks!  Maybe make sure you shepherd younger kids if you get this for them?

Other than that, I adored this game.  9/10 for both solo and cooperative for me.  So neat and so fun. I admit that my rating of Ham Helsing was higher than my friends, but they liked it a lot too!  And to be clear; you DO NOT need to know anything about the Graphic Novel to enjoy this game!  None of us knew this IP, and we still enjoyed the game tremendously.