A Gloomhaven Review

Gloomhaven is a game of Euro-inspired tactical combat in a persistent world of shifting motives. Players will take on the role of a wandering adventurer with their own special set of skills and their own reasons for traveling to this dark corner of the world. Players must work together out of necessity to clear out menacing dungeons and forgotten ruins. In the process, they will enhance their abilities with experience and loot, discover new locations to explore and plunder, and expand an ever-branching story fueled by the decisions they make.

This is a game with a persistent and changing world that is ideally played over many game sessions. After a scenario, players will make decisions on what to do, which will determine how the story continues, kind of like a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book. Playing through a scenario is a cooperative affair where players will fight against automated monsters using an innovative card system to determine the order of play and what a player does on their turn.

Each turn, a player chooses two cards to play out of their hand. The number on the top card determines their initiative for the round. Each card also has a top and bottom power, and when it is a player’s turn in the initiative order, they determine whether to use the top power of one card and the bottom power of the other, or vice-versa. Players must be careful, though, because over time they will permanently lose cards from their hands. If they take too long to clear a dungeon, they may end up exhausted and be forced to retreat.

 

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The main storyline done all the unlockables open, except this saw character, and so now we can finally review gloomhaven in its entirety. God this took forever to play through we’ve done something like 60 out of the 95 scenarios, so good job, big, daddy, honcho isaac, childress for making us lose hundreds of hours off our life. But you know only takes a few seconds of your life like and subscribe baby, okay enough screwing around, ah with the actual review, starting with the general overview. What is a gloomhaven? Do i have any duties?

Everyone knows about gum haven is a thick dungeon crawler for one to four players. It’S got a b campaign with a ton of sidequests, which all add up to a total of 95 scenarios to play through each snarl is gon na. Have some story before you clear out the dungeon and then some story afterwards, alongside some rewards, you know typical dungeon, crawler stuff players have to create a character by picking one of these six starting classes. Your class gets their own unique pool of level, one ability cards and every scenario you bring in this many guards determined by your class. When you pick a scenario to do you set up the room, tiles and enemies who have their own stat sheets and ability decks.

 

Gameplay works like this. Everyone secretly picks two cards from their hand to play face down when everyone is ready, you all reveal simultaneously, including the enemies who flip one card from their ability deck turn order is determined by looking at all these cards initiative. Values, players use the number in the middle of their topmost card, so choose carefully when playing face down. Meanwhile, enemies use their cards top left number. The smallest value goes, first, meaning turns are done in ascending order until everything has gone, and you do this all over again next round, when it’s your turn, you perform the top action of one card and the bottom of the other, in whatever order you want, you Can do this bottom then that top or that top, then this bottom or the other bottom then other top or top bottom cards will typically be doing stuff like attacking and moving.

 

But then there’s also the weird stuff with lots of text use cards. Go to your discord, pile and when you don’t have two cards to play anymore, you can rest to get back your entire discard, but then lose one card for the entire scenario, meaning you can lose the scenario by running out of cards, not just health. Also, whenever you take damage, you can reduce it to zero by losing a card from your hand, so do that sparingly. Also also, some cards are crazy, strong, but are lost instead of discarding when played so also do that sparingly and that’s the core of gloomhaven’s gameplay loop. You pick a scenario, play cards out, running out, win or lose, and do it all over again.

 

Obviously, there’s a ton of nuanced combat roles, i’m leaving out like stats conditions using items and also these attack modifier decks that are drawn from to modify attacks instead of rolling dice like in other dungeon crawlers. But i’m focusing on the card management aspect, because that is the backbone of gloomhaven’s gameplay and is what really sets it apart from everything else, because it is a very crunchy, thingy, big brain there’s, a lot of depth to it when you play your cards is just As important as what card effects you’re using as well as thinking ahead to make sure your leftover cards still work together, once your hands are shrinking from losing more and more cards, all right, there’s also a bunch of rules surrounding progression systems outside of combat like leveling Up buying items, drawing event cards and even retiring your characters to unlock new classes, all of which i will explain when necessary, because now it is time for the pros aesthetics, slash components. First thing to command is all the art and graphic design. That’S here, oh the character, art looks great. The monster art works well, standees, the map feels super live with sticker and every single item is super unique, oh and also the tokens really pop out.

 

Iconography also works really well here, can’t think of any times or i couldn’t tell what something was all the sas conditions and elements are very colorful with distinct icons, whether it’s on cards or tokens and items have clear equip slots duh. This is head. That’S chess hands legs small items scenarios also look great when they’re populated with your character, minis, enemy, standees and obstacle overlay tiles, which, by the way, there’s a ton of bushes trees. Water rocks traps, you name it. Every scenario is gon na.

 

Have these overlay tiles plastered throughout to add life to otherwise these sort of bland generic map, tiles, random terrains strewn about not only looks great, but they also heavily affect your gameplay strategies. Oh yeah, an enemy stack cars. Do this really cool thing where you slot them into these envelopes to select their level level one level two level: three, you did three damage skeleton number three boom and when you got all of the components laid out on the table, gloomhaven has a certain alert that Just really primes you for an epic campaign, just waiting to happen, glue maven with how physically massive it is, really knows how to do presentation it’s hard not to be drawn in by the novelty of having a board game box. That’S this big! When so much of what’s in the box, is locked off, there’s a lot of room for the imagination to run wild all the sticker spots on the map really make you anticipate what scenarios next the lock class icons keep you guessing as to what they even are And all the envelopes really have you going like what can possibly be in these.

 

Lastly, we got the rule book, which has a really nice reference in the back lots of useful information here now, yeah, that’s about it about the book. We’Ll get back to the rule book in the contents. Okay story, slash theme, slash campaign unlocks the setting of gloomhaven is phenomenal. This is a really unique fantasy world that strays far far away from your usual orc selves, goblins dwarves, sure, there’s humans, pretty normal, so are valyreths, who are basically t flings, but then you’ve got savas who are sentient, rocks and heroes, who are swarms of bugs who Decide to hide mine together to form intelligent individuals, god is so cool, having really cool races, results and having really cool character, classes and enemies. You can see this just from the starting six classes being super distinct from one another and don’t even get me started on all the locked classes.

 

Google haven’t’s world also incorporates both magic and technology, which is always a really fun way to expand the world’s possibilities. It’S why there’s the magic slinging spellweaver and a gadget using tinkerer among the starting classes, as well as other stuff among the locked classes, see what i mean by expanded possibility like who knows what these are is lightning bolts, gon na be a lightning spell caster or A lightning technician i have no goddamn idea. I don’t know why i said i obviously do have an idea i did unlock it. Uh is saw gon na, be a techno lumberjack mercenary or are they gon na? Be a magical druid woodcutter?

 

I have no goddamn idea. Okay back to gloomhaven’s world, i should probably touch on what exactly the setting is basically you’re playing as a bunch of mercenaries who mess around in a town called blue maven. That’S all the way on the eastern coast of the continent, rio far away from the capital. So it’s kind of like the wild west wild east out here with a whole bunch of untamed surrounding wilderness and constant random violence going on so obviously, in a place like this, it’s gon na be pretty lucrative to form a mercenary party and just hang out at Bars looking tough so that randalls approach you with jobs and gold, but then one day this not so random val wrath woman named jack. Sarah pays you to retrieve some documents stolen from her, so you go dungeon, delving and end up getting yourself wrapped up in something much much bigger for further story.

 

You got ta, play more scenarios and read their flavor text, but for more lore here’s a nifty little book called the town records, which is locked until you retire character, at which point you get to document the character’s details, so they’re commemorated within gloomhaven’s records, very cool. Being able to look back through the last two years of our characters in here, however, the town records is mostly comprised of world building or entries that are drip-fed to you, as you make blue maven more and more prosperous. There is more to it, though spoilers, but for now just think of it, basically, as your lore book for the game, so yeah very much enjoyed reading through this and speaking of making gloomhaven more prosperous. There are two progression systems that affect gloomhaven in between scenarios when you’re back in town shopping and whatnot. First is reputation which goes up for doing good guy stuff and down for being jackasses.

 

There will be things in the game that you’re only allowed to do if you’re, above or below certain thresholds of reputation on top of stuff. That’S straight up. Unlocked for reaching those thresholds. Second is prosperity which has nine tiers, reaching a new tier unlocks more items in the shop and allows any characters from this point onwards to instantly level up to your prosperity level. Prosperity is a really clever mechanic because it lets you progress gloomhaven without necessarily doing a whole bunch of main quests, as there’s all sorts of ways to increase prosperity.

 

But it also makes it really easy to drop in new players, since they can start at a power level closer to people with already leveled characters. Granted gloomhaven actually works fine, if everyone’s all at different levels, but it’s probably better if everyone’s closer. So it feels like everyone’s putting in a similar amount of work. Oh yeah, glue, maven’s campaign supports swapping players in and out between scenarios at a whim. So if you have a large group, it’s totally possible to have everyone involved if you’re, okay, with constantly rotating around, who gets to play in each session, but yeah in between reputation, prosperity, locked classes, envelopes and the town records.

 

The campaign has a lot of things to work towards and unlock, there’s, always a steady influx of new content. Every few scenarios that keeps everything feeling fresh and it’s really compelling to just keep on playing gloomhaven, especially personal goals and character. Retirement didn’t mention this before. But whenever you make a character, you also get dealt two personal goal cards and have to pick one of them to be that character’s reason to adventure. These can range from killing x amount of enemy, to acquiring certain items to playing really strangely, during combat x amount of times.

 

We love this concept, especially in how it manifests during scenarios people randomly young all right. I don’t kill that guy. I want to kill that guy, that’s just never not going to be funny, and once your character’s personal goal is completed the next time you return to gloomhaven your character, retires they’re done they did the thing they’re at it here, at which point you document them into The town records, like we mentioned before you put all their stuff away, unlock a new class and then add a few events to the event, decks that correspond to the retired class and the newly unlocked one. Well, what are these decks? They’Re, basically, random events that help to make bloomhaven’s day-to-day happenings come to life.

 

All of them have something happen to your party, and then you pick an option and flip over the card to resolve, there’s two event: decks city and road events in town you’re allowed to draw a city event once per visit and road events. You have to draw one when doing a scenario: that’s not linked to gloom, even because you know you got ta travel to get there. Events are yet another way. Gloomhaven makes your actions matter because all sorts of things you do end up shuffling more vent cars into these decks, like retiring characters. Look the point is glue.

 

Maven has a bunch of stuff and all that stuff causes an unlocking feedback loop that it’s constantly dangling in front of you like a carrot at the end of the stick, but then you get the carrot and it gets replaced immediately and nothing exemplifies this feedback loop. Better than locked glasses, because unlocking them is a consistent way to spice up the gameplay as you’re working towards the next thing and speaking of gameplay gameplay pros holy [ __ ], the gameplay is good. In fact, it is more than good. It’S probably the best dungeon crawler gameplay. You can get right now.

