An interview I heard with designer made clear he envisions the party as a motley crew, a rag tag bunch, not mighty and heroic, but normal and struggling. And as they fight on, they become exhausted.
So the mechanic is perfectly aligned with the theme.
I don’t like exhaustion mechanics because they feel to “gamey” for me for a game like this.
By definition, it almost forces you to min/max. It throws me out of the narrative of the game. I’m not sure how to do it better, but I do not like the hand management aspect of games like this, where you are essentially fighting an irreversible degradation of your character.
Whoa, the old “you’re playing it wrong” canard. I haven’t heard that one in a while! You don’t have anything newer like “learn the rules” or “go play Imperial Assault if you don’t like it” or “well, my characters never get exhausted”?
Anyway, glad you’re enjoying Gloomhaven. If you’re ever interested in having a conversation about it with people who might feel differently, I’m right here!
Oh, I’m not just talking about the actual failing due to exhaustion mechanic. That’s not my issue. My issue is a game premised on the idea that your character is a clock that winds down over the course of the scenario while the monsters get more powerful. Running out of steam, taking power away from the player, is a poor design choice. I mean, sure, I understand some games need to lean on a clock. Swords and Sorcery, for instance, is just a straight up time limit. Ten turns or bust! At least Gloomhaven is attempting something different. I just don’t think it works because it’s an active disincentive for me to keep playing. I prefer games where I don’t have to choose between bending over to pick up a penny or swinging my sword.
You don’t count leveling up characters, fulfilling personal story quests, and unlocking new characters as legacy? That’s the stuff I’m talking about. That seems like the main draw of Gloomhaven, but what I know? If the basic moment-to-moment gameplay doesn’t work for me, why should I care about opening some box with an ankh on it, or whatever?
-Tom
But they don’t? I’m genuinely confused as to what mechanic you’re referring to here. As far as I can tell monsters don’t make any meaningful gains in power except as one turn effects, with the possible exception of spawners or very very occasional scenarios where enemies are summoned constantly. But as you move through the scenario you’re definitely decreasing their available effectiveness by slaughtering them all.
Levelling up? No, that’s standard campaign RPG-lite stuff. Unlocking new characters sort of is? But it doesn’t introduce new rules or massively change the campaign world or anything. The exhaustion mechanic in particular is definitely not going anywhere. So if that’s your issue with the game, unlocking new spins on the class design isn’t going to change that.
11 of the character boxes have seals on the back, 6 do not. The unsealed boxes are the starting classes.
Our Cragheart is so close to retiring now. After last night’s game it announced that the time has come to TAKE BACK THE TREES! Which I guess is a very fitting personal quest for a nature-element junkie. We’ll miss the insane utility of populating the board with obstacles, but at the same time I welcome the possibility of more open space for my mobility-challenged character.
As a piggyback on this announced retirement, our Sun-class announced that he’d also retire as a result of the Cragheart retiring. This means we’ll open the Rock/Angry Face and Music Note boxes before they make their new characters.
We backtracked and tied up some loose ends before this happened (Scenario 6 followed by 28), which was a bit interesting since we had done some of the stuff in between.
In other news: WHY OH WHY DIDN’T I ADD THE SOLO SCENARIOS WHEN I BACKED?!? They are sold out and print and play is so janky…
I’m really looking forward to these two reviews, Tom. It might take you a long while to get there, though.
As for Gloomhaven, I won’t be able to really play beyond the first couple missions in a while. Changing diapers is not good for solitaire boardgaming time.
Tom, how do you feel about this version of exhaustion vs pathfinder? I’m not wild about either of them, personally, and it’s getting in the way of my enjoyment of both of them. Maybe I need to learn how to play, but the loss of cards on the spellweaver in gloomhaven feels brutal to me after just a couple of playthroughs. And I’m not blowing my big cards, but that millstone of two cards per turn and losing a card every rest catches up to me regardless of how cautious I try to be.
Dammit. You are reminding me I no longer have access to Starz and the new season of Ash vs. Evil Dead started a few weeks back. Sigh.
All this really wants to make me do is try Kingdom Death: Monster. But oh god, the price. It literally makes it impossible to take a stab at it. You pretty much have to be all in just to buy the damn thing.
