You got it. I was talking about the character unlock, which I never got to myself. In fact, I never even got past the Spellweaver’s basic summon. I just wanted to point out that making summons more manageable is something Gloomhaven will do of it own accord down the road.
Without spoiling anything, how deep are you into the game, Jorn?
-Tom
Great, as someone who loves summons, I guess this means I’m going to have to start playing multiple scenarios a week!
So this is for sale for $140 at my FLGS, please tell me the game is overrated :) Thats a BIG price tag.
Hey, don’t worry, it’s no $400 (KD:M) or $godonlyknows (a full set of Cthulhu Wars).
Obviously there are naysayers, but IMO it’s better than literally every other dungeon crawler on the market and pretty much every other coop game I’ve ever played.
Yeah, pretty much this. It’s my favorite board game right now, I think about it all the time. I need to set up another date for this month, I’d like to get my group together once a month if I can so we can keep at it while it’s fresh.
For $400, that game better give me a backrub and ask how my day went. It doesn’t have to care on the inside, but it damn well better pretend.
Be warned that the game does not come with adequate storage solutions and there’s a fair amount of setup. If you can’t leave it set up on a table like some people can, you’ll at least want some sort of ghetto binder/plano box/etc setup (there is an insert, and it’ll handle part of what comes in the box, but nothing like all of it, so supplementing it is a possibility), and may want to drop another $75+ on a custom insert (that’s what the Broken Token one costs, anyhow). I think it’s still good value even once you do that but…it is a bit of an ask.
Plano boxes are cheap and easy. He can look up a bit and see how mine turnef out and get links as well. Good point.
Hugely. It’s a typical tactical dungeon crawler with a horrible combat model that reduces everything to a puzzle, a la Mage Knight. People like it because it’s got little boxes you can open.
-Tom, not even kidding!
Hmm, I’m not sure I agree, although everyone has a different threshold for set-up fiddliness. I’ve got everything bagged and sorted pretty easily, and it even fits in the original box. The dungeon tiles are lettered by size, so they make a pretty neat stack. And the cards sort as you’d expect. Granted, a fancy insert would make it all more elegant, but I’m not convinced it would make it much easier, if that makes sense.
For me, the biggest setup issue is pulling out specific monsters. But I’ve got them all in one one big baggy, sortied into smaller baggies by background color. That’s made it pretty easy for me to find whatever critter I need.
-Tom
On his blog the designer mentions Mage knight as one of his favourite games, and a big influence.
That’s fine by me. I enjoyed mage knight, even while conceding that tom’s scathing analysis of it was accurate.
So mage knight but better combat sounds good to me.
I’ve had the game since Saturday but not had a chance to do anything other than read half the rules book…😯
Wait… its like a puzzle game? Ewwww! Hmm maybe watching a playthrough is in order.
I’m not sure. If we can say that the two main branches that fork from the first scenario makes up Act 1 of the campaign, then we are a bit into Act 2. We followed some of the forks from one of the branches a bit before we went back and tied up some loose ends recently. I think we have played around 13-15 campaign scenarios and 5 side missions from various sources.
We’ve had 5 retirements, though. One member of the group has a couple of fast ones. We’re 3 checkmarks into Prosperity 4.
I agree with this. One caveat is that game has stories that unfold over the course of the campaign, the story plays second fiddle to the tactical game play.
Not literally. That’s just me kvetching about how the combat feels more like an optimization puzzle than a narrative. I also really dislike how the game clock is based on the dynamics of exhaustion. Running out of gas is usually the bigger threat than any monster, and the “puzzle” is figuring out how to dole out that gas.
Also, keep in mind I’m definitely the odd man out in this thread. If you’re looking for enthusiasm, most of the other folks in the thread have plenty to spare. :)
-Tom
So far we have only used the basic summons from the Spellweaver (which was really good once it was enhanced with +1 range) and the Mind Thief (which is a bit more conditional). I am curious how well the stuff to manage summons with will work in practice, but I get the impression that the general consensus is that summons loose a lot of utility on larger maps.
Next time I retire I might want to try some summons, I’ve had none available so far.
I got this and read through the rules (twice!) and am about to get started on a two player campaign. Any advice for noobs? I think of myself as a decent RPG/strategy gamer, but rarely have time to play board games–say twice a year on vacation. (The wife and I have committed to this one, though.) Also, she’s leaning strongly towards spellweaver; how much does class pairing matter? (My thought from CRPGs is that I should be a tank, in that case.)
The overview videos on cephalofair’s website are good: http://cephalofair.com/gaming-rules-overview
The rules for the monster AI can be easier to grasp if you look at the this flowchart on BGG: https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/144945/gloomhaven-enemy-focus-and-movement-flowchart
Also, not that the rules for Advantage are so simple that it is easy to play it wrong: You draw two cards and choose the best of those, continuing drawing only if you get two rolling modifiers; you do not resolve two complete draws (with rolling modifiers) and choose the best.
But imo, the game plays better if you do and you should do this anyway.
The discussions are interesting, for sure. It is strange that rolling modifiers work against you when you have advantage in some ways. However, I think that removing the possibilty of drawing the Null card is really powerful.
One suggested house rule is to replace 2x with +0 on attacks with Disadvantage if you play Advantage as best of two stacks. We’ll play the rules as written for the time being, but the rest of my group are in the “Rolling modifiers is the worst!”-camp and might revolt.