 

You know when dark souls fans go like dude. The combat in other games. Just doesn’t do it for me anymore. That’S what goldman did to me. I can’t go back to other dungeon there’s.

 

Actually, a lot of truth to that comparison, because there’s a lot of video games out there, where you can more or less just trade hits. But then dark souls is very much about not getting hit same deal with blue maven. There’S a lot of dungeon crawlers, where you just kind of run in and trade dice rolls, but gloomhaven is very much also about not getting hit. There’S a lot of reasons why gloomhaven’s combat is so crunchy, because there’s all these different things you can play around with and pay attention to when avoiding attacks, an easy example to point at monster stats. If you know this, dude has moved to and you’re three spaces away.

 

There’S no reason to just run in and get hit play a high initiative, so you can go slower and let them come just short of you. Then because you went last, you can now safely move up and hit them next turn play a super fast initiative and hit them before they can go. Hopefully you get the kill, if not move away from them, there’s so many ways to avoid getting attacked. Besides, just manipulating turn order, let’s talk conditions, there’s some that prevent enemies from doing a thing for one turn, this arm prevents attacks, immobilize prevents moving and stun stripe just skips. Their turn you’re, usually not going to have a bunch of cards at your disposal.

 

With these disarms and stuns, so you got ta time them right. More commonly found conditions like poison and wound are of lesser impact and can be spammed more, but they still matter that they add in a little more damage. Not gon na explain all the conditions here because they definitely affect combat a lot, especially because enemies also do them against you, which might explain around them all the more important by the way. Enemy. Behavior is a whole ass thing in above itself, because earlier, in the overview we talked about how they flip an ability card to determine their initiative and actions and their ability cards sometimes lets them.

 

Do some real wack stuff to throw you off. So it’s not always a just oh they’re, gon na move and attack. You see bad guys all get their own ability, deck of 8 cards and all enemies of that type do what’s on the card example, if their card says, move an attack on their turn, they move within range of the closest player and attack them with some nuance To their pathing, to avoid traps plus tie breakers for closest players involving closest proximity instead of closest path or which player was faster. It’S the whole thing if they flip something else, they might just stand there being really defensive or summon or heal or yada. Yada cool monster abilities, what’s super cool here.

 

Is that, because of how initiative internal order works once everything flips, your group can see what all the baddies are doing and change up your plans if the enemies did something unexpected cause. When it’s your turn, you have options for which top and bottoms you want to use from your two cards and if all else fails, you can ignore the text of your card and use it for either an attack to damage top or move to hex’s bottom combine. All this with having to manage your hand so you’re not losing too many cards and order the wrong cards, which we think thematically represents characters. Stamina, really really well by the way, on top of having to coordinate with your team and you’ve got yourself a game that very much holds true to its advertised euro inspired comment because jesus christ there’s a lot of death here and, as expected of most euros, gloom Haven keeps randomness to a minimum. Like we mentioned in the overview, you don’t roll dice when attacking you.

 

Instead, flip a card from your own attack, modifier deck, which, as you might have guessed, modifies the value of your attack most of the time you’ll, be flipping negative ones, zeros and plus ones, so it’s pretty manageable to account for shifting attack values. Now this deck sounds kind of boring at first, but you can actually upgrade it. Yeah every class has a bunch of unique cards. They can add into their attack modifier deck. You can make it way more consistent by removing or replacing negative cards you can throw in conditions or other unique effects to really spice up your attacks.

 

You can even put in these rolling modifiers that make you flip another card before adding all the effects together. It’S really cool how this deck upgrade system can control just how random you want your attacks to be because you can trim it down for consistency or you can just throw in all the jank nonsense and let your attacks go haywire. What the hell is happening to this attack speaking of upgrades, let’s talk about character progression which comes from acquiring gold, exp and check marks, and these three things get you new items, new cards, enhanced cards and more new cards. It’S super fun bringing in the cash and then just blowing it all on cool new items or putting stickers on cards doing handsome. It’S also super fun to level up, so you can gain new cards.

 

Progression is super cool in that well, first and foremost, it’s fun, but also in how much control you have over how fast you want to get stronger. This is because the more you over perform during combat the more rewards you’re going to reap. If you look at gold as an example, enemies will drop money when they die and to pick it up. You either end or turn over it or play a card with a loot action which grabs everything within its specified radius. So if you want more money, you have to make a conscious decision to be grabbing more of it, whether that means positioning, unoptimally or weakening your hand by bringing a loot action card instead of something more generically useful.

 

However, if you’ve been playing well, you’ll find that you can typically afford to be grabbing some extra money, sometimes i’d even bait enemies, to stand close to money on the ground so that when they die, i can efficiently grab everything all at once with a loot action. Exp has a similar story because you get it by performing actions that have this spiky symbol on them and not from killing stuff. So if you really want a ton, you got ta try for it, whether that means bringing in more easy exp cards or trying to use conditional exp actions more often. Lastly, check marks are rewarded from battle goals. What the hell is a battle goal well before every scenario.

 

Everyone is dealt two of these and then picks one to complete. They generally ask you to play a little more strangely than you normally would totally optional to do these. But if you succeed, you get a check, mark three check marks and you get to make it an upgrade to your attack modifier deck because of all this there’s even more factors to take into account during gameplay. Besides, just trying to complete the scenario, so we got gameplay death from the comic system alone, but then there’s def and how much you can get away with looting on top of death and deciding how to upgrade with said loot, which items you get which new cards Do you take? What builds are you going for playing?

 

Gloomhaven is insanely rewarding and since players can control how hard snares are just by grabbing, more or less loot, gloomhaven ends up doing player, modulated difficulty exceptionally well in a lot of other games when you’re picking easy normal hard modes. They’Re, all a little too all in and put a lot of responsibility on the player to gauge not only their own skill level, but also the game’s difficulty. Google haven isn’t like this at all. The difficulty always feels so natural because the baseline difficulty seems to be balanced around expecting players to get an all-right amount of gold exp and check marks. If you decide to forgo all of that scenarios become significantly easier, because now all your actions and focus goes towards the objective.

 

No messing around wasting turns picking up money or doing your battle goal. This means that, once you know how to play, it’s super easy for the difficulty to just fall in the right spot, especially if you started off a scenario going for all the side goals, but then tone it back halfway through when you realized you bit off more Than you could chew, it’s an amazing bass line for difficulty, regardless of, if you’re, over, achieving or playing really casually like i’m fairly certain. This is the reason why there’s constantly so many stories in gloomhaven forums about play sessions coming down to the wire and people getting super hype when they win with only two cards remaining aka. The last turn before running out of cards. On top of all that gloom even still has easy normal hard modes, if need be so yeah great game design isaac, you know, what’s also great game design, no quarterbacking.

 

It’S really easy for co-op games to become group projects, but glue maven has so many systems in place to prevent players from optimizing. Other people’s turns remember those battle goals that gave you check, marks yeah. Those are kept secret, so sometimes you’ll see your friend randomly play. Like an idiot for a few turns – and you kind of just have to go with it – also remember how enemies drop money on the ground players, don’t share their gold and you’re not allowed to trade, so everyone ends up scrambling over who’s, going to be the first Ones to get the loo on the ground. Furthermore, there’s communication rules in place where you’re not allowed to say the names of ability, cards or sending numbers.

 

So you can’t go like go earlier than 20 initiative and do at least four damage. Instead, you say: go really fast. Do okay damage this communication rule also helps make multi-character combos feel so much more satisfying to pull off and, in general, heightens goomhaven’s sense of teamwork without sacrificing player autonomy. A really good example of this is infusing elements as a mechanic. Certain actions will generate an element, however, elements are made at the end of your turn, so it’s really annoying to be self-sufficient and then, on top of that elements can be used by anything in a scenario, enemies and allies included.

 

Most of the time elements are used to augment specific abilities instead of being mandatory. This causes a ton of situations that go like this. Imagine i go like hey. Can you make ice instead of this hard lining someone else’s turn? This usually ends up being just an option for them to consider, because it’s maybe too inconvenient for them to make ice.

 

For me, we might talk and figure out if it’s worth them, making the ice and messing up their plans or if i should just look for another play that doesn’t involve using ice right now, then to top it off all the classes are so different, one another That it’s unlikely you’ll fully comprehend what someone else is doing unless you’ve played their class before and even then are you really keeping track of which cars have in their hand, discard and loss piles? Probably not there’s more than enough to keep track of just playing your own class, it’s similar to spirit island where, like yeah, it’s technically possible to quarterback, but everyone’s characters are complex enough. That you’d have to be crazy, meticulous when accounting for everyone’s options – oh yeah speaking of gloom’s classes, are all awesome and feel incredibly different from one another, both in aesthetics and out to these gameplay. I love them for injecting some wacky wahoo nonsense into your scenarios. Oh and this one for having a crazy amount of builds, and also this one for being, it’s really weird, you know actually they’re all pretty weird because of gloomhaven’s unique races and complex gameplay triforce is pretty weird to play.

 

Just trust me, okay, my personal favorite is circles because i love me. Some snobby high skill floor, high skill ceiling gameplay and they also just have a certain presence on the board. That’S it’s so funny. When you see it anyways all these classes play really differently from each other, with a few of them almost feeling like you’re playing a different game. They are all so good at making you think about playing in a different way, so much so that even abilities that are literally the same end up playing differently depending on what class it’s on, like scoundrel, has a tiny hand size, but has incredible initiatives and movement.

 

Speed, while also being a mostly melee class but in tinkerer, has a massive hand. Size is mostly ranged and has decent initiatives and movement. This attack to target 2 at range 3 lets scoundrel dive in and hit some enemies real far in the back or use a bottom melee to kill a guy and then start working on the next baddies. But tinkerer basically is using this as just another. Solid range attack in their toolkit and it doesn’t really enable new lines of play.

 

Oh yeah, and then they have different attack modifiers, so that attack too is actually worth different amounts of damage to the scoundrel and the tinkerer. That’S just two of the starters and one card example, there’s six starters and believe me when i say that you can get by playing the entirety of gloomhaven, going from starter to starter and still not try out everything there is to all these starters. I say that pretty confidently because i played a whole bunch with these six classes throughout our campaign and there’s still so many different builds. I want to try for all of them, but also like you’d, never play only starters, because when you retire one and unlock a new class you’re, probably going to want to make the shiny new class your next character instead of another starter. So we have 17 classes.

 

Each with a ton of def on their own, but then there’s also 34 different enemies and 13 bosses, plus even more. If you want to count scenarios that turn a normal enemy into a boss by giving it tons of health with that many enemies. Yeah, that’s why there’s 232 monster ability cards and 240 monster standees like holy [, __ ]. I don’t know why. I went for youtuber height mode there because you know the components list is pretty ridiculous in general because, like oh, my god, 504 character cards and 457 attack modifiers.