Every scenario I’ve played – admittedly not that many, but it’s certainly how every early scenario and how the random scenario generator works – is structured so that you get weak monsters up front and powerful monsters on the backend. So as your deck exhausts, you face more and more powerful monsters. In other words, you run out of steam, but the monsters gather power.
It’s a back-asswards dynamic, and I can’t think of any other power fantasy or fantasy RPG that works that way. Consider something like Spirit Island where you get more powerful and the invaders get more powerful. It’s designed so that you’re each becoming more powerful in different ways. It’s a gratifying mechanic instead of an inherently frustrating mechanic like Gloomhaven.
Of course not, it’s the foundation of the gameplay. The question is whether or not the legacy stuff – the main appeal of the game – is effective enough to overcome the inherent and lopsided frustration of the game design. It is for most of you, so I’m not writing off Gloomhaven entirely.
-Tom
Most of us love the mechanics you’re finding frustrating. I don’t think it’s primarily the campaign/legacy stuff, although that’s another reason it’s such an amazing package.
Excellent comparison, @Banzai! It’s a perfect illustration of what I’m talking about. When you play Pathfinder well, you still have powerful cards! The game is designed so that a character’s special abilities are often how that character circumvents or manages losing cards. The cleric heals. The wizard gets insanely powerful options to recharge instead of discard. The fighting classes hang on to their weapons and armor until exceptional circumstances come up. The rogue opts out of combat.
When you’re playing Pathfinder well, you will have plenty of cards left if you deck. Partly because the cards are your hit points. I love this dynamic, and it was one of my favorite things about Decipher’s old Star Wars CCG. In Gloomhaven, your cards can’t be your hit points because the game is taking them away from you whether you like it or not.
Furthermore, Pathfinder isn’t tuned to make you weaker while the monsters get more powerful. It’s not set up so you’re always limping across the finish line. It’s theoretically possible to win a Pathfinder scenario really early if you get lucky with the draws.
-Tom
You love a game where you get weaker and weaker until you can’t bend over to pick up a penny or walk down a hallway to open a door? Welp, okay. I guess it takes all kinds.
Seriously, though, I don’t think I’d mind if it felt more like something I could manage, a la Pathfinder. Instead, it feels like a cheap way to enforce difficulty. It’s as if the designer came up with these cool cards and synergies for the different characters, but realized he had made them too powerful, so he had to punish players for using their best abilities by making every single one of them one-shot abilities. And then piling on top of that a game clock tied to your ever dwindling deck.
-Tom
Yeah, it was probably the most injudicious thing I’ve done in a long long time. I’m going to have to like it now to justify the price and the time I’ve spent putting the goddamn miniatures together.
-Tom
I really can’t disagree with Tom enough on this, from monsters getting more powerful as you play a scenario (they don’t - they get different in terms of what they can do from Scouts to Demons, but a a group of level 3 oozes is just as dangerous as a group of level 3 scouts, for instance) to the designer punishing you for playing your cards. It’s all about risk/reward, and playing well and carefully. It’s incredibly satisfying when a strategy works, and that happens more and more the deeper into the mechanics you delve.
Seems kind of an insulting way to put it.
I think what makes it enjoyable to those that like it (myself included), is that it is a resource problem to be managed. When do I use my cards that are only one use? Do I take the time to go for a treasure? Should I stick with my party member which may take more time, or should I split up?
I enjoy making due with what I have. It is a problem to be solved, which is one of the reasons I like to play games.
You don’t get weaker and weaker, though. You lose options, flexibility. Not power. Again, you want to keep your best options the longest because that way you get the most use out of them, and if you need big flashy powers then as you say, there’s a good bet it’s going to be in the last encounter. Which creates a narrative of death-defying clashes and desperate heroism. It’s great narratively, it’s challenging and smart tactically, and you’re never ever just going through the same motions repeatedly the way I am in most of these games or for that matter D&D.
Yeah, I wish the designer wasn’t so single-minded and allowed for a miniature-less version of the game with standees. It would lose some of it attractiveness, sure, but it could be cheaper.
If this was marketed at the second KS price of $200 it could sell a lot, I think. At the regular price you are definitely paying some weird sort of premium.
To try it without the price tag you could always get a hold of the rulebook (some of them are on sale at some places like ebay) and try the tabletop simulator mod.