Hellboy: The Board Game has been in solid development for around seven months now, and it feels like even longer than that. It's lasted over half of Needy Cat Games' lifespan! (Oh, we had our first birthday last week - I meant to do a blog post about it, but we've been too busy...) There's still loads more Hellboy in the pipeline, but I'm proud to say that the rulebook for the main game is about to go into layout after being bashed into shape - uh, edited - by the famously patient Stew. Duncan over at Mantic HQ is currently doing an amazing job of translating my hasty prototype scribbles into wonderful, glorious game components, and he'll be moving onto the rulebook before we know it.

I was gonna do a blog post to talk about the latest stages of the design process, but I decided against it for two reasons:

My god, I'm exhausted. We've got a lot of projects on the go at the minute, we've been travelling all over the country seeing clients, and I haven't had a holiday in about sixteen months. I thought I'd just let you guys see for yourselves.

So here you go! The Hellboy rulebook. A couple of notes before you read it:

This is pre-final. It's been proofread, but if you find any oddities please report them so we can fix them before we go to print!

The final book will look a lot prettier, with colour and illustrations and that sort of thing. This is just the text with a few placeholder diagrams I threw together to show Duncan what needs to go roughly where.

There are placeholders in the text, highlighted in green. Hopefully they won't ruin your immersion too much!

So there you go. Guidance complete. All that remains is to give you the link!

Here it is. Read, enjoy, pass it along to your friends if you think they'd be interested. The Hellboy Kickstarter's still open for late pledges through Backerkit, so it's not too late to get involved!

Thanks to everyone who's given feedback so far, and to our small army of playtesters. You guys all rock. This has been a great project to work on - and it continues to be, thanks to all the expansions and stretch goals!

Right, I'm gonna go and get a drink. After all, it's Friday! Have a great weekend, and hey - if for some reason you think I've done a particularly awesome job and wanna support me in making more games, you can always check out the Needy Cat Games Patreon page.

Have a great weekend, everyone!