 

Whatever point is, monsters have a lot of personality because of their ability cards and there’s a whole bunch of them. Oozes like to split into more oozes archers like to sit in the back whittling you away and setting up traps. Golems are big, slow and lumbering bears. Are big fast and not all lumbering? You get the idea, and once you play enough to get decently familiar with all the enemies, you may even learn to start changing around the hand you bring in depending on what enemies you see during scenario setup, because you 100 got ta approach them differently since strategies That work against a couple of bears are probably not what you do against a small army of oozes.

 

Look if there’s something to take away from all this. It’S that gloomhaven’s, combat, combined with the amount of content, is by far its greatest strength, because remember, there’s 95 scenarios and you’re most likely not going to play through all of them, and even if you did, gloomhaven systems lends itself well to custom content. So, there’s an endless amount of extra scenarios. You can find online there’s even dudes, who made a whole ass custom expansion, called crimson scales with its own classes, items monsters minis like bro. What the hell, it’s literally like another glue haven, just two-thirds the size crimson scales, is like the big ticket example, but there’s also more official content in the form of additional mini campaigns.

 

Isaac made where the community voted on what happens in them as well as 17 solo scenarios designed for each class to play through by itself. Oh and there’s a random dungeon generator in the game. Yeah there’s two decks a room deck and a monster deck. You draw three of each, so every random room has random enemies in them, and then you just have at it. So with this insane amount of content.

 

How well balanced? Is it all as a whole because it would suck if a lot of it was a janky mess, we’re happy to say that overall, it’s very balanced and at all player counts too. We’Ve played an ungodly amount at three to four players, and i’ve personally played a lot solo, the self-balancing that was described earlier to see how much lu, exp and battle goals you can get really works wonders here. In most scenarios, the player account aspect was done well and that scenarios will set up different amounts of enemies based on your group size. It also takes into account solo play where you have to control two characters at a minimum, but then the game makes you play on a hard mode, because you now have perfect information and control over your own guys.

 

So yeah very, very well done. That’S something incredible about gloom: even it’s a game that is never going to run to player count issues. So, no matter who you are or how many you play with you’re, basically getting the same experience, and that experience brings me to the last bit of pros, which are really weird and pretty unique to gloomhaven community slash online resources. So these are points that we debated. Even putting in here because in our shelf side reviews, we think it’s best to critique the experience of a board game right out of the box.

 

So if there’s like a website link in the rulebook or something we’ll mention it, but likewise, if there’s a better rules reference or like stripe house rules that can fix the game that you got ta dig through bgg forms: they’re, fine, that’s uh! That’S all knock against the game, not included yeah. However, gloom even goes so above and beyond this that it feels wrong not to bring it up, because this is something that would never be included in the box, which is the incredible online community for gloomhaven. The subreddit bgg forms and facebook groups are absolutely thriving with posts and discussions on top of a plethora of resources for literally everything you could ever ask for. I personally go on r slash goomhaven a lot: there’s [ __ ] posts, strategy, discussions, news, art, custom content, just like there’s so much content here in general, when i was first getting into gloom, even it really reminded me of when i first got into video games.

 

Like destiny or dark souls, or dead by daylight, or whatever, just i just dive into their communities and be like hey, what’s up guys, which, by the way, is something i personally feel is missing from board game spaces, because, even though we’re all board gamers, it feels Like nobody’s on the same page, because everyone’s all playing and talking about different games, and even when you do talk about games, you’ve both played there’s only so much to say, but that’s a topic for another video. As far as i’m aware, other board game communities dedicated to a single board game come nowhere close to the size of gloomhaven’s community going off of reddit. The next biggest are for twilight, imperium and kingdom death monster which they’re both pretty big but don’t even reach. Half the size of gloomhavens, i also feel like there’s always so much to talk about when it comes to gloomhaven, which really speaks to how much and how good all the content in bluehaven is not to mention how there’s always new updates in the form of upcoming Stuff cephalofear games is doing or just kickstarter updates or frost haven like it just. It really feels like any other life service.

 

Video game. That’S just constantly bustling with activity. Okay. But what about folks? Who don’t care about all this and just want to play glue?

 

Maven? The community still comes into play here because they have collectively made so many resources for gloomhaven. You can literally automate any aspect of the game that you want through apps and websites and they’re all really easy to find through google or the sidebar of our slash gloomhaven. We personally used glue maven helper to speed up, combat gloomhaven attack, deck for attack, modifiers and ninja looters campaign tracker to digitalize all the out of combat campaign stuff. We even used to use gloomhavenevents.

 

etlife for the event decks, but i was like this is ridiculously unnecessary. Like those are literally just two decks of cars, what am i even doing, but yeah god bless the gloomhaven community for making these things and ultimately saving me hours of my life that would have went through setup and bookkeeping to steal. No pun include its take. Gloomhaven has gone beyond being just another board game into being more of a phenomenon: the blank haven, ip has official, merch comic books, upcoming novels sequels, you name it it’s a whole ass brand now, so that wraps up all the pros, which means now it is time For cons gameplay, so these gameplay cons are literally never going to matter to the vast majority of players, because most of the segment is essentially just saying late. Game is wacky once you’re in deep, like prosperity, five or six you’ll run into gameplay repetitiveness, which isn’t helped by the late game being too easy, and that isn’t helped by super unbalanced items and some super unbalanced classes.

 

The first one repetitiveness is like the main point here, because it’s the result of endgame being so jank. There’S multiple reasons for this like scenario, design, enemy, variety and also class design affecting both of those so scenario, design scenarios all have a scenario goal that you got to do to succeed, duh, but most of them either kill all enemies or can still be done just By killing all enemies granted, there’s nothing wrong with killing all enemies, considering how good the combat is, but the ratio of kill all enemies scenarios feels too high. In our experience, it’s about two-thirds of the scenarios, which wouldn’t actually be that bad. But the problem is that so many of the non-kill enemy scenarios can still be feasibly done by just killing our enemies, which kind of downplays the otherwise cool objective and makes the ratio of kill all enemy scenarios way higher than two thirds objectives like loot. This macguffin at the end, destroy the macguffin at the end or escape through.

 

This exit will usually come down to killing everything anyways, it’s not even the cool kind of killing enemies where you’re clearly overwhelmed and you’re desperately fighting your way towards the objective. You can still feasibly just kill everything as a result, we’ve definitely had a couple scenarios where all the baddies are dead and then we read the scenario conclusion and it says something like you desperately fight your way through and barely make it closing the door behind you. As you hear, the monstrosity screeching on the other side we’re all like bro, there’s nothing there, we killed everything. Also, we’ve typically found these scenarios a little too easy. If you kill a few things and just sprint to the finish so like.

 

Why? Wouldn’T you want to kill more stuff, so you can get more money cranking up either the enemy’s lethality or their numbers would definitely help incentivize, not fighting everything, especially if they come from behind you. However, there’s some nuance to this problem that isn’t immediately apparent, namely class design. Some classes have terrible movement as a way to balance them, but in a lot of the non-kill all enemy scenarios, good movement is incredibly powerful. Obviously, it would be problematic if certain classes, just straight up, couldn’t do certain scenarios, so it’s best if another way through is to simply kill all the enemies.

 

This problem also prevents scenarios from being designed to be really long, which is probably a good thing. For the sake of table space class design in general has an issue where the classes, while really unique in play style, can sometimes be inflexible, which ends up causing slight problems here and there snarl design is one example. Another is team compositions at two player because there’s definitely some combos that really don’t play well and then there’s some classes that are way too good at two player and, if you’re, a galaxy brain viewer who thought to yourself. If so many scenarios are to kill everything. High damage classes must be great for that right.

 

Yes, g, i wonder why certain class combos don’t work well at two. This isn’t even mentioning that at two players, there’s less enemies, so high single target damage gets really good and multi-target attacks lose value. Oh wait! What’S that frost even designed their classes to have more flexibility, so they cannot only work better at all player accounts, but also design better scenarios. Well, how about that [ __ ]!

 

Well enough about this tangent regarding classes time. The second main point about scenario: repetitiveness is enemy variety, being lacking, wait how the hell is 34 enemy types lacking? Actually, it’s more like 28, because some enemies use the same cards like bandit guards, einox guards, city guards most narrows are gon na have at least three enemy types in them. So you’re gon na see all the enemies sooner than you might expect, which isn’t a problem by itself, considering how different all the enemies are with their own ability decks. But it’s just more of an issue because of how many kill all enemy scenarios there are to avoid as much scenario repetitiveness.

 

One of these has to change either have more enemy types to accommodate, so many kill laws or have more scenario, variety to squeeze more gameplay from. What’S already here also worth mentioning that, for lore reasons, certain types of enemies will commonly be found together, which means that there’s less permutations available from the 34 different types you’re, probably almost never going to see an underwater crab alongside a demon on fire. But you will almost always see bandit guards and archers together, actually there’s something else that would help variety making the monster ability card decks, bigger, which would make it take longer to learn the enemies that and also having ways to occasionally change enemy, behavior beyond just attacking Whatever’S closest, oh, wait: the forgotten circles. Expansion has this. What about that?

 

[, __, ], wow and now that i think about it. Class design also affects enemy variety, because, in my experience, there’s certain lines of play available to most classes that seem effective against pretty much everything and regardless of enemy type. They can’t do anything about it. One example being that class initiatives tend to be a little too good, like so many classes have numerous cards that are under 20 or above 80 and at those initiatives the vast majority of the time you have total control over. If you want to go before or after enemies and then cards under 10 or above 90, there’s barely any monster cards that can go faster or slower than that.

 

That basically means a majority of what the monster does won’t matter either, because you went faster and disrupted its turn or you went slow out of range, so they whiff. I really can’t think of any reason as to why you’d want to go to medium initiative. Besides trying to do some weird combo with a faster ally but then like most of the time, you’re better off, both just going early to deal with an enemy anyways in a way, this initiative, tangent, is a product of gloomhaven’s. Don’T get hit style of combat which results in players gravitating towards gameplay patterns that are safe and effective against almost everything in the game like it doesn’t really matter how cool an enemy’s attack is, if you’re, just gon na stun or disarm it before it goes or Go invisible, which means you can’t be targeted or run away so you’re out of range. You get the idea being big, slow and tanky is just not really a thing in gloomhaven, especially because cards that shield you need to be fast to matter, but then most tanky classes are generally slower, which might be thematic, but in gameplay means you can’t go at Medium speeds playing a shield card because enemies will probably hit you before you can even play it also there’s a ton of level up cards that are really cool but get completely outshined by a basic effect on a good initiative.

