Oh man, so much advice.
Anything in particular you want to know about?
Err on the side of too easy. Start at a lower difficulty when you’re learning the game, then adjust upwards for later scenarios as you get more comfortable.
And if you’re playing solitaire, ignore the suggestion to bump everything up a level. At least for your first scenario.
-Tom
I second this. Heartily.
Try to avoid losing cards for as long as possible. Try to play out your entire hand before taking a long or short rest.
Expect to get some rules wrong during your first mission. You’ll probably be consulting the rule-book regularly for your first 10 sessions.
You’re likely to lose the first scenario. I’d recommend setting aside enough time to play it twice so you avoid the doing the set-up and tear-down twice.
Remember that you can lose a card from hand or two from discard to prevent an entire instance of damage. And that you can take a point of damage to avoid losing a particular card when short resting. And buy stamina potions.
We frequently forgot to put down a gold token after killing an enemy.
I never remember gold. We’ve gotten all of our gold from road and city events.
Also, auto-looting happens at end of turn, not at end of movement.
We did a scenario last night where there was a room with a treasure chest and a monster. At the start of the round, I thought I was being so clever. I wasn’t going to play any attack cards – I was just going to run and grab the treasure. My friend goes first, one-shots the monster with one card and then announces he’s moving to take the treasure. I laughed and told him that’s what I was planning on doing. I moved elsewhere.
He opens the chest to find… damage and poison. I couldn’t help but laugh at him.
Thanks everyone! We (wife: spellweaver, me: cragheart) have now done the first two scenarios on normal difficulty (level one) and we won both; we actually felt pretty confident that we could have gone five or ten more rounds, too, so I’m guessing we were playing something wrong in our own favor but I’m not sure what.
- We often reshuffled action or attack cards too early or too late by one or two draws (probably not a big deal)
- We left magic charged up by accident a couple times. Don’t think we actually benefitted, though.
- The main one is that we probably over-communicated. We would fairly regularly work out exactly where we could move to to control monster focus. (Initiative wasn’t a big deal because she always seemed to have low numbers while mine were all between 35 and 70, more or less). I’m not exactly sure how wrong this was.
I know we at least got lucky in the second scenario… the boss never once drew special two (summon bones) and blew two turns just moving toward us. I was also able to place obstructions (helped by the enemy doing the same, in fact) that forced the melee units to take the long way around. The spellweaver summon sat on the other side of the barriers and fired away to great effect. While we were down to 2hp each at one point, we managed to finish off the boss in good time (I think I did 7 damage in one round) and a timely disarm gave us a breather to finish the archer (when we were at 2hp) and the rest was gravy. Probably should have spent more time looting given how slow the remaining melee dudes moved. (The spellweaver’s fly 8 card really helps pick up that distant chest that seems to be in each scenario…)
So, @tomchick, while I will gladly ride the Imperialism 2 hype train with you to the end of the earth, I think I’ll disagree on Gloomhaven. (Though I definitely see where you’re coming from.) I’m also happy to chock it up to my inexperience with board games in general and not knowing what I’m missing.
If people want to keep telling me rules we might be getting wrong (or other noob advice), keep it coming!
Maybe you guys are gloomhaven savants! 5 to 10 extra rounds sounