Board Game - Gloomhaven (2017) [+]
May 17 2020
Gloomhaven is a legacy dungeon crawl board game for 1 to 4 players. It's a fantasy world and at first you are doing random sort of missions but later on the metaplot asserts itself and you have a big picture goal.
It's a legacy game in that each character is a box of special cards and tokens and once a character achieves their goal they leave the campaign, which is fine because later characters are more powerful, though more complex to use. It's also legacy in that revealed locations have stickers you put on the map and depending on choices I bet you can never reach all locations.
Characters have a pack of action cards. Each card has a top action and a bottom action, in general top is do something and bottom is movement. There are also default top and bottom actions to do a small attack or a small movement.
Each turn you choose two cards and place them face down, choosing which card is your initiative card. Once everyone has done that (including bad guys) reveal. Each combatant goes in initiative order low to high. When it's your turn choose a top action and a bottom action, so you have a little bit of flexibility when it gets to your turn. Sometimes a combination you setup doesn't present itself so you choose the alternate actions or the default ones (powerful actions tend to send card to discard pile). Cards then go to your used pile.
You can recover used cards by doing a no-action turn and discarding a used card of your choice (I think you also heal a bit this way). Or you can recover at the end of your turn by discarding a random used card. Or some cards allow you to do a recovery with/without discard. But in general you are losing cards as the session goes on and once you have one card you are out of the adventure.
Adventures are fairly tight and often the PCs are down to a few cards each. if you fail you can redo an adventure but there is a penalty.
Gloomhaven kind of plays like a light RPG without the role-playing. You have equipment to buy and upgrade, you level up characters and unlock alternate cards (making for a bit of deck building element), you get skills that give you small bonuses. We only played three sessions before COVID-19 but it is a fun game which we might restart using Asmodee's official app.
It's a legacy game in that each character is a box of special cards and tokens and once a character achieves their goal they leave the campaign, which is fine because later characters are more powerful, though more complex to use. It's also legacy in that revealed locations have stickers you put on the map and depending on choices I bet you can never reach all locations.
Characters have a pack of action cards. Each card has a top action and a bottom action, in general top is do something and bottom is movement. There are also default top and bottom actions to do a small attack or a small movement.
Each turn you choose two cards and place them face down, choosing which card is your initiative card. Once everyone has done that (including bad guys) reveal. Each combatant goes in initiative order low to high. When it's your turn choose a top action and a bottom action, so you have a little bit of flexibility when it gets to your turn. Sometimes a combination you setup doesn't present itself so you choose the alternate actions or the default ones (powerful actions tend to send card to discard pile). Cards then go to your used pile.
You can recover used cards by doing a no-action turn and discarding a used card of your choice (I think you also heal a bit this way). Or you can recover at the end of your turn by discarding a random used card. Or some cards allow you to do a recovery with/without discard. But in general you are losing cards as the session goes on and once you have one card you are out of the adventure.
Adventures are fairly tight and often the PCs are down to a few cards each. if you fail you can redo an adventure but there is a penalty.
Gloomhaven kind of plays like a light RPG without the role-playing. You have equipment to buy and upgrade, you level up characters and unlock alternate cards (making for a bit of deck building element), you get skills that give you small bonuses. We only played three sessions before COVID-19 but it is a fun game which we might restart using Asmodee's official app.