 

But the whole point of this bit is that once you’ve played a certain amount and get familiar with gloomhaven, you learn the effective gameplay pattern, so that plus scenarios being a little too similar ends up making gameplay more repetitive, which in turn makes new classes to be The main source of replay value instead of scenarios, because you have to learn the nuance beyond how each class plays in addition to how you want to build them. Just saying, there’s a good reason why you can find so many class guides online, but scenario and enemy guides are essentially non-existent. Repetitive gameplay, once you’ve played a lot, is also intersecting with gloomhaven’s inverse difficulty curve. Yep, the game is legitimately harder early on versus towards the end, for a multitude of reasons, so don’t feel too bad for getting your ass whooped when you’re first starting, however, you’re totally justified for feeling bad later on. If the game gets too easy, which makes it repetitive and boring, obviously you’re going to get more knowledge as you play more.

 

So that’s one aspect of gloom even getting easier, but scaling in this game is very much not balanced. This is because, as you level up get new items, get new enhancements, yada yada you’re, not only getting raw increases in numbers to match enemy, stat increases, but you also get more utility from crazier abilities. If you have a card that does a whole lot beyond just having good numbers, you are now presenting a problem to the enemies that they probably can’t answer by simply moving up and attacking no matter how high their stats are. For instance, any time there’s movement and invisibility on the same action, that’s insanely, strong anytime. You get an ability that says, kill an enemy, that’s not affected by how much health they have or how about aoe stuns yeah.

 

Let’S just spin one action to skip multiple enemy actions seems fair and, after all the times we brought in friends new to gloomhaven to make fresh characters at higher starting levels because of our higher prosperity. We feel pretty confident in saying yeah. Late game is just easier. Newbies can make way more mistakes in positioning or car management, and it wouldn’t matter as much because they’re just slinging around op [ __ ] to make up for it. That’S a huge slap in the face for groups out there made up entirely of new players just getting into gloom, even because there’s a double whammy of the game being legitimately harder, early on and you’re still learning the mechanics as well as good lines of play.

 

The only exception to this general difficulty curve are some particularly nasty scenarios you can encounter later on. But again those are exceptions, not the general rule of thumb, 72, 38, 31, but also making later scenarios harder, isn’t exactly always gon na pan out, because there’s so many paths players can take, you can beat the main story in 16 scenarios. If you happen to take the shortest path – or you can side quests like a [ __ ], so who knows where you’ll be power-wise at any given moment. Therefore, this is a problem that pretty much has to be mostly addressed through nerfing the classes, because adding too many extra abilities or lines of text to the enemies so that they can compete with late game players would either result in their turns being too complex and Hard to manage or making enemies, crushingly difficult unless you’re, you know using other busted stuff enemies having utility in the first place, also means that they need to use it somewhat well, which may be hard for them to do, given how they’re currently kind of stupid whenever Enemies put traps down, they usually end up going into their own traps, because the players have actual brains and can leverage forced positioning effects pretty well, plus it’s already fairly common for players to get a few things wrong about monster. Behavior rules, despite their seemingly simple run, at closest thing to hit at nature.

 

So if there were even more nuance added to enemies, oof that is just asking for massive faq trouble and then on top of all this getting gold is so slow early on. Looking at the monster difficulty chart, the money tokens dropped by killed enemies is only worth two gold when you’re starting out. Meanwhile, at higher levels, when money tokens are worth three or four gold, it’s pretty doable to buy a fancy new item after every scenario. It’S also worth mentioning that scenario. Difficulty level is calculated by taking your group’s average level divided by two meaning, it doesn’t factor in everyone’s items.

 

I try to wager that a character fully decked out with gear is about as strong as if they were three or four levels higher without any items so because at higher levels you get all your items at a faster rate than early on you’re. Reaching those item power – spikes really really fast. This isn’t even mentioning how at higher levels you can equip more small items. Specifically half your character’s level, rounded up by level five onwards, you can have a sizeable utility belt of random [ __ ]. You can just pull out of your ass for any given situation.

 

You know what [ __ ] it items are in bounce as hell in the first place, you see this minor stamina potion it’s immediately available in the shop upon starting your campaign. This is the best item in the game. I’M not even kidding 10 gold is dirk cheap for allowing you to recover two cards from your discord, pile without resting. Oh, no, i’m an idiot all my fast actions are in this car and i still have a bunch of cards in my hand, so i don’t even want to rest. Yet what do i do?

 

I’M just stabbing a potion up, get some fast cards back. Okay! It’S all good, it’s all good, oh hey! This card is crazy. Straight up kills again yeah.

 

Let’S play two turns in a row yeah. Why not? So not only is stamina potion the ultimate mistake fixer if you really need a discarded card back in your hand on demand, but it also lets you play your strongest cards back to back and there’s four of them available. Everyone gets one and just to clarify this x card icon on it doesn’t mean you lose item after use, it actually means you can only use it once per scenario. So yeah, your 10 gold stamina potion, has infinite free refills between scenarios.

 

On that note, the starting item pool has a lot of items that are arguably some of the best in the game. Eagle-Eyed, goggles, iron, helmet, warhammer, piercing, bow, invisibility, cloak and boots of striding are all items that remain top tier buys for the rest of the game. Items in general have these power levels that don’t always make the most sense for their costs and which prosperity, tier they’re in especially because high prosperity items sometimes cost way more without being worth it. I’M assuming the design intention was because you get more gold later on. So high prosperity items should be costly, so it still feels like you earned them at a similar rate to early game.

 

But what actually ends up happening is that you’re totally fine, just buying a whole bunch of the cheaper items and filling out your equip slots super fast. There are some super expensive items that actually are worth it, but those are legitimately game. Breaking i’m looking at you prosperities, eight and nine. The issues with some of these high prosperity items is that they’re, either too situational or not powerful enough to justify the cost and annoyingly enough. These problems are present with most of the unique items you get from treasure.

 

Chests or scenario rewards for some reason: they have a tendency to be worth 50 gold, which is a lot for an item, and then they provide a benefit that only helps in some scenarios. As a result, these unique items tend to be great sources of gold by just selling them to the shop, but then once in the shop, no one ever buys them don’t be mislead. Here, though, there are plenty of higher prosperity items that are pretty cheap and extremely powerful, with an especially big power spike at prosperity4 like holy [ __ ]. Is that the turning point for when the item shop gets way too good? The main gripe here is that gloomhaven could have really benefited from changing around when a lot of the items aren’t locked that in their cost, especially the situational items found in scenario loot, i would have made them cheaper, but had the chest also have some gold in It that way, you’re incentivized, to keep the items up, selling it since it’s worth less and then future players might actually consider buying it for when those situational situations happen.

 

Okay on to the class balance being jank, especially these three shits, but in general lot classes feel stronger than the starting classes, which honestly wouldn’t be bad by itself, because unlocking stuff and feeling stronger is fun, but also there’s a certain level of what the [ __ ] is going on we’re destroying the game, so we’re not gon na spoil any names, but we will talk about certain mechanics that these three classes can do, but we’re not gon na say which class is doing which mechanic, if that’s still too much spoilers, feel free To skip ahead to this time stamp, okay, so these moon, three arrows and music note classes break a whole lot of gloomhaven’s fundamentals: we’re talking about doing infinites lots of kill abilities instead of attacking perpetual stun locks on enemies permanently being invisible attacks and buffs affecting the Whole room, so positioning doesn’t even matter and also just being overstated in general. A lot of what was just said there would be overpowered in a vacuum, but let me remind you, stamina, potion so yeah on top of built-in recursion in the class itself, combine it with sound to potion and that’s how you get infinites, but yeah constantly doing non-loss Insta kills stuns disarms and invisibility really puts into perspective. How strong not getting hit is why the hell would you ever try to do big, healing and shielding when it barely even covers monster damage and straight up, isn’t even viable at higher difficulties? Meanwhile, with stun disarm and visibility like those are just methods of outright stopping attacks and then instant killing, something that’s basically a permanent stun, if you think about it, oh yeah and then a lot of this is happening either globally or the aoe is so big. It hits the whole room, so you don’t have to think about positioning to make these things happen, but these three classes are just outliers right true, but even then the power levels are still generally higher with the loft classes, so you can still do some really strong [ __ ] on them that overshadow starters.

 

On top of you know, just having higher numbers can’t hate on them too much, though all the classes are still really fun to play and to build craft and pilot. But hey we’re talking about whack, late game balance and repetitiveness, so yeah. Unfortunately, the classes can play a big part in that when played in a certain way, and the last thing we want to mention: that’s twisted by late game are summons. We find summons to be in a weird spot because balance wise they’re, extremely strong when monsters are at lower levels, but then later on summons run into huge problems. Also quick explanation most summons: are these lost cars that put out these circles that are your buddies, but behave just like enemies by running to the closest enemy and hitting them?

 

Oh, and also their stats are on the card. Early on summons will definitely tank. Multiple hits getting some attacks here and there and will absolutely be worth losing a card to play because they bring so much value. Compare these two lost cards a one-time instance of 6 damage versus this summon that can easily end up doing six damage over three attacks: poison, a few things and also tank six incoming damage because of its health awesome right, but then later on, when enemies start doing More damage suddenly that summon might die in two hits, maybe even one if you’re unlucky. This is definitely more an issue with melee summons because they don’t know how to stay safe and will dive head first into trouble.

 

But it’s annoying because classes using their summon mechanics can end up being really hit or miss purely based on what level and difficulty you play them at, not the biggest deal, but still knowing how there’s still playstyles that just fall flat later on and push you more Towards tried and true strategies like stunning stuff, it’s also apparent if you play at increased difficulties, because if the value from summons is tied to good numbers, those numbers ain’t worth it unless you’re being very meticulous with how you’re, micromanaging everything and positioning all your stuff to Keep someone safe, which is a lot of effort compared to just more standard lines of play, stun all right enough with the end game, repetition and balance. Now, let’s talk about more general gameplay cons that will actually matter to the vast majority of players. Instead of us end game nut jobs, first up we got rolling modifiers and how they interact with advantage and disadvantage, which will come up frequently as buffs and debuffs on attacks through general gameplay advantage means you flip two attack modifier cards for the attack and use the Better one disadvantage is what you’d expect flip two use the worst one rolling modifiers make you flip again, so you think that if there’s advantage and you roll into something that you’d still flip again so there’s still two cards to compare right, nope, that’s not how it Works the rolling card counts as one of the two cards oops. You can roll into a negative attack my fire with advantage, maybe even a miss that genuinely feels like dog, [, __ ] on the flip side, while disadvantaged rolling modifiers still roll but lose their effect. But who cares when he can roll into a crate which is hysterical, but honestly that feels really goofy like there?

