Dang, I finally got my email that my Gloomhaven retail pre-order isn’t being honored. Will have to try tempering that excitement for a while.
A designer’s diary re: Gloomhaven
https://www.boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/62743/designer-diary-gloomhaven-or-trying-fit-full-rpg-w
We played again tonight, having finally bumped up to scenario level 2, and tackling our third boss encounter. We were despairing of actually getting close enough to fight the boss since a wall of minions was in the way and the boss summoned more on most actions, but our Tinkerer made a desperate suicide play to open up some room for the rest of the party to close, and between a couple of lucky crits on one shot actions and the Brute’s generally solid damage output, we actually finished the boss off not too long thereafter. (The flip side to the lucky crit draws was that I had a turn with a strong one shot ranged action again and drew a miss, then used a 1-damage ranged stun on a minion and drew the crit immediately afterwards.)
That a fair amount of info in accessible amount of text. So is Gloomhaven the kind of game that requires a consistent and constant play group then? He talks about getting that RPG feel in a board game plus the campaign, and aside from the absurd amount of prep work RPGs require, that constant and consistent game group is a challenge for us… but we can do a 3-4 hour stint fairly easily.
You could have multiple concurrent groups exploring Gloomhaven or players that can’t make it to every session, but it’s a long haul game in its primary mode. That said, if you just wanted to mess around with the class design and tactical combat (which is phenomenal), you could just run random dungeons and have plenty of fun, I’m sure.
It’s the one thing I feel I’m really missing from our rotation. We have the Pathfinder Card Game which is easy to learn and readily accessible. Zombicide is close but it’s not fantasy. I could really use a fantasy / dungeon crawler. I still have Heroquest which is fun, although every time I roll dice for it I will chuckle a little… now.
Pretty much @malkav11 said. It isn’t as locked-into a set group of players as other Legacy games are, but it’s abig game. 90+ scenarios, 50 or so of which are designated as ‘main’ plot, though some get blocked off by choices you make. So probably 40 for the core campaign. Then there’s the other 40+ side quests. They say a game to completion is probably ~70 scenarios.
Knowing this, I’m actively trying to have multiple groups participate. I’d like to someday get to the end, and I know that’s impossible for just one set of players in my group. I started one set a few days ago, and expected to start another tonight, but they had to cancel. I’m also running a neat Trello board to help all the players keep track of the goings-on in the world.
But what you talk about an RPG needing a lot of prep and a consistent play group is precisely why I picked up Gloomhaven. It seems to scratch those classic DnD dungeon bash itches, all in a box- just open and play.
Thanks. I’ll keep an eye out for it. I really wish it it was 5 not 4, but I might be able to work that in.
It’s not recommended, but a semi-official hack to bring it up to 5 is to adjust the scenario difficulty by +2 over the base for your average party level (so if your party level average is 1-2, play scenarios on difficulty level 4), for trap damage and monster level only.
Oh that’s promising. A bit of flexibility is welcomed. I guess now all I have to do is wait for the darn thing to get in stock. I am patient though. I have at least 5 games we haven’t played yet, 2 of them birthday presents courtesy of the group.
me and my daughter are playing Yomi most of the time recently… If you do not know Yomi, it is a fighting game based on Rock/Paper/Scissors translated to Attack, Block, Throw and Dodge. You play with character decks containing 52 cards (2-10, JQK and Aces), some cards come with special abilities. We love it! It has bluffing, strategy and tense fights. Your super moves are on the aces, so you are trying to “read” your opponent before you play them and it works.
There are 20 character decks available… it is really “addictive” meaning we always want to play a couple of games (each takes around 20 min)… There is a steam client, if anyone from here is around there, we could play …
Remember when we used to post about boardgames on the old boards and people like @tomchick were all like, “Haha nerds!” The hobby sure is different now.
Which is awesome. Gone are the days of walking through the aisles of department stores hoping for something other than various Monopoly versions too. Target actually carries some of these games, good quality games. Barnes and Nobles has for years. I mean it’s nothing like online, but they’re there. And, with stores like Amazon, you don’t even have to find a super hobby store that might ship within a week. You can get them almost overnight.
And that’s before even talking about Kickstarter which has so many different offerings now too.
To date, it’s the best time to be a board gamer. There is so much, and as far as I can tell, it’s not too much… yet.(not churning out as many that fall flat like the PC game front).
It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times.
One thing that does drive me crazy is the extremely high prices for board games. I think they’re on par with buying a new AAA console/pc title these days, if not even more for a KS game.
I know that I can walk into Target and find Small World, Codenames, X-wing, Pandemic Legacy, and a few other serious boardgames. Not FLGS levels, but more than simply Mattel, Parker Brothers, or Milton Bradley that’s for sure!
Which is a heck of a lot better than me walking into our local store which is always MSRP and saying hey, this looks cool… so you have the English print-out of the instructions right?
Hahaha, yes.
Or scouring BGG for fan-translations of the rules.
I played a cool game last weekend called The Great Zimbabwe.
It’s a pretty simple economic game. Every turn, you can either build a new monument or upgrade all your existing monuments. To upgrade a monument, you need to be able to buy cool artifacts for it. Those artifact producers are placed on the board by other players. If you put your artifact producer in a good spot, players will be paying you throughout the game to use your artifacts to upgrade their monuments.
What makes it really interesting is that at the beginning of the game you randomly draw some subset of god tiles with crazy special abilities. At the beginning of your turn, you can choose to adopt a god as the one your tribe worships, gaining its special ability for the rest of the game. But you can only choose one. And basically every god increases the number of points you need to win the game. It may at first seem like you need to choose a god first turn, but it seems like it’s actually better to wait for the board to develop and choose your god based on your position and the economic status of the board.
All these systems tie together into something pretty simple but surprisingly deep, dynamic, and exciting. The only problem is the game is $100 and the components are… not so great. I’m still considering picking it up.
As an aside, the currency in the game is cattle. This feels like it hits the theme, but I also just enjoy trading little cattle meeples so much more than cardboard coins.
Starfire just went up on WargameVault if any of you have been looking for this oldie in PDF.
http://www.wargamevault.com/browse/pub/9056/Starfire-Design-Studio
Miniature Market got in their copies of the Millennium Blades reprint, so I ordered mine today. I’m also going to try to get Krosmaster stuff to the table this weekend; depending on how many people we have here, we’ll figure out if we’re playing Quest or Arena.