Boardgaming in 2017!

I want the game to work with any combination of classes but we haven’t actually tried without a support. And support characters like the Tinkerer are very helpful and probably constitute a meaningful difficulty reduction over going without. We have had two in our four man group for months now and have had to turn the difficulty up.

I think we need a Gloomhaven thread.

It seems like there’s a lot of consistent feedback that the difficulty scaling on the game doesn’t work well. I’ve read a lot of threads saying the game is too hard in the first mission but eventually becomes too easy as you level up and the power-curve out-runs the enemies. It might be worth doing the first mission or two in “easy” mode, especially with the solo rules because I imagine the scaling is even more off there.

I played it with two friends for our first session and lost. We had a similar group (Mindthief, Cragheart, Spellweaver). We won on our second. We were doing two things wrong: 1) We were throwing away a lot of power attacks in the first room (because the mass of enemies scared us). We found fighting slower over more rounds and not burning cards worked better for us. 2) We weren’t working with the initiative system well. Managing heals with the initiative feels like one of the more interesting parts of the game. A slow heal on a character you’re very confident is going to take a bunch of damage this turn felt really effective for us. Basically, we were trying to rush down the game and we found playing slower and more carefully to be the trick for us.

I think the difficulty scaling works great. The game itself is not a smooth difficulty curve but that would be a nearly impossible design task - after the first couple of scenarios you can tackle dozens of others in nearly any configuration (there are quest chains, but no guarantee of the order you will approach them), with between two and four characters that can be a subset of seventeen or so completely different classes at anywhere from level 1 to level 9. There are simply too many variables to guarantee a perfect fit. But between the placement/spawn scaling based on party size and the scenario level adjustment based on average party level, it works out reasonably close a lot of the time and a quick bump up or down allows tuning to your individual group’s needs. We have typically been running at plus a level lately, and it’s pretty solid.

We managed the first mission with four characters (Brute, Spellweaver, Cragheart, Scoundrel) , but it was close. Due to positioning and such we avoided damage from some of the guards in the first room. We also made good use of the traps in the second room. The Cragheart has a good card that gives many enemies Disadvantage that was useful, IIRC. I think a key point is to not use the loss effects on the cards before late in the scenario.

This may be a silly question, but is Gloomhaven worth playing if you do it solo? I doubt I would be able to convince anyone to play it with me.

Tales of the lengthy setup time made me uninterested in solo.

So, might I suggest that you don’t boost the monsters? After a dozen missions, the first one is the only one we’ve failed. It’s hard enough as is.

Got my copy of Gloomhaven. I’m a bit disappointed as the box is NOT as big as I thought it would be. I’ve had larger.

I thought receiving this would cure me of buying more games for a bit…nope…just ordered The Gaia Project and might order Dragonfire.

STOP THE MADNESS

Played our first game of Heroes Wanted tonight, with all the expansion content because why not. Heroes Wanted is a game of goofy supers assembled by joining an A half (which gives the superpower and the hero type for hero characters) and a B half (which gives some sort of passive bonus). You are B-list supers competing for a spot on Zeta City’s illustrious Champions superteam by taking on some sort of ridiculous super threat (in our case, Loitering, Littering and Jaywalking). It is by default a competitive game where you do want to take out the villain (not least because it gets you points) but mostly you’re grubbing for fame. And you may well want to throw a few punches the way of other heroes while you’re at it. There are two Champions and Masterminds mini-expansions that allow you to play the Champions taking on big-league villains in full coop, but that’s a big shift we didn’t want to take on right away.

Our team of the Vegetarian Lemur, the Voodoo Blonde, and Professor Helmet tried (and failed) to stop the nefarious Left-Handed Genius (one of the less amusing villain combos possible - personally I prefer stuff like the very possible “Crime Death”) from his littering ways, but at least we threw some of the litter away while we were going. The Lemur pretty much ran away with things as Vegetarian let him rack up points for down turns and the Lemur power and the special actions he got as a Gadgeteer hero allowed some fairly disgusting combos and kill-sniping. It’s entirely possible that Professor Helmet could have done significantly better in other hands - the player in question has some learning issues and takes a while to really get into the swing of games, but still achieved plenty. A Mythic hero, Helmet gets bonuses with the powerful blocking Costume action (including a second one, and even a third after a couple of headlines) and so was just too durable for my sadly pretty PvP-intensive Voodoo Blonde. (Who can as a Mutant use a second, mutant superpower, in this case the ability to hit all other heroes within range 3 for 2 damage - not much but enough to force discarding a blocking card - and set up a free use of the strong ranged attack that is the primary superpower of the Blonde. And Voodoo makes nearby heroes roll on the Curse table when your superpower is used. So even not able to take out the Professor, I was quite annoying for him.) And the Lemur steered well clear. So I lagged behind. Alas.

Pretty fun game, though. Very silly. Not perhaps entirely balanced but I don’t think that is necessarily the point and you do get a small selection of A and B sides to choose from each time. (From well over a hundred once you’ve added all the expansions.)

Weeee, so my insert for Gloomhaven finally arrived (it’s this one, the only one EU based and thus reasonably priced for me).

And the game still feels cumbersome to set up (made an attempt to check I was sorting things up in the most efficient manner). And this is without having yet to keep track of the character’s decks, equipment and other stuff.

Still probably I have reduced setup time by 50% and now I can be set in 20 minutes or so, which is probably still too long for my group, but still doable to try one play with them… I’m going to try a solo playthrough of the first mission and then try to get them interested, but it’s looking like I might have to play it solo.

We’ve decided to decide which scenario to play beforehand, so I can set it up before the others arrive.

I want that organizer. So jealous.

In for 2 double stacks:

Opened my Gloomhaven last night, punched, sorted, counted…all good.

Set up the 1st scenario and then looked at the ability cards and everything in the box and all the time this would take away from the other dozens of games I have and packed everything back up, put it up for sale, and made a little money!

Will probably regret this but omg, just too much time and effort for me. Will play a bit of Spirit Island and Galaxy Defenders, and Fallout this weekend. No time to play long video games anymore, not sure why I thought I’d have time for this!

Boo! Boo, I say!

Turns out I wishlisted but did not buy Gloomhaven…ugh.

And now it’s Christmas.

The upside is that means when i do buy it I’ll have the newer edition I believe.

You would have anyway. The first print run was barely big enough for a few copies to hit retail. This one is vastly larger and specifically trying to meet previously unanticipated levels of retail demand.

I enjoyed this article describing a game of the Infection at Outpost 31 game by The A.V. Club so I figured I’d share. I passed up on the chance to kickstart since my wife is getting pretty suspicious about my growing boardgame collection, but now I’m thinking I may need a copy of this.

I’m still a novice in the world of tabletop games, but I got the impression the A.V. Club team have even less exposure to them. They were excitedly describing game mechanics that could mostly be ascribed to Dead of Winter, or no doubt a host of other games. So I like their enthusiasm, but it’s hard to get a feel for how The Thing stacks up against other hidden traitor games.