 

Was this really stupid build? I did on skeletor that did massive poison damage and this move poisoned. All jason enemies was the go-to way of poisoning, but the best way to attack them all was with multi-target ranged attacks and like most dungeon crawlers attacking adjacent enemies with range attacks caused a disadvantage, but my attack, modifier death had so many rolling modifiers that it didn’t Even matter it was like, i was attacking normally. Both of these are really dumb, particularly the advantage of it, because it’s far more likely you’ll be actively giving yourself advantage a lot more often than you’ll get disadvantaged from enemies and part of why you give yourself advantage. Isn’T just for better damage, but also because you don’t want to miss, especially on a loss attack as a result, it’s a legitimate build path to avoid adding rolling attack modifiers at all costs.

 

So your advantage attacks are better, so there’s literally an incentive with some advantage. Heavy classes to avoid doing your battle goals and try to level up slow at a certain point which feels really weird and terrible and speaking of battle goals. There’S only 24 of them and you’re dealt to every scenario, meaning you’ll memorize, all of them extremely quickly, which kind of defeats the whole point of getting players to behave. Unpredictably also attack modifier upgrades in general, aren’t the most balanced, because removing all your negative cards first on average does way more damage and adding in all the cool, weird [ __ ]. So if you’re trying to be super optimal, your attacks won’t start being really cool and unique until the mid levels of your character.

 

Last bits of general gameplay to complain about advertise play time of 30 minutes per player does not hold true at all, especially because so many scenarios are kill all enemies which tend to play like endurance tests through multiple rooms of baddies, but also setting up and tearing Down scenarios takes a while as well as doing all the monsters turns, especially when there’s a ton of them on the board. There’S all these little things to manage that really adds up towards a lot of time loss from bookkeeping. In our experience, two players is the only one that holds pretty true to time. It’S usually about an hour, but then three players is like two hours or less and then four players who knows how long that goes. Four players is especially hectic because there’s the most amount of enemies, so wow a lot of management there, as well as the most amount of team play possible.

 

Enemy management gets especially bad whenever there’s rooms have a ton of weak enemies. Because now you got ta, look around and see the numbers on all the standees, but then wait elites always go before regulars. So then, you forget, which number you’re even on it’s a very annoying hassle, plus your terms can be absolutely crazy when comboing off each other and it’s pretty easy to waste time talking about term possibilities and who’s setting up who, alongside planning on how the monsters will Move and the final gameplay con line of sight rules are whack rules say you have a line of sight on hexes that you can draw a line to from only the corners of the hex without touching a wall hex. This works fine most of the time, but then there’s sometimes rooms like this, where this door breaks the game, since its corners are all touching walls. It’S also just kind of weird to learn and get used to at first, because certain door configurations don’t actually allow the walls to provide any cover.

 

If you’re anywhere near the door story, slash theme, slash campaign, unlock cons, so gloomhaven’s actual story. It’S uh somewhat bare bones. Sure there’s stuff happening, but that’s just it stuff happens, there’s not a whole lot of explanation or character. Motivations similar to our video on glumhaven jazz’s alliance story, bam. Link up there.

 

Gloomhaven story has pretty much the same problems going on where there’s not a lot of. If then, going on just a whole bunch of then this happens, then that happens, then this happens and just like in that video there’s not a whole lot of concrete explanations behind. Why characters do what they’re doing there’s not really any defined motivations or explanations behind people’s powers? They kind of just do their thing and they’re like okay, dude, blue maven story does do better than jaws, though, just because of this town records book cause all of gloomhaven’s world building is done right here, but is that a good thing? You don’t think so, because you have to unlock its sections bit by bit by getting higher prosperity so to read through the whole thing.

 

That’S gon na take a really long time. As a result, you can actually beat the main story and be missing a ton of context about the world in final boss, because you weren’t far enough into the town records and even then the town records is mostly world building. That’S big picture info. So while it does explain why things are happening generally, you’re never gon na get anything more interpersonal, but that’s not the only problem with the talon records, because if it takes a long time to read the next section, it gets really easy to forget what was described In previous sections, forgetting things in gloomhaven is also a big problem with the story, and it’s really easy for the game to feel like this hazy dream of non-stop fighting going from scenario to scenario without a clue in the world as to why you’re killing. So many things this is because there are so many branching storylines that it’s really easy to jump from branch to branch.

 

So then you end up losing track of what’s going on in all of them. Having so many branching paths works well in games with less time-consuming ways of making story decisions, but in gloomhaven all big story. Decisions are done by picking which scenario to do so. If your group gets together weekly to do one scenario that takes like two to three hours, that’s dedicated to game play and not story, there’s no way in hell. You’Re gon na naturally remember the different plot lines going on unless you all decided to solely focus on one path at a time.

 

So if you want any sense of a cohesive story, focus on the current path and don’t branch out unless, like you’re, all playing super regularly, if every weekend you all get together to play all weekend so you’re doing like five stars a week, then sure the story Story’S actually fresh nervous minds, but uh good luck. Getting that to happen also reminder that personal quests exist, so it’s very common players are going to be incentivized to just do whatever scenario best suits them instead of following the story, and that’s probably how most people are going to be playing gloomhaven, which is totally fine, Because the story is definitely not the main attraction here anyways when i was done with the campaign, i went back and read through all the scenario: flavor text for the main storyline and even then it’s very much just a bunch of things happening and just along for The riot without fully knowing why here’s a fake story example, i especially loved i stole from this person on reddit congrats killing medusa in the jungle, opened a crack in the giant glacier right next door, because her magic was keeping it sealed. And now you can fight the ghost king honestly. This whole comment that is, hilarious, go ahead and pause. If you want to read it, but yeah, seeing as not knowing what’s going on is a problem resulting from making story decisions every few hours in the form of picking which scenarios to do the ways to fix this would either be to make out of combat story Way more involved so you’re doing more stuff in gloomhaven, besides just character, upgrade things or to overhaul how scenarios are designed so that there’s more flavor text and story choices being made mid scenario.

 

Oh right, there are event cards that you can draw from between scenarios and while they do introduce some fun random slice of life to gloomhaven, they aren’t like full-on story, beats they’re, just random shenanigans that happen real, quick and are usually resolved right on the spot. Occasionally some have like a chain of events where, if you pick the right choice, you’ll add another event card to the deck, and this keeps going until the end of the chain. You like unlock a new scenario or item or something. The problem is that this is an event deck who knows when you’ll draw that specific card you just added so just like with scenarios you’re, probably going to forget what that specific card was even talking about by the time you drive, especially if this deck keeps branching With multiple cards doing that, there’s a really easy fix of that to help scenario branching forgetfulness too, which would be to just have in the corner. What unlocked this thing like?

 

We have some scenarios saying they’re linked to other scenarios, but why don’t all scenarios have unlocked from that way? If you forget where this thing came from, you now know all this branching will probably make players forget what’s going on, but it can also result in a story legitimately becoming nonsensical. For instance, after killing the final boss, i decided to do some of the earlier main scenarios that weren’t blocked off from our campaign and at the end of on the quest lines, the final boss starts talking to me again, despite being, you know dead, so that was Goofy there’s a lot of shenanigans with sequencing as a whole. We looked at this nifty reddit post, someone made of the longest possible campaign path you can take and it’s honestly hysterical to look at through a story lens. That path ends up making the poor town of gloomhaven go through so much [, __ ] and you backstab every other character.

 

You meet like it’s, so it’s [, __ ], amazing. I don’t even know what to say about it: okay enough with the story’s forgetful branching problem. Now, let’s talk about unlockables, starting with oh the envelopes, not the class envelopes. Actual slim envelopes – you know talk about what’s inside all of them vaguely. So if you don’t want to hear it skip to this time stamp, i’m going to go on a limp here and say that the majority of players were indifferent to or outright disappointed by.

 

What’S inside all these envelopes b is the only one that actually like does something, and the rest may end up not even affecting you at all. I’Ve also found that if you dig through forums talking about x, jesus christ, is this one controversial a lot of people loved it? A lot of people hated it, but pretty much. Everyone agrees that its implementation needed fixes. Where do we stand on it?

 

Cool idea, terrible execution so envelope x, is a puzzle and obviously we aren’t going to say the answer or how to do any of the steps. What we will say is that the puzzle is in a weird no-man’s land, where it’s definitely not easy enough for the masses, but also not hard enough to warrant the internet working together on it. Despite giving some arg vibes, because some steps you’ll really got to think outside the box, that matters because going online to look for help, wasn’t intended and so there’s spoiler tags everywhere, and thus it can be hard to look up anything involving envelope x. Someone did make a complete guide on board game geek that walks through all the steps, and thank god that exists basically we’re saying either. It should have been so hard that it’s intended to be done by everyone online working together on it.

 

By the way, i love those types of puzzles because of five nights at freddy’s at doki, doki, literature, club or dumb it down with better directions and give more confirmation that you’re making progress. Good puzzles build upon ideas that you keep trying until something works and then keeps adding on to what you’ve already done. You look at crossword and jigsaw puzzles. It’S immediately clear when your answer doesn’t work. Unfortunately, this x puzzle doesn’t confirm anything until it’s time to put in the final answer so oops.

 

Who knows if you did one of the steps wrong on top of all that the steps themselves are locked behind all sorts of random content in the game. Like certain scenarios, events etc. So at the time we opened envelope x more than half the clues weren’t available. Yet but we didn’t know that i ended up scouring through the components staring at random things for like two hours, without finding a single clue before i just gave up and started googling. This is why puzzle feedback matters, people, because i thought i was doing something wrong but turns out.

 

I was just really unlucky with the clues i could have found, because they were just the last components that i didn’t check. Oh yeah also because we used so many companion apps one of the clues isn’t even in my box, because it was automated out whoops, there’s even a typo on one of the clues like what all right. We should also probably mention that the way you open envelope x is through a personal retirement goal. So, if you’re choosing to forgo unlocking a badass new class with us by the way, which is probably why everyone online is suddenly motivated to tackle the puzzle. Right then, and there instead of going like, i will leave it for later, which is also why there’s probably a bigger sentiment of disappointment for so many because it feels like they lost out on unlocking a new class x, really should have been open through some different Means because, as far as i’m aware, it was intended to be bonus content, but attaching it to retiring, isn’t exactly out of the way bonus material, but enough about envelope x.

 

I could talk all day about it, especially the part where it turned out. I already knew the answer because of a google auto complete long before opening it, and i knew what the reward was because of one of the apps we used something look. The x was a total [, __ ] show for me. Okay, we can’t even use the legitimately badass reward anyways, so we effectively got nothing out of it and unfortunately so will a ton of other players out there. The rest of the envelopes aren’t much better and if i had to be honest, all the spoiler tags online made me overly hype up the unlockables and set me up for disappointment.

