Hercules or Heracles? By either name, Hercules was the greatest hero of the ancient world, a child of gods who was hated by gods, suckled unknowingly by the same goddess that most wanted him dead, driven mad enough to kill his own family, forced to serve a cruel king to pay his penance, a dozen heroic tasks.
He died centuries ago, but now he’s back!
I love backing inexpensive little games on Kickstarter. They come in the mail after awhile, sometimes I remember backing them, sometimes I don’t. It’s like a little mystery gift. This one was more unique than most, in that you could pay what you wanted. No tricks. The minimum price was one Euro, and I think that’s because that’s the lowest price they could set.
Naturally, they would be overjoyed if you paid more. And naturally, I did pay more — but not a lot more. Maybe 15 Euros. I hope I helped subsidize this game for people who weren’t able to pay more than that single Euro, because it really is a fun game, once you get into it.
In Hercules: Micro Hero, you must help Hercules complete his twelve labors by fighting twelve legendary monsters. (I’m not sure how they handle the Augean Stables, where he had to divert a river. Probably fight a horse or something. I’ll get to it, I suppose.)
You shuffle the tasks deck and draw the first task from the top — in this game, I drew the Erymanthian Boar. In the legend, Hercules didn’t kill it; he chased it for a very long time until they came to some snowy mountains, and it grew exhausted trying to climb them. Hercules then carried the boar back to his king.
Not this time, though. This time, we’re killing it. We surround the task card with cards tracking its attack, defense, and health. The boar has a special power; any experience we do not spend increases its attack by that much this round.
We draw five cards each round. We start with ten, but can buy more as the game progresses. The ten we select from the start is our deck. The remainder are the reserve. We can also eventually add “wound” cards to the deck, which take the place of useful cards in your hand. Too many wounds and you instantly lose the game, and Hera/Juno smiles.
Yellow cards are experience cards, and give experience according to the number of yellow star icons at the top — one normally, two if upgraded (rotated 180 degrees). Similarly, attack cards have the red swords icon, and defense cards have the blue shield icon.
Cards are played vertically, top to bottom, and are scored according to their position in the stack. Each card counts itself and the number of cards below it as its score — doubled if it is an upgraded card. In the hand above, we score (5 + 4 = 9) nine attack points, (3 + 2 = 5) five defense points, and one experience point.
Since our attack is equal to or greater than its defense power (which is initially four), we score damage equal to the attack total divided by the defense power, throwing away the remainder. 9 / 4 = 2, so we did two points of damage to it. Since we had a point of experience that we didn’t use, its attack power increases from four to five, but that was exactly how much defense we brought, and so we don’t add any wounds to our deck.
If we’d had more experience, we could have spent it to buy a card from the reserve and add it to the discard pile; to upgrade a card on top of the discard pile; or to place an upgraded card from the top of the discard pile onto the top of the deck so that we would draw it next turn.
We eventually track the boar down and defeat it. But that is not the end of our friend, the Erymanthian Boar. He joins us in the reserves for the next task, and we can pay eight experience points to have him come in and supply both defense and experience, or, when upgraded, defense and double experience!
We’ll need that… somewhere in that deck are Cerberus and the Hydra, and those monsters are no joke. The Hydra gains attack power any round it takes damage, and the three-headed hound of Hell, well… time will tell.
It’s a fun game that gets more intricate as you get deeper into the tasks, where you have to juggle doing damage and defending yourself against trying to get the blessings of the enemies you have defeated on your side while never taking even one wound.
That’s going to be tough when he fights Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, for her girdle. Maybe he won’t fight quite so hard.
It’s a fun game. I have only defeated one task, and I believe it was one of the easier ones. Other people have mentioned that the game is very sensitive to the order in which you do the tasks. The stance card that lets you score a card double at the cost of losing it back to the reserve can be key (and I did this deliberately so I could buy it back and thereby use experience points so the boar couldn’t power up with them). If not used in a turn, it flips to let you draw a sixth card on the next turn, which is nice.
The game is expected to show up in game stores next year. Grab a copy if you see it!
