Hercules and the 12 Labors is a solo game of dice manipulation based around the famous Greek myth of Hercules. The Labors were a tribute to his brute force problem-solving skills, but a warning about his uncontrolled anger. Both will become relevant in this game.
Gilty Pleasures
While there aren't many components, each of them is top quality. The good quality cards have amazing art and gold detailing, with all of the important information up front and obvious. The dice are colourful and beautifully marbled, but again without sacrificing clarity with their obvious contrasting colours.
The cards and dice are a pleasure to use
There are also two small wooden printed tokens to track Spirit and Divinity, but the main attractions are the cards.
Pre-Trial Preparations
Setup is brief and easy. Take the Spirit/Divinity tracker and place the two tokens, shuffle the Mood deck (after removing four cards that will be added later), pick up 3-5 starting dice depending on your chosen difficulty, and place the Bow of Hercules card in front of you as starting equipment.
That’s it; now you can start the game. Each Labor starts with a card that describes the story of the particular Labor. After that you place the card (or cards) for the enemy, and you’re ready to go.
To spice things up a bit, reveal the top card of the Mood deck and apply its effect. Often it’s an immediate effect of losing a certain number of Spirit, other times it’s either an ongoing effect or an extra ability that applies for this entire Labor.
A nice clean setup to get you started. Be warned, this will expand as the game proceeds
Full marks for seamlessly and easily setting the theme and getting you invested. Especially considering the small number of moving parts involved.
Herculean Tasks
Each Labor’s card(s) start with a Labor die set to the number on the starting square. To the left of the starting square is the rule for what you need to roll in order to damage that die. In the starting battle, you need to roll 5s or 6s to deal damage. On later cards these rules get narrower, more complicated, and/or use more dice (one example requires 3 dice, two of which add up to equal the third).
Each turn, roll all of your available dice. You start off only equipped with your bow, which has a single ability in a blue box. You can place a die here, lose one Spirit, and adjust that die +/- 1 point. Blue abilities modify dice, which can then be used on Gold abilities or to damage the Labor. Gold abilities are powerful effects for defence or boosts, but these lock the dice down so they can’t be used for damage.
Each time you apply damage to a Labor die, reduce the number on it by that amount. If you drop it to 0, remove the die. If all Labor dice are removed, you defeat that Labor.
If there are any Labor dice left, move each of them one space along the lightning path and apply the effect on that new space. This is usually some permutation of dealing damage to you, healing itself, temporarily removing one of your dice, or otherwise hindering you. If a die reaches the skull square, then you lose.
Once you’ve defeated a Labor, flip the card(s) over to reveal new equipment. These often trigger an immediate effect (e.g. recover Spirit, take more dice, or gain Divinity), and include some combination of blue and/or gold abilities. Add this to your current equipment, shuffle the Mood card back into the deck, and move on to the next Labor.
A few Labors in, and you can see the progress already. There's a great feeling of escalation as you gain more dice and abilities, but face more difficult foes
The game continues through all of the Labors. You win if you defeat the last Labor and have your Divinity at the maximum level. You lose if you ever run out of Spirit, a Labor die ever reaches the skull space, or you get to the end of the game and don’t have full Divinity.
Labor of Love... Okay, maybe Anger
While the Labors are not all about killing everything in front of you, the story is often brutal. This becomes more apt as you play the game.
Dice manipulation games, by their very nature, rely on a combination of luck and luck mitigation. I do feel that in this game there’s sometimes a little too much luck and not enough mitigation.
The tricky part is how specific some of the Labor dice damage rules are. Taking the Erymanthian Boar above as an example, one die requires three dice, two of which add up to the value of the third. The other die requires any number of dice that add up to 12. You have a total of 6 turns to generate a total of 3 damage on each (or potentially 4, as each has a space that heals that die). On normal difficulty you have 5 dice by now; on easy you have 6.
By this time you have a variety of equipment that allow two dice to be re-rolled, one can be adjusted +/- by one, and another can change a 3 to a 6 or vice versa. This seems more than sufficient at first, but there are two problems that often come up:
Firstly, you have other priorities for the dice. If you’ve rolled two 4s, you will be tempted to use Blessings of Artemis to increase your Divinity. It doesn’t matter if you complete your Labors if you haven’t also reached the top of the Divinity track by that time. Also, you often need to keep one die back to shield against damage to yourself. It’s far too easy to lose Spirit, so reducing the damage you take is important.
Secondly, sometimes you just don’t get the rolls you need. I’ve too often rolled numbers that combine to deal maybe 1 damage total to just one die, so I use both of my re-rolls to try and improve this by getting a higher result. It’s dispiriting how often I will then get either exactly the same numbers back or some equally unhelpful combinations. Do that too often and you just don’t have enough dice to roll to be able to catch up, so you run out of time and lose.
Outside of this, a common complaint is that the Mood deck is too swingy. A great example is when you have a Labor which requires 6s to damage, but you’ve drawn the Mood that applies -1 to all your initial rolls. You’re now having to use your re-rolls and +1 ability to try and get anything done.
While it’s not in the rules, I would strongly consider house-ruling that if the Mood card directly blocks your ability to play (this should be incredibly rare), then lose 1 Spirit and draw a new one.
If at first you don’t succeed
This preponderance of luck is sometimes frustrating, but it’s still usually a fun puzzle. Also, each Labor is quick, so it doesn’t take long to either lose or progress to the next one. The problem is that this is trying to be a campaign.
You have 12 Labors to complete, and all it takes is being unlucky for one of them and you’re out of the game. If you’re trying to run through the whole series, then I can see this becoming less a Herculean task and more a Sisyphean one.
In a move that honestly saves this game for me, the rules include a system to start at any Labor. You pick a Labor and then go through all of the previous ones and choose which equipment you will take from them. Gain all of the immediate bonuses from them, then each piece of equipment has a number of Spirit that you lose. Place that equipment in front of you, and you can now start this far through the story.
This may irk the purists but, unless you enjoy grinding your way through earlier Labors every game, then I would suggest you use this system whenever you want. It allows you to skip some of the earlier Labors that you feel you’ve played often enough, or just try starting again from where you left off.
The Myth, the Legend
I’ll be honest, without the rules they’ve included to jump in anywhere, I would very quickly give up on this game. A bad combination of luck can cause you to lose all hope of winning, and if this happened on Labor number 10 after starting from the beginning multiple times, I would have to resist the temptation to go slightly Hercules on the box.
With this system, I have three play options:
- I can play from the start just to see how far I get.
- I can jump back in wherever I left off and gradually work my way through the remaining Labors, until I reach the end.
- I can play the greatest hits and pick a Labor I want to go back to and beat it again.
Doing this turns a frustrating grind into a fun game that doesn’t have to run longer than I want it to. It’s not cheating when they’ve included rules specifically to do it.
In short, this game is beautiful, remarkably small, highly thematic, and occasionally very unfair. I enjoy it, but if you are quick to anger then this may not be for you.