 

So here’s shelfside’s recommendation for the envelopes work towards them for sure, but don’t be overly committal, because the envelopes aren’t going to do anything too substantial at the end of the day. If you really want to rush an envelope to open it, early go for b, but for the rest of them, definitely be patient and go for them. When you’re, starting to finish up your adventure with gloomhaven, i’m talking unlocking most of the glasses and doing almost all the main scenarios, don’t take these cons the wrong way, because these envelopes are definitely cool, but they need to have the proper mindset and timing. Hence why their implementations are cons, because you know we got ta, warn you about that. Don’T adopt some insane hype.

 

Zealotry just have a calm appreciation for cute little cherries on top that were totally unnecessary, but nice to have if you’re gon na be stringent about spoilers. Save it for the classes cause when you first start, unlocking them [ __ ] gets wild, but then, if or when the rest of the cons about repetitiveness sink in and getting the last few classes loses a bit of its magic. Especially you know, because you really start to understand. Gloomhaven reactions start becoming oh cool versus the original whoa. This glass is so cool last few bit of cons for this section retirement times are wildly inconsistent.

 

The amount of scenarios you do could be five could be 25 and that’s not cool granted. This does happen less than later in the game you are and that’s because so many scenarios require doing something hyper specific and we’re not talking like weird hyper-specific gameplay actions that can be done in any scenario. More, like you straight up, have to do certain scenarios if you’re a new player who happens to pick one of these, it may take a disgusting amount of time to retire, and you end up stuck with a max level character with tons of items and enhancements on The other hand, if you are late game, you can totally spam these retirements super quickly, since you have access to so many scenarios which intersects with the repetitiveness con from before, because this can diminish the value of retirements retirement as a mechanic can also be easily disrupted By player count, if you have a group of four and multiple players need to do something super specific someone is usually going to be forced to take longer to do their personal goal. Unless you find a scenario that luckily progresses everyone’s goal, but also if everyone’s on point with their retirements at four players, you could end up unlocking all 11 classes way too fast, especially because there’s ways to unlock classes aside from just doing personal quests. That’S definitely more rare, but you know what isn’t rare you regularly playing with two players and realizing holy [ __ ], it’s gon na take so long to be able to see all the classes.

 

Whoops can’t do anything about that unless you decide to pilot multiple characters. Each session, okay: next we have reputation being a mostly useless mechanic. Its most impressive role is serving as a prerequisite for certain event cards, as well as these unlockables in the back of the rulebook, but it otherwise only slightly affects the prices of items in the shop. Reputation affecting random events would normally be a fine use for reputation. Most games but because the meat of gloomhaven comes from scenarios and not at all from city management, you quickly stop caring about reputation once you’ve unlocked what you wanted from it.

 

If there was more going on while you’re back in town, then you’d feel the effects of reputation way more, but as a reminder, a gloomhaven ain’t kingdom death monster where you do a gajillion thing to your colony between encounters nah gloomhaven, just do one city event and Then you maybe spend your gold on improving yourself and then a road event happens on the way to the next scenario, though, i do want to mention that quickly, dropping reputation makes early game way harder, because everything costs more and your gold income hasn’t sped up yet And finally, global achievements is another fairly useless. Mechanic. Gloomhaven has an achievement system where certain scenarios reward an achievement like first steps that future scenarios may check for except there’s two types of achievements, global and party achievements. The only thing that distinguishes global from party achievements is the fact that global achievements are stickers. You get to slap on the top of the map, however, in function, global achievements serve the exact same purpose as the party achievements you write down, that is unlocking or blocking off certain scenarios.

 

Global achievements are a missed opportunity for cool things to happen to the world. Once you unlock them, but instead all they end up doing, is causing a slight annoyance during bookkeeping, because now you have to check two places to see. If you have the thing that allows you to do the scenario, aesthetics, slash components, cons from goddamn, big gloomhaven’s boxes, there sure are a lot of components that funnily enough are way too small. You see these monster, standees yeah, you can probably see them. Can you clearly see their numbers at a glance?

 

Probably not unless i zoom in but yeah it can be annoying if you’re the person who sits further away from the action than everyone else, plus monsters. Turn orders are already annoying to manage, because you have to look around and see which monsters are going in. What order plus elites always go before normal is regardless of number i get so annoyed by this. I straight up only put the low numbers into the elite stands instead of fully randomizing the monster numbers. Also, the hp, slash, exp dials have really small numbers too.

 

No way in hell, you know your teammate’s health without asking and speaking of health, the damage token numbers are tiny. We basically know the value by their size instead of reading them, but even though the one damage tokens are small, they still don’t fit well onto the monster sleeve sections and at a certain point you got ta stack them, oh god, how much damage is on ooze? Nine, oh yeah, and then the world map stickers have tiny text so once you have a ton of them, it’s really hard to know. What’S even going on here, very shitty way to track which snarls you’ve done. So i instead used this notebook and wrote down my quest lines, which greatly helped us remember: story beats since we know what scenarios unlocked what, but this is all the tip of the iceberg, because glue maven is so emblematic of board game finicky fiddliness.

 

This is the nightmare game to do a dice tower component drop with, because the cleanup and organization afterwards would definitely take a few hours. Everything has its own cards or tokens that go along with it, and so many of them look the same at a glance too. You absolutely need some method of organization to make gloom even happen, and the game doesn’t do nearly enough to help with this, including a getting started. An organization guide, or even some plastic bags at a minimum would go a long way to fixing this problem, but you’re, basically on your own, when it comes to organization which is incredibly intimidating for a box. This big and trust me, you will need a storage solution.

 

We’Ve tried at first to just haphazardly, dump everything in the box. It’S a nightmare. Ideally you just leave gloomhaven set up in a room and never pack it up. So you don’t have to deal with this, but we were bringing this chungus box to different friends places. All the time and quickly realized that setup and tear down was ridiculously tedious when digging through unorganized tiles tokens cards, more tokens, more cards, overlay tokens, but that’s just for putting the game onto the table.

 

The fiddliness is absolutely bonkers when actually playing, because you have to track initiative order. Every round put tiny damage. Tokens onto tiny monster sections perform every monster’s turns under their behavior rules. Remember to remove certain conditions at the end of that figure’s turn shuffling every attack mod deck that drew a shuffle card. It’S so easy to forget about something while performing upkeep every turn, especially hate.

 

The constant shuffling every enemy type has two of their eight monster ability cards causing a shuffle and attack modifier decks are really easy to forget to shuffle if something was attacking a lot and flipped way more cards beyond the crit and miss that caused a shuffle. All of this combat fiddliness was completely solved when we started using gloomhaven helper, which is software someone made to completely automate bookkeeping during combat you literally click. What classes you have plus, which scenarios to do and bam every monster stats are set up. All you got ta. Do is put in the player’s initiatives and hit start round boom.

 

All the monsters draw their cards and everything gets neatly, organized top to bottom plus monster numbers left to right such a clean way to track everything’s health and turn order. Glue maven helper will automatically shuffle the monster decks and automatically remove conditions on top of tracking elements, with a cool little animation. I can’t imagine how a group of four could finish a scenario in the advertised two hours without using this app, it speeds up everything considerably and goes to show that gloomhaven basically requires companion software. If you don’t want to waste tons of hours, doing bookkeeping over the course of dozens of scenarios, here’s even more fiddliness cons about tiles and tokens. The tiles don’t properly slot together, not sure if we got a bad copy or what, but sometimes we really got ta shove, the tiles together, which does sometimes damage the edges.

 

This problem is so bad that certain scenarios literally aren’t even functional the tiles try to push each other apart and won’t fit these room tiles in general. Aren’T that stellar there’s only four generic backgrounds across all of them, which plays a part in repetitiveness, because it can be really easy for scenarios to look the same if they’re, sparse with overlay tiles. But then, if there’s too many overlay tiles setup becomes annoying and the user experience may suffer from the overlay tiles shifting around and becoming especially problematic when there’s tons of stuff on top of them like a monster on top of multiple loot tokens who’s, also being marked By some character’s ability and there’s more cons when it comes to overlay tiles, there’s a lot of them, which is a good thing, except for the fact that tons of them are double-sided, making it a huge pain in the ass. Looking for the one that you need. Since you got to keep flipping them over, i ended up making this very jank infographic, so i don’t have to deal with this, but seriously.

 

Why couldn’t overlay tiles all just have the same thing on both sides or at least have numbers on them. So there’s like an organizational system: jesus christ scenario, setup instructions also tell you how much of everything you need to build a dungeon great right, but for no reason they never say how many coins doors and quarter tiles to bring out. Why half the time i don’t even set up the quarter, tiles out of laziness, because all they do is remind you that two tiles are connected without a wall. Honestly, that’s just pretty easy to remember, but you know what i almost never set up. Scenario, 8 and objective tokens.

 

Not only are the scenario, a tokens, annoyingly double sided, but the font makes it hard to distinguish the letters, a d and e at a glance. So unless a scenario has a ton of tokens i need to set up, i don’t even bother, but thankfully most scenarios only have a handful of these. They usually just mark spots for something to spawn from, so i can typically get away with just looking at the scenario book. Instead. Ultimately, gloomhaven asks for a lot of work from the player’s end to make the game function at a more reasonable pace, and we probably wouldn’t have played as much as we did when we first got the game, if it weren’t for the amazing community making.

 

So many resources to help speed up the game, whether it be from organization resources or creating software to automate bookkeeping. It’S also just simply a big community, so odds are whatever your complaint or question. Someone else has already made a post about it somewhere, like seriously. It’S astounding how you can google, the most hyper-specific [ __ ] about gloomhaven and you’ll, probably find a thread about it, or it’s straight up in the official faq on board game geek. That probably has a similar workout to this giant review, which reminds me that faq is an absolutely necessary supplemental to this rulebook.

 

The final bit of contour this review is this goofy thing, because what kind of a board game review would this be without the rule book being in the cons? So gloomhaven’s rulebook isn’t the most pleasant thing to read from the back when first learning the game, because it inelegantly dumps a whole bunch of component overview onto you without really explaining what you even do in gloomhaven like when i was first reading through. I didn’t even know gloomhaven’s loop of picking a scenario. Go back to town repeat until, like page 40,

Yeah the campaign aspect isn’t touched on at all until the later half of the rulebook, which i guess sort of makes sense since combat, is the main focus of the game but organizing it. This way made it really hard to grasp the point of the game, because you learn a whole bunch of combat mechanics nuance before learning about the big picture like how you even build a character or do scenarios, but that’s big picture organization.

 

There’S tons of little details. Misplaced here and there within the rulebook that you are not going to parse from the table of contents or the quick reference on the back example, you’d think the part explaining that non-summoned spawn monsters, drop loot would be explained under loot or monsters right nope. It’S under attacks, what the [, __ ] and then there’s the clause about the distinction between an empty hex and an unoccupied hex being under flying movement, which should really be under its own section under common terminology or something so it can be referenced in the table Of contents there’s a few more examples like how the part about skipping card effects is under character turn. But then you learn. You can’t skip earning exp under attack effects instead of under exp or even under the original skipping card effects paragraph.

