Gloomhaven

Ah, Gloomhaven. The game that came out of nowhere, and took the whole scene by surprise. If you are into board games, you have definitely heard of this one – it sits on top of the boardgamegeek top 100 list as of now. If, however, you are not into board games – Gloomhaven is probably not the easiest entry point, let’s just leave it at that.

Gloomhaven is a fantasy tactical combat legacy RPG, you play as fighters and rogues and mages, level up, gain skills, buy items, kill monsters, and go on ever more dangerous quests.

The Good

The game comes in a massive, 20 pounds box, that is a beauty on its own. Opening this box is like entering another world, honestly, it’s one of the most exciting unboxings I have ever had the pleasure to attend. Sheet after sheet of cardboard terrain tiles, monsters, tokens, a footlong pack of cards, a hundred pages long scenario book, a beautiful map, dozens of stickers, and most importantly, mysterious, sealed envelopes and boxes you are only supposed to open after certain events in the game.

At the beginning of the game, every player picks a character from the six beginner classes, forming your ragtag group of mercenaries. That character is going to be you in the game – at least for a while. That is because every character also comes with a secret mission when they begin the game, which describes the goal they want to achieve. Once they are done, that’s it, they retire from adventuring, in order to pursue a more quiet life. That sounds weird at first, you don’t want to lose your favourite character you spent hours levelling up, but first of all, you have to stop being so selfish, they worked really hard for their goal, and second, as your character retires, you get the chance to open a sealed box containing the next character, under the sign of their mysterious (and sometimes misleading, right, sawperson?) symbol.

The game works with a legacy system, which means the story campaign can only be played once. You can technically buy a reusable sticker set, and reset everything once you are done, but you have to be a really boring person to do that. (We are…)

At the start of the game, you are introduced to your base of operations: Gloomhaven. It takes some role-playing to breathe soul into the city, it doesn’t have a physical form in the game itself. This is where you rest between your missions, buy items and enhancements, engage in random activities through the city event deck, pray to the giant tree for blessings, go to the town records for information. You read the introduction page of the scenario book, and off you go, to the first mission.

After some random event on the road to your adventures, you arrive at the tactical combat part of the game. You set up the rooms / caves / wilderness tiles, traps, obstacles, treasures, and monsters. Everything is devilishly simple – your characters and the monsters have life points, movement points, melee and ranged attacks, there are status modifiers like poison or stun, everyone takes their turn once per round, you control your actions through character-specific cards, the monsters follow a predetermined set of rules. And yet, through the various item effects, the limited options provided by your action cards, the complex magical elements system, the uncertainty of the damage cards, the room setup, special scenario rules, an extremely elaborate puzzle builds up in front of your eyes of these quite easily comprehensible rules, where every single step needs to be carefully considered, and there are seldom any situations when you are just going through the motions. The challenge level of the missions are always tailored to your character’s level, we ran into any scenarios which were too easy or too hard only once or twice throughout the whole campaign.

So you did the mission, the bad guys are dead, you got your reward, so you go back to town, see if you got any new scenarios, buy items, etc. Rinse and repeat. Sounds boring, doesn’t it? Well, it’s anything but.

That is where the legacy elements come in, and the story of the campaign. Seeing the scenarios opening up on your map, sensing that general progress, getting the global achievements in the form of nice herald stickers, collecting the trophies, seeing your characters retire happily and engrave their names in the town records’ hall of fame, slowly building up the city’s prosperity, thus opening new item cards… these are rewards enough, if you are a certain type of person.

The game excels at both the micro-level of a single game night and at keeping you interested so you always come back for more.

There are at least half a dozen game mechanics or ideas that are so unique and interesting that a whole game could be built just around them, and we have them all here, it honestly feels quite a waste, but what a delightful waste.

One is the magic system. There are six magic elements in the game (you could probably guess them), and there is a weird sense of them belonging to everyone. Whenever someone for example creates a fire-related magic, the whole room is imbued with the fire magic element. This can be used by anyone later on, so if you have a skill that is somehow stronger if there is fire around, you can use it. If you happen to be a frost elemental, on the other hand, it can damage you. Simple, elegant, never used before.

Another is the deck of attack modifiers you use. There are no dice in this game, instead, every character has a set of cards with numbers that modify the base damage of the attack they did, representing the randomness of such attacks. You draw cards from this deck, so if you had bad luck and drew a -2, at least you know it won’t be there for the next one. This is so much more enticing than simply rolling the die, somehow you feel like you are more in control. And any mathematician can tell you that the result is going to be less volatile. OK, you say, that has been done before in other games. Well, what if I told you that your character will have a special additional modifier deck that you can combine with the base deck, if you did well enough in the combat and did your battle goal? (Which reminds me that I haven’t even mentioned the battle goal cards before, but there’s simply no way everything can be covered from this beautiful behemoth of a game.) These special modifiers to the attack modifier deck allows you to tailor your cards to your own playstyle.

The characters themselves, and while we are at it, the story and the world itself, is utterly unique. Instead of orcs, elves, dwarves and humans, you have your inox, orchids, valraths, savvas, quatryls, and humans. Well, you still have your humans, granted, but everything feels so fresh and unattached that you can’t help but pay attention to the weird lore. Needless to say, the characters feel really distinctive, everyone has their own special thing that no one else can do.

And finally, the secrets. Oh, the secrets. I’m not going to spoil anything, if you play the game for a while, chances are, you are going to run across a ciphered message, and tell you to look out for secret clues in the game. You will most likely happily embark on this quest, and find some in plain sight, and some in, khm, less plain sight. There is a clue hidden in a way that is so simple and elegant and obvious and yet has never been done before that I still can’t wrap my head around it. The whole idea is so wonderfully meta. There’s one mystery in the game we couldn’t solve and it’s being confirmed that we are not supposed to, which could be a cheap trick making sure that we buy the next product, but we would anyway, so right now from the bottom of my heart I’m just loving it.

I have only played this game with two players, and I don’t really wish to try it with more. The combat is chaotic enough, the stakes are high, the possibilities are always numerous enough to present a challenging puzzle. The story does not suffer in any way from the low number of players, and we could successfully open all the characters, so I feel like we saw everything that we were supposed to see. One thing that I feel like we were missing out though is that the game comes with a number of support type characters. They looked interesting, but we couldn’t find a way to efficiently use them with only two players.

The Bad

And this last kinda negative comment brings me to my next line of thought. Sadly, nothing is perfect, and Gloomhaven is no exception.

The game is huge, that is great, but this hugeness comes in small packages. Every single scenario takes a long time to set up, and you need to invest in additional organizers (like plastic containers with neat divisions for the tokens, or an alphabetical organizer for the map tiles), to make the game remotely manageable. If that wasn’t enough, the game is a bit of a logistical nightmare to display and store, this is definitely not a kitchen table-sized game, and, which might be the single weirdest mistake with this otherwise incredibly well-designed game, there is not enough space in the insert to store the small cards, you have to keep them in plastic bags like some sort of caveman.

Another general issue I had with the game is that everything was too gritty and depressing. I get it, it’s supposed to be dark fantasy, I still don’t like how I meet my old, retired character later on in the game, who tells me how he messed up his life and sponsors his newfound hobby, alcoholism, from the pitiful wages he gets from menial jobs. That’s not why I spent so much time with his personal quest. There is also an evil path in the game, I don’t understand why anyone would choose that, but now that we finished the game, I checked it out. Without spoiling anything in particular, you mostly go on the same scenarios, regardless of whether you helped a “very evil being” accomplish a “very evil thing” relatively early in the game, which feels weird. Could be a very clever statement on the nature of evil. But it’s not.

The overall story is weird, doesn’t really go anywhere, and at some point, there was just a bad guy sitting right in front of us, and well his deal was that he is evil and we had to defeat it for reasons. Maybe we were just not paying any attention, I don’t know. You need heavy roleplaying to get around that aspect of the game. Or just ignore it. The way you open up the scenarios is also a bit mechanic, there are decisions in the game, the outcome of which is administered through various levels of achievements, and then the scenarios get locked or unlocked depending on which achievements you have. (For example, if you kill someone, you gain the XY is dead achievement, and then you obviously can’t do a scenario where you are working with that person, and it requires you to have the XY is alive achievement.) That would be great, except that it does not always work perfectly, and on a few occasions, we were wondering if we were supposed to do that specific scenario at all, because even though we technically had the achievements, it didn’t make much sense from a story perspective.

The creator would say that you are always supposed to just follow the rules, it’s not as complicated, but in a game where even the second printing has the same typo in an important message to decypher, you can’t help but feel suspicious.

And finally, I mentioned the secret above, with the clues and all. Well, after gathering and solving everything, despite our best efforts, our first reaction was: that’s it? And it still is. The thing is, I don’t know what I expected, because honestly, there is even a reward at the end, and it’s great, and I actually like it, but for some reason, I expected something more.

That was kind of a downer. But if I think about it, I only experienced this because Gloomhaven made me completely forget that I’m playing a game with little cardboard pieces and occasional miniatures and cards and paper and pen. I had a feeling that the adventure is endless and it’s not the game’s fault that… well, beneath all the genius design and masterfully optimized statistics, it is a game.

The Co-Op

Story-wise, I have to say, co-op not entirely there. You are a mercenary group, with a constantly changing roster of characters, after their own personal quests. You can role-play a bit, become best friends, but that aspect seems to be diminishing as you play the game. I still remember our first two characters we played with, when one of them retired, the other took it for a farewell party (through a lucky draw of random city events), wrote them a nice message, etc. By the fifth pair of characters, you did not really feel like they are best buddies or anything.

But boy does it compensate in the mechanics department. You really have to work as one well-oiled machine in order to defeat the challenges. One person puts down traps, the other pushes the bad guys into it, stand next to someone so the other makes more damage, or simply combine the magical elements. On the scenario level, it also has my favourite co-op mechanism – sacrificing yourself by standing in front of the other player’s character. I’m a giver.

The Recommendation

So that is Gloomhaven. An imperfect masterpiece, a game well ahead of its time, a beautiful tapestry of a global campaign consisting of a hundred carefully linked scenarios, perfectly balanced tactical combats presenting puzzle after puzzle, an immersive ongoing story, and the feeling that while you are playing it, you are also part of this world. I believe we played this beauty for at least a 150 hours, and every minute was well spent.

I think it should be obvious at this point, if you like you some light board gaming, like to have some casual fun, but that’s it – stay away from this game, it’s not for you. If, however, you are willing to deep dive in a whole set of intricate systems, with a well-written story, and have a hardened companion you trust to be committed enough to join you in a 100+ hours journey – don’t hesitate. This game is a milestone in boardgaming, and a testament to the genre’s limitless possibilities. What a time to be alive! See you in the Sleeping Lion!

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Info

Release Year	2017
Genre	RPG, Tactical Combat
Difficulty	Hard
Number of Players	1 to 4
Length	1.5 hours for a scenario, 100+ hours for the game

Ratings

Overall	Amazing
Story	Great
Co-Operation	Amazing