Just punched and assembled Gloomhaven…2 hours of work. Still need to double check cards (a sensible habit I’ve discovered). First time I’ve ever taken a break while assembling a game.
You know, seeds are basically gatcha boxes. Like in mobile games.
Just discovered a Steam game: Nyheim.
It’s basically Rebuild translated over to an Eldritch Horror boardgame port using the Elder Sign dice system.
Interesting, but very rough in execution. It’s insanely difficult, not so much by design as by random chance and sloppy design. Countless moments of getting screwed over at the very beginning and just starting over. The polish is very good though!
Check it out since it’s super cheap ($3). Keep an eye out if they ever improve the balance.
I just failed my first Gloomhaven mission. By which I mean I just played my first Gloomhaven mission and failed it, not that I’ve been playing a bunch of Gloomhaven missions and I just failed one for the first time.
So, uh, there’s a lot of Mage Knight cardplay all up in my Gloomhaven. I am not pleased.
-Tom
Haha!
But actually, I am interested in a more measured opinion on this game. I read the rules back when it was on Kickstarter and was intrigued but unconvinced. If it’s an even bigger Mage Knight though, guess I should have got it!
It isn’t much like Mage Knight at all, really. I see why people go there - they both have cards with actions on both the top and bottom. But Mage Knight is (in part) a deckbuilder with a randomly shuffled deck where you access the bottom half mostly by spending consumable resources and you’re assembling a turn out of some combination of most or all of those cards, whereas in Gloomhaven you’re playing pairs, fully chosen by you out of your entire available card pool for the mission (or at least, the ones you haven’t played yet), and using the top of one and the bottom of the other. The only resource is the card itself. And the cards are both generally more unique and yet the puzzle is much less mathy. You aren’t forming pools of movement value and offense and block and whatnot, you’re performing discrete actions. It can still be a tough call but you’re playing with mostly the same card pool from scenario to scenario (you have a few more cards than you can bring into a scenario, and get one more card in that pool when you level) so you’ll get pretty familiar with your options before long.
I tried playing Gloomhaven with my wife the other day, but she was just overwhelmed with everything. I know its not a complicated game, but it can still be intimidating. In the end, even if we do get to play, I don’t think this is her cup of tea. Oh well, guess I’ll have to find some other people in my game group who are more into thematic games or rpgs.
Pointing out differences between the games doesn’t invalidate the point. Guess which game I’m describing here:
Play from a hand of cards, with pairs of mutually exclusive powers on each card that impose a contrived restriction on what you can do in a given turn. Now puzzle out how best to use these cards to get across the map to punch the monsters. And to introduce tension, impose a super tight time limit.
That’s a description of the moment-to-moment gameplay in both Mage Knight and Gloomhaven. You’re applying a hand of cards to a contrived tactical puzzle. There’s more to both games, of course, and I’ll stick with Gloomhaven to explore the legacy elements and character mechanics. But they both use the same fundamental cardplay.
-Tom, not pleased
Do other tactical games like Descent and Imperial Assault have the same restrictive time limit, or this concept of exhaustion? I think part of what’s imposing about Gloomhaven is the shrinking pool of options as you play. It’s a weird dynamic, and psychologically, on a game design level, I think it’s a really bad call. You start out with lots of cool stuff, but it all starts going away as you play. You get fewer and fewer options until you’re left just plinking away until you die.
Contrast this with Spirit Island, for instance, where your powers get bigger and crazier and more insane as the game goes on. That’s good game design!
Did you try pulling back on the difficulty level, starting out at zero instead of one? I wonder if that would make things less daunting for your wife when you guys try it.
-Tom
To be honest, we didn’t even start playing the first quest. We went through all the other stuff first:
- Picked characters and got long term goal cards
- Read the introduction text at the beginning of the book.
- Got the overworld board out and added the first stickers.
- I found the town cards and we did a town event.
- I got out the item cards and we bought our starting items from the town
- I found the road events and we did one.
- We read the text for the first quest.
- We set up the first quest (which took quite a while!).
At that point, I saw that my wife didn’t seem to be enjoying the experience at all. We ended up packing everything away, and I decided to find other people to play who had more of an interest in it. I think it most has to do with the following reasons:
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She doesn’t like games that are long to set up or have lots of fiddly bits. She also doesn’t like lots of tacked on story or exposition. She wants to get to the action right away, and have it be non-stop. This is the main reason why she doesn’t like these kinds of games.
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The sheer amount of stuff in the box makes the game look more complicated than it is. I’m sure if she played it a couple times, it wouldn’t be a problem, but I don’t want to force her.