 

But you know, i think the point’s been made, so many of the rules are spread out throughout all the pages that it can be hard to not only learn the game, but also quickly find what you need mid-game once you’re playing blue maven would have benefited greatly From having three rule books, one for combat one for the campaign and another as an appendix faq to reference rules, but then, on top of all that, there should have been like a what to do upon opening gloom. Having sheet that gives organization tips and a checklist for preparing your first scenario, that briefly runs through the setup steps for everyone’s characters, play area and monsters like seriously, it’s so funny seeing the endless permutations of rules that people get wrong when first playing gloomhaven i’ve seen Commenters make mistakes ranging from using all their upgrade attack modifier cards as their starting deck accidentally playing on hard mode by not tackling star difficulty right and even making monsters always move in attack, instead of only doing what’s on the card. Those are all pretty major rules, but then even gloomhaven veterans will frequently miss a ton of minor rules like how difficult terrain hexes costs two movement to enter, but then a jump movement lets you ignore all the hexes pass through, except the one you land in meaning In this example landing either here or there still takes five movement with jump, but hey that’s what the official faq is wore on bgg. It’S honestly so comprehensive that it’s astonishing, you can find literally anything with a quick control effort command. F.

 

However, its existence stemming from a particularly avid user having to relay questions to the designer is still hilarious, though very endearing, but again not mentioned in the rulebook. So if you don’t know about the faq and its official credentials, that’s just another source of rules, confusion and the last rule is confusion. Con the difference between actions, abilities and ability, modifiers, first of all, haha another example of bad rule book organization, because it defines what is a main line, ability and ability modifier way back in enhancements instead of under character terms. But second, this distinction actually does matter a lot and it can be really confusing to know which is which solely based on if the font is large or not quick and dirty explanation, action refers to a half of a card top action. Bottom action ability is a thing done from an action like attack or move an ability.

 

Modifier means the smaller text that modifies the ability. Okay, but not only is this rule super hard to find, but relying on font size for the cards is a terrible way to differentiate, separate abilities or ability. Modifiers. Like look at this card, i assumed this part was an ability modifier, because small text, but turns out this is two separate abilities. Okay, dude recommender score time to score this juicy thick boy.

 

Here we try and critically evaluate our pros and cons to judge how well the game did what it’s trying to do and if what it’s trying to do is even a good idea. In the first place, gloomhaven is gon na get a recommender score of 7. Out of 10

It’S a good game. Believe me, i am just as surprised as you that the score stayed the exact same from the initial quick review we did two years ago. There was definitely a period where the game just kind of clicked and we were having a ton of fun, but then, of course, we hit the late game with high prosperity and messed around with busted glasses.

 

So then, all of a sudden, the gameplay, the best part of gloomhaven, got real wacky. Here’S the thing, though most board gamers, aren’t going to be affected by the wacky late game. Plus gloomhaven has great difficulty adjustment options anyway, so it doesn’t actually hurt the recommender score that much especially because the really broken stuff is few and far between in an otherwise exceptional combat system. If anything, the game really should be like an eight, maybe nine, if using community resources, with the primary cons coming from how the game is such a hassle to manage because of all the fiddliness in its subpar learning experience. So then, what’s dropping it down to a seven right now?

 

Well the fact that jaws of the lion and gloomhaven digital exist link to our jaws review up there. We cannot, in good consciousness, recommend diving into the hundred dollar plus big box experience. If you’re a newcomer when cheaper much more accessible, gloomhaven options exist on top of that, these two products are arguably better. In so many ways. Jaws doesn’t have tiles and instead has custom art scenarios built into its scenario, booklet and that, along with its excellent insert and tutorial cuts down your setup time dramatically, plus as multiple rulebooks and a getting started guide all for 50 bucks, usually 40 on amazon.

 

I’Ve even seen it go down to 30

What the [ __ ], on top of all, that jaws, isn’t even a watered down glue maven. It’S only missing like a handful of mechanics, so it’s still quintessential gloomhaven combat and it has 25 scenarios, which is still a lot even compared to other full-blown 100 dungeon. Crawlers, so why the hell would we ever recommend bass gloomhaven as the default starting point when jazz exists? It’S less commitment, if you want to try out gloomhaven, has an amazing tutorial, along with excellent rulebooks plus appendix and the gameplay is way more balanced than banks gloomhavens in a weird way. It’S valid for newcomers to treat gloomhaven like an expansion to jaws of the lion except you know this expansion is hilariously bigger and will quadruple the size of your gloom.

 

Even experience, which is a dream, come true. If it turns out you really like the gameplay, you also further enhance gloomhaven’s gameplay by bringing in the jaws characters, battle goals and even items if you wanted to, despite that part not being recommended by the rulebook, the item restriction seems to be done, for simplicity’s sake. Rather than balance, because there’s items with shared art but different effects that don’t exist in basically moving, but then, if you want to dodge all the bookkeeping entirely and get games going with zero hassle, gloomhaven digital exists with the benefit of remote play. It’S so much easier to get sessions going with your friends and because all the bookkeeping and setup is automated scenarios legitimately take half the time to play. It’S also a quarter of the price of physical and it’s on steam, meaning it’s easy to get it for even cheaper because of constant steam sales plus with mods in a level creator.

 

It even competes with what should be physical’s advantage, which is using all the tiles and enemies to play additional custom content, and it even has tons of rules options. So you can play rules as written or with updated, frost, haven rules and even a reworked card enhancement system that allows for so much build variety yeah with digital’s options. You can change enhancements to be way cheaper and allow them to be sold at the cost of them, not carrying over to all future characters of that class. Physical can’t do that because they’re stickers, so enhancements are way more committal, but then in digital enhancements. Allow for insane flexible experimentation with your builds.

 

The only thing digital is missing are a few of physical secrets like envelope x, because those secrets are very much tied to physical components being used in clever ways, but digital missing. These things is actually so insignificant. Considering said secrets, don’t actually do anything substantial, like we covered in the cons like for reference, you can buy the envelope x reward as an add-on for the frost-saving kickstarter. So trust me when i say that even for a lot of gloomhaven physical players x hasn’t done anything for them. Yet, as of this review to really hammer the final nails in the coffin gloomhaven digital not only has a tutorial, but also a separate casual campaign called guildmaster mode.

 

That has like a hundred of its own scenarios, where the story is way more loose and is designed more like a sandbox mode that has everything unlocked more easily, so you can quickly mess around with tons of builds. If you can’t get enough of that sweet sweet glue, name in combat, so not only does digital have everything that physical has, but there’s also additional content. Yeah, it’s really hard just to find a physical gloom even purchase when digital exists wait. What did we literally just make this a movie length or review about glue maven just to tell you to check out other products instead yeah but hey now, you know a lot about the classic big box glue haven enough to know that maybe big box gloomhaven is Still for you, if you prefer physical over digital and don’t mind the hard learning curve, plus organizing all the components – and you know that the value proposition of having this much stuff in a box matters to you, because you actually use a lot of instead of just Letting it collect dust in your collection, then by all means dive right in just don’t say we didn’t warn you if the experience is so part early on. First impressions can matter a lot and we’d hate for anyone to be left with a sour taste.

 

If all they had to do was start off on the right foot but hold on before you completely write off physical glue, maven. Here’S an angle that i never see anyone online bring up. What, if you don’t treat gloomhaven like a campaign game, just treat it like any other co-op, a la spirit, island or manchester madness? We say this because it’s totally normal to pick up a co-op and only play it a handful of times, and you don’t have to see gloom even exclusively as this massively epic campaign game to get some great sessions out of it. If you know you’re not going to get around to spending hundreds of hours, unlocking everything, why not just play gloom even like any other co-op, [, __, ], unlocking stuff and tracking progress?

 

Just pick? Whatever scenario looks cool pick whatever class, you want grab some badass items and just have at it completely disregarding those big red stickers that indicate something’s locked and if you’re still concerned about scenario spoilers, you can just use the random dungeon generator deck. Instead, if that’s what you’re going for this is definitely the better purchase over jaws of lion, because you’ll be able to play around with so many more classes, items and enemies with the more limited time you’re putting into the game. Has anyone actually ever played blue maven? Like this, please comment: if you have we’re genuinely curious, this only really works because of how exceptionally good gloomhaven’s combat is in combination with our glue.

 

Maven story was ultimately meh and again we really cannot stress enough just how game changing gloomhaven’s combat is it’s so far off from being just another dungeon crawler gloomhaven has gone on to become genre, defining and has even changed the board gaming landscape for really opening up More people to the idea of gargantuan boxes filled with stuff, and not just cosmetic fluff like unnecessary minis or deluxe components like genuinely all the stuff in here is deliberately used by the gameplay without endless add-ons and expansions god. It feels so weird talking about gloomhaven because of how different it is for most board games. In fact, it almost doesn’t even feel like talking about a board game, but rather an actual iep that spans across multiple different mediums like warhammer or dungeons and dragons, and it really does feel like the haven brand, has so much possibility for where it’s going to go. Next gloomhaven for how epic in scale it is in many ways, feels like it’s just getting started. After all, it is the first haven game, so of course, there’s some [ __ ], but also moments of utter genius, alongside glimpses of super ambitious ideas that we have.

 

No doubt will be more realized with the release of frosthaven. This is also a reminder of gloomhaven’s, humble origins, being the second game made by daddy isaac childress, who was basically writing off the following. He gained from his first game for jor and then when gloomhaven’s. First, printing was launched, it exploded in popularity enough to warrant a second printing kickstarter run and then, from there gloom, even [, __ ], shot off into the stratosphere isaac, never expected gloom even to get this big seriously. He probably wouldn’t have designed a certain part of this envelope.

 

The way that he did. You can’t really expect the game you made to become the number one game on bgg for four years, and counting google even represents something so beautiful about board gaming as a hobby, because for how much we harp on the physical version for not being a video game. Gloomhaven would have never existed without isaac, creating it as a board game, a medium where it’s so much less expensive to create a game of this scale compared to video games board gaming is the perfect medium where it was possible to kickstart the whole thing into existence With limited manpower and capital in the first place, so yeah, that’s it for our analysis on this truly special one-of-a-kind game. So, let’s move on to our personal opinions ashton’s personal score. My personal score for gloomhaven is going to be a 4 out of 10 below average.

 

Full disclaimer here i’ve only played bass, gloomhaven this big box three times, but then i completed this jaws of the lion box, as in i had a campaign where we played every single side scenario. So i’m basing this score off of these experiences combined throughout the gloomhaven universe. I’Ve probably played three classes in total whoa. What this is so much different from your personal scores on the gloomhaven quick review and then the jaws of the line personal score. That’S because the lure of all the cool classes, with the massive content got overshadowed when i realized that programming is a mechanic i just don’t like, and that mixed onto a co-op game is not good for me, so we got ta start with the world gloomhaven.

