Micro Hero: Hercules

• Designer: Leandre Proust
• Publisher: Grammes Edition
• Players: 1 – 2
• Age: 10+
• Time:  20 minutes x 12 
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Step into the mythological and humorous world of Micro Hero: Hercules, a minimalist solo deck-building card game inspired by the 12 Labors of Hercules. As the legendary hero, you’ll embark on an epic adventure, revisiting his mythical feats with a fresh, humorous twist. This compact and strategic game invites you to prove your strength and resilience as you face increasingly challenging obstacles.

Each game consists of twelve rounds, each representing one of Hercules’ Labors. Using your deck of technique cards, you’ll gather experience points (EXP) to improve your abilities, upgrade your cards, and overcome mythological foes. Master the balance between offensive and defensive stances, strategically chaining your card plays to unleash powerful combinations while minimizing the damage you take.

Your goal is to complete all 12 Labors of Hercules without succumbing to the burden of wound cards. To triumph in each round, you must reduce the Labor’s health to zero by dealing enough damage while defending yourself from its attacks. Defeated Labors transform into blessing cards, which can be added to your arsenal for future rounds. Victory is achieved by completing all 12 Labors consecutively, while the game is lost if your deck becomes overwhelmed by wounds.

With its evolving card system and streamlined mechanics, Micro Hero: Hercules offers high replayability and minimal randomness, ensuring every decision is impactful. Each Labor takes about twenty minutes to complete, and the game can be paused between rounds, making it perfect for long campaigns or quick sessions.

To start, draw one of the 12 trials at Random.  Place the Attack, Defense and Health cards around the trial per the values on the trial card.  Select 10 Technique cards to form your starting deck and shuffle them.  The remaining 6 Technique cards and 3 Heavy Wound cards are placed face up in the Reserve area.  You start the game with your Hercules stance card on the Supercharged side face up.

As you set up, you’ll note that many of the cards have different icons on each end of the card; as you play the game, be sure to only change the orientation of the cards when you are required to do so. 

There are six phases to each turn in Micro Hero: Hercules – 

1] Draw Phase – Draw 5 cards from your deck to form a hand.  You will note the Red swords for Attack points, the blue shields for Defense points and the yellow stars for Experience points.  If your deck is exhausted, flip your discard pile over (on the long axis) to form a new draw pile – you do not shuffle!.  Make sure you flip the cards over in a way that you don’t change their orientation.

2] Planning Phase –  Play each technique card from your hand, one at a time.  Again, be sure not to rotate the cards. The order here is important, because you play each successive card so that it covers the bottom half of the card(s) above it.  Each time you play a card, you trigger all the effects of all the cards in your stack.  Note that you can use the effect of your Stance card at any point in your turn.

3] Improvement Phase – now you use your yellow stars to generate experience points to buy new cards from the Reserve, upgrade the top card of your discard pile or move the top card of your discard pile to the top of your deck  (the cost for a card is seen in the number of stars in the central border)

4] Attack Phase – Your attack points must be higher than the trial’s Defense Value. For each multiple of the defense value, you attack will cause the loss of one health point.  Adjust the Health card next to the Trial to show the updated Health

5] Defense Phase – The trial attacks you based on the value of the red card around it.  If your defense value (blue shields) is at least equal to the attack, you block the attack.  If not, you suffer a hit and must add a wound card on top of your discard pile.  If there are no wounds left to place in your discard, you lose.  The trial’s attack value increases by one at the end of each Defense Phase.  Also note that many trials have unique rules that apply in this phase as well.

6] Upkeep Phase – Place your played cards in your Discard Pile in the order they were played.  Check your stance card for any End of Turn effects.

Repeat this process until you win by reducing a Trial’s Health to zero OR you lose by having to put a wound card in your discard and not having one in the supply to do so.

If you have defeated the trial, flip it over and add it to your Reserve. It is now a blessing you can use in the next Trial.  You now go through your deck and rotate all the cards back to the basic side. Draw the next trial, and in the setup, add 1 Health point to the card for each Trial previously overcome.  Reset your stance card as well.  Finally take 2 prep actions (exhaust a wound, gain a Technique from the Reserve, Exhaust a Technique/Blessing from your deck, or upgrade a Technique card in your deck).  You can do the same action twice. Finally shuffle your deck and draw 5 cards to start the next trial.

You win the full game if you can defeat all 12 Trials.  You lose the whole game if you lose any of the Trials.

My thoughts on the game

Micro Hero is a great little micro game that provides plenty of challenge despite its small package.  We have played a few sessions here this week, and we’ve made it through as many as 8 rounds, but we have yet to win.   Yes, I know the game is solo, but we’re playing it as a couple, talking between us as we make our decisions.  It works just fine that way.

There are a lot of good ideas going on here.  I really like the mini-deck building aspect here – you have a chance to upgrade and change out the cards in your deck, and these small changes can make a huge difference by the end of a Trial.  You’ll need to constantly be upgrading your deck because the trials will get stronger and stronger (they increase by 1 each round) – so your five cards will need to have some upgrades in order to continue doing damage to the Trial (or to withstand its attacks)

You’ll have to start over with each new Trial – but this is a big part of the fun for me – because each Trial is a little different and you might actually want/need to take different strategies with your deck depending on the stats and special abilities of a particular Trial.

Each game plays out differently due to the random order of the Trials. The special powers on the back of the Trial cards can definitely affect your strategy, and your ongoing deck composition can be swayed by the order in which you face the Trials.

Individual trials are fairly quick, maybe fifteen minutes at most (once you’re familiar with the rules).  It’s quite easy to play a number of trials in succession, but we’ve also taken breaks in the middle of a run, gone off to cook/eat a meal, and then come back to renew the fight.

As we’ve liked this one as a couples solo game, this one will probably worm its way into my travel gaming pack given its compact form.  You don’t need much table space for this (you probably could even get this to fit on 2 airplane tray tables, and it’s definitely been a nice challenge (and we haven’t even ventured into the expansion stuff yet!)

For a nice and tiny solo game, Micro Hero: Hercules is definitely worth a try.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y
• Neutral.
• Not for me…