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My wife is not a huge fan of games with spacial movement of characters or pieces, and especially square or hex grids. This is not always the case (she loves Ghost Stories), but more often than not true.
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My wife isn’t as into fantasy theme as she is sci fi. She even said she might be more interested if it was sci fi (I already got the Star Trek rpg core book in the mail).
That said, I would love to find a dungeon crawler that we could play together. Maybe something like Space Hulk or Claustrophobia would be better, since they seem much simpler and “straight-to-the-point”, and have less set up.
Then you should get Star Wars Imperial Assault, which is essentially the Descent dungeon crawler re-skinned. And now there’s an app to act as the overlord, so the two of you can play cooperatively. Its not too fiddly nor is does it have a long set-up.
As I started learning the rules to Gloomhaven I had the same thought.
That’s like saying guess which game I’m describing here: you roll dice. Or guess which game I’m describing here: you deal cards from a deck and then people win or lose based on which cards they got. Sure, there’s a broad similarity, but the details are really important to the game’s identity. And make for very, very different games. But I get that you aren’t into the similarity you’re seeing, which is the main thing.
Yes and no. There’s not an explicit time limit, but Descent (without the app, at least, I haven’t played with) has a tacit time limit in that the Overlord is also trying to accomplish a goal and if they do that before you get to yours, they win. Imperial Assault less so, but if they can kill all of your characters once before you get your goal done, again, they win.
I personally think the exhaustion mechanics are the most brilliant thing in Gloomhaven. A lot of other dungeon crawlers are pretty much just run up and murder stuff with handfuls of dice. There just aren’t that many interesting decisions to make and I rarely feel like victory is particularly earned or exciting. There have been so many Gloomhaven scenarios that we’ve won by the skin of our teeth or that seemed lost due to some catastrophe early on and then with good play and big moves we’ve pulled victory back. And so much of that feeling is because you’re constantly making those tough calls about what to use when and what you can afford to lose from your toolkit.
But your powers should be getting bigger and crazier and more insane as the game goes, because most classes have a bunch of splashy cool actions they can take that will lose them that card going forward. And one of the important considerations is when you use the big cool splashy stuff, because that loses you turns, going forwards. Which means, mostly, that stuff is going to come out more and more towards the end. Also, even if you don’t have anything like that (my current class has almost no cards that can be lost through using them), obviously you want to be saving your best, most cool and useful toys for ongoing use. Finally, of course, Spirit Island isn’t a campaign game. Gloomhaven is. And every time you level, you’re getting new, radder powers that seem more and more broken. Want to just make an enemy’s skull explode and attack everything around it with the shrapnel? There’s a class that can do that, a little later on. You’re also getting cool loot, making your attacks more effective by editing your modifier deck, etc. I don’t know if you’re ever going to like the core gameplay loop - although I hope you’ll get into it once you’ve had some time with it - but you can definitely look forward to getting more toys.
I beat the piss out of that mission.
Um, I covered this in detail last March, here in this thread, and you even responded to it! A point-by-point breakdown of how Gloomhaven compares to Mage Knight vis a vis your ‘10 reasons why Mage Knight is the worst game ever’ list. You have no one to blame but yourself, heh.
Edit:huh, the board software formats this link weird, but if you click the little arrow it takes you back up to the post. Neat!
I’ve failed it three times now. I can barely get out of the first room. If the six guards in the first room don’t get me, the elite guard right through the first door does, or the three archers down the hall from him.
I’m playing a brute, a scoundrel, and a spellweaver. Classic fighter, thief, magic-user party. I’m using the solo rules of boosting the monster level, so they’re level two to my level one guys. Maybe this is just a bad combo, but it feels like I just don’t have enough hit points to power past all these enemies, even using the spellweaver’s frost armor and the brute’s persistent warden ability and one-turn shield.
How did you guys get through this first mission so quickly?
-Tom
Sorry, I was joking. I haven’t even had time to punch out the counters.
Are you aware of the ability to lose a card from hand (or if you really must, two from discard) to cancel all damage from a single hit? That seems to be something a lot of people miss and it’s very important to your survival. But yeah, that first room is brutal. One of the hardest I’ve seen, honestly.
Yep. And believe me, I’m using that rule. I have to. I come into the room with a total of 24 hit points (10 for the brute, 8 for the scoundrel, and 6 for the spellweaver) going up against 24 points of damage being doled out. Without modifiers, that is exactly how many hit points of damage the six bandits in the starting room will inflict on the first turn. Six bandit, doing three points of damage each.
What a terrible introduction to a gameplay system. Ugh.
-Tom
For some reason I am reminded of the troll in the second (?) adventure of the lotr card game.