 

As a theme, it never really pulled me in that well from the start, with the art style, there’s really not much on any figure or the board design. That starts tickling my imagination, but i gave it the benefit of the doubt for a long time, just waiting for some cool story bit to happen. To give me reason to find interest in the world, and then i was just waiting and i was just waiting and nothing ever happened. There is just a god-awful lack of narrative in the snares here which just end up devolving the game into a monster: murder, fest. So the combat is well undeniably more crunchy than games like descent or old school hero quest with actual hand management.

 

I do have to think about sequencing elements, especially to get the benefit off of cards that are really specific to my character, which is satisfying enough out of all this concentration, though including the guessing of my teammates initiatives. I’M expecting some exciting board progression, but the outcomes are just mostly dumping damage on generic units. So well, if this game is just gon na, be all murder, why not have more bosses, so i don’t have to keep slugging through archer after archer and again i have to program to kill those annoying things. I especially dislike programming when it comes to playing a hero. It really takes me out of any sort of role play.

 

I have to move and loot well better program that specifically with a specific initiative like sheesh. I want something way more dumbed down for this type of monster: bash we’re not managing civilizations or economies. For christ’s sakes, oh and because you’re playing as heroes that get weaker with less and less cards, man – that’s even less satisfying compared to other euros that actually ramp up. Another deeply unsatisfying thing for me was how items were handled, see in dungeon crawlers, there’s enjoyment for saving up for some bling item to buy the shop or finding some cool mythic item inside a dungeon. Think of like a hero, quest, long sword, you can buy or descent dawn blade that once you have them just permanently, make you stronger but gloomhaven with its crazy branching story, paths and multifaceted abilities couldn’t have such simple items to power creep your characters that would wreck The balance of the game instead there’s a lot of tappable items which are more balanced in the direction groomhaven is going towards, but deeply unsatisfying for me to use.

 

Oh, my poison dagger gets tapped once to add poison once in a scenario on one standard attack. Another on thematic thing is how your character progression is handled. Since i dislike programming already, i don’t feel the same excitement that most get when acquiring new abilities or slowly tweaking the attack deck that feels very fiddly. So while stuff like descent second edition abilities, seem just as cool in name as to grab as gloomhaven’s unlockables. The way these games execute these new spells and abilities in gameplay is totally different, and so knowing that just really dampens my excitement for just getting new stuff in here, because i know it’s just going to be programmed the same way.

 

These subpar feeling mechanics get way more aggravated on how long gloomhaven ends up taking. Oh, my goodness, a dungeon crawler, with no narrative where we went through three rooms that took over three hours, not helped by the setup and takedown so many pieces. So much to bookkeep, and even with gloomhaven helper and all the phone apps we use, i constantly go. This premise doesn’t need this much stuff if we’re using an app for so much on everything. Why not play something with app integration like manchester madness or why not play gloomhaven digital right, but then i know that groomhaven’s mechanics aren’t satisfying enough for me.

 

So, even if the bookkeeping were to get automated, if i’m playing a video game, yeah, i’m gon na be playing another video game, groomhaven has made me realize very clearly that what i want in a dungeon crawler is first and foremost, theme. Give me the exploration, the npcs, the constant narrative injections, and, if that comes at the cost of having combat being dumbed down to dice rolling, then i’m actually kind of okay with that. There needs to be that incentive for me to be playing these scenarios in a deep rich world other than just unlocking more classes. Otherwise, why the heck would i spend 3-4 hours playing at co-op, even if it does have some crunch with cool abilities here and there? I do never find the co-op elements to be a complete bore because people are doing their weird personal goals to promote tension in the group victory.

 

But again i don’t really care too much about personal goals with a low investment in what progression gives me in this? Whatever feeling world my opinions on gloomhaven make it sound like i dislike it way more than i actually do, because the very idea of gloomhaven has really irritated more than actually playing it. Daniel wants to play this dry programming euro all the freaking time, and while i don’t have a bad time with it at some point, i was like no. Why am i playing this game for four hours? That feels like a waste of my time?

 

I’M sorry and i really don’t like the scenarios that keep spawning monsters screw those scenarios screw that me being a board game. Reviewer has gotten increasingly irritated when i have to play campaign games, i’m about because that’s sinking in a lot of time. I could have easily dedicated to another game and yeah. So thank goodness, we had daniel to actually play through all this stuff here and get through all its nuances, because i would have played like three or four scenarios, maybe five and then just called it. A quick review, it’s a me, [, Music ], i’m sure you can guess what my personal score is.

 

So gloomhaven has a particularly special place in my heart and no it’s not the game that got me into board gaming or my first favorite. Nothing like that, but it is the game that really made me feel like shelfside was onto something that we were going somewhere with this channel. Every gloomhaven scoundrel ever was our first video that really took off, like that was the video that shot us over a thousand subscribers and got the ball rolling initially, that is until that snowball turned into an avalanche. When ashton made the seven levels video like. I still remember one day, logging onto youtube and suddenly seeing all these new subscribers pouring in and getting super excited over it, god damn that was such a rush.

 

You know just feeling validated from seeing a bunch of people enjoy something that you created is always such a special feeling and then, on top of all that those gloom mating videos got us in contact with more people in the gloomhaven circle like rage, badger, gaming and Even isaac childress himself, in fact, we’ve even done play testing on frosthaven. Nothing too involved, though, just some feedback in a few of the classes, though these two classes, those are my babies, i love them so so much, but that’s because we, you know, still want to play through the game and get surprised by the campaign. So we can, you know, review it. Is that a potential conflict of interest – maybe probably actually i don’t know uh it’s not like isaac – is holding a gun to my head with money and just going like you gave groom, i even a seven out of ten. How dare you, hey seven out of ten means good in our scale, jesus christ?

 

That is a good thing. God i swear. School grades have rotted everyone’s brains where they think everything, seven and under is garbage. That’S what the average five is for under five is bad say it with me. 7 is good.

 

Gloomhaven is a good game. It was a good game. Thank you. Okay, enough about that tangent. I do recognize that having really fond memories of a game because you associate it heavily with your youtube channel, isn’t the most relatable thing ever so, let’s actually talk about the game and my personal preferences.

 

First up high levels of asymmetry between players. Yes, please, you know me, i love it when everyone gets to do their own super unique [, __, ], that no one else understands it makes everyone feel so special to me. It also makes me want to play the game more because not only does every session play out incredibly differently, because everyone has so much depth and acts very differently from everyone else, but that also makes me want to try out their classes too and note that this Is even happening in the first place because, in my opinion, complexity and or death is one of the best ways to prevent quarterbacking and make your co-op experience feel like the avengers or everyone’s other unique superheroes. Instead of feeling like you’re, all just working together on a group project or something there’s so much room for a personal expression, not just by which class you pick, but also how you build and play them, there’s a reason that i still love playing. Gloomhaven digital with the homies, because i feel like i’m never gon na run out of different ways of playing.

 

Look. It’S a good sign to me when it’s totally normal to run out of scenarios to do after 95 of them without having played all the classes. Second – and this ties into the first point, is just how much i love gloomhaven’s combat, there’s just so much. You can do with it since there’s so many variables to consider which, of course, manifests as having a crap ton of options to choose from on a turn-by-turn basis. It’S immensely satisfying to not only build your ideal loadout, but also to play it out throughout the scenario.

 

So you can see all these pieces working together. Third, i love it. When games have sizable communities, maybe i’ve just got a super, obsessive personality or something, but it’s really fun for me to just get super lost on something and do nothing, but that thing for days at a time most board games can’t offer that gloomhaven does in spades. I can play it a bunch and then, when i’m eating or pooping or something i can check out the subreddit to see what’s new or visit a discussion thread on literally anything in the game. Fourth, i generally enjoy dungeon crawlers a lot.

 

It’S just fun. Taking control of a mini and running through a level to fight monsters, mansions of madness descent, cthulhu death may die. These games are always great dumb fun, though maybe could do with the little less dice rolling determining whether an action succeeds or not. Funny enough, though, i actually would probably slightly prefer, if gloomy, even had dice rolling for attack modifiers and you put stickers on the dice as you upgrade it. Fifth, unlocking stuff is always really fun board games doing.

 

This is such a good way to double down, because, let’s be real here, unboxing stuff is so entertaining and getting to do it once initially on top of doing it again and again, while you’re playing the game. That’S honestly, just cheating, especially in the box, is this goddamn big, that’s a lot of stuff to open now, if only the envelopes actually did something substantial. I say that despite the fact that i actually really liked envelope a because of reasons, no, i will not elaborate. Sixth gloomhaven’s world and its general aesthetics are just so cool to me when game looks good and game plays good, that’s always a plus to me, especially fantasy worlds that have their own unique races even more so the farther you get away from humanoids like i am So sick of oh that race is just green people that one has blue people that was pointy ears. Meanwhile, gloomhaven’s just like yo you wan na play as a giant rat [, __, ] yeah.

 

I do because this world is so cool. It does sadden me that there isn’t a wiki full of lore that i can just delve into, which is one of my many personal gripes about gloomhaven, which brings me to the final thing i enjoy so so much which is complaining about gloomhaven. Wait. What let me explain so you know how there’s so many live service games like mmos or competitive stuff, like valorent, where you can find people with thousands of hours in them and yet they’re. So, like yeah, this game sucks.

 

That’S like the funniest part about players. Absolutely loving their game because, obviously, when you play anything long enough, you’re gon na have your own negative opinions about all these random aspects of the game. But that’s still a sign that you’re a huge fan so yeah there’s a ton of these personal nitpicks. I got about gloomhaven that don’t belong in the cons, but that’s all coming from a place of knowing what i like and not really anything. That’S at fault, with the game itself like any live service.

 

Game gloomhaven is gon na see, updates in the form of sequels that will change all sorts of rules and add in new stuff, which is why so many nitpicky things ultimately don’t matter so long as the core gameplay remains so exceptional and with that our biggest review. Yet maybe ever is finally wrapped up. My personal score for gloomhaven is gon na be a 10 out of 10 and i cannot wait to see the future of these games. Give me frost haven, i want it, i need it anyways, i’m going to go. Call ashton.

 

Ask if he wants to play gloom even because they’re still forgotten circles to play through so see ya, hello ashton. I got the boys ready. You want to come play, gloomhaven, forgotten circles, nah. I think i’m i’m okay i’ll pass yeah. I heard from rage, badger gaming that there’s actually a story now, okay sure, but i’d rather play something else.

 

I know you don’t like blue haven, but forgotten circles is hella hit or miss. Apparently, so you may end up lacking it. I’M gon na play something else. Dude, i’m gon na go play brass, nah, trust me: if fans tend to hate it, then that means you’ll, probably love it. It’S flawless logic up and he hung up