Gloomhaven

Today's review is of the 2017 release, Gloomhaven. For 1-4 players, it takes 60-120 minutes per scenario. One full campaign can involve many scenarios. I played one scenario mid-campaign, substituting in for a friend.

Overview

In Gloomhaven, you are a hero who will gain abilities and items as you explore and overcome various scenarios. This is a cooperative and persistent game where decisions you make in one scenario affect later ones. Items and abilities you gain (or lose) persist. Each scenario has an objective and monsters or other obstacles that you must overcome to meet the objective. A scenario may also have decisions points where the group will decide which 'path' to take, leading to branching storylines.

One example setup; image from here

Each player starts with a deck of cards and ability sheet. (Note: since I subbed in to an ongoing campaign, a friend prepared all this for me.) On your turn, you choose two cards secretly with one on the top. Each has two abilities (top and bottom, generally to battle and move, respectively), special effects, and an initiative number. Everyone flips their cards, and the one whose top card has the lowest initiative goes first. The round proceeds in initiative order (and monsters have initiative numbers, too) until all players and monsters have gone. Then you choose two new cards and the next round begins.

On a player's turn, they must choose one top and one bottom action on their cards. If they use the top action of card 'A,' they must select the bottom action of card 'B.' Since the cards are chosen secretly and initiative order is unknown, what you had planned to do might not make sense by the time your turn comes around, so you may have to adjust plans and be locked into non-ideal choices. Some cards are discarded once played; others are trashed (they cannot be used again in that scenario). When you run out of cards, you may take a 'long rest,' effectively losing a turn to get your discard pile back. But beware—each time you do that, you must trash a card, so your hand will diminish as the game progresses.

Monsters deal and receive damage based on combat numbers (shown on monster cards or the cards players use each turn) plus a modifier based on drawing cards from a combat deck. Each player has a custom combat deck, and they can spend their resources over the course of a campaign to increase the odds of a successful strike by adding to or trashing cards from it. (The monsters have a common combat deck.)

Over the course a scenario, players may gain gold, experience, items, or other things. Relevant things are added to their ability sheet and saved for the next scenario. If you win (or lose) a scenario, you follow the instructions and make the choices shown to indicate what happens next time.

Review

This game is wide regarded as one of the best ever, currently ranking third on boardgamegeek. It is impressive in scope and content (the box is huge). It may be unfair to rate this based on playing one scenario—and mid-campaign at that—but I thought it was solid, though not spectacular. 

I liked the card choice/initiative-based mechanic; though it was annoying to have to choose with little to no information about other players' choices, it does create interesting scenarios and imitates the 'fog of war.' That was cool. The thing that gave me pause is similar to what I thought of Sleeping Gods: once games reach a certain complexity level (or 'activity' level, with a lot of things going on), it becomes more appropriate to make it a video game. There were a few times we forgot to add things to a monster's card, or take a given effect into account, simply because there was a lot going on. 

Overall, Gloomhaven is worth a look, but I prefer campaign games like Journeys in Middle Earth, where the app-assisted attribute can help players focus on their choices vs. tracking everything themselves.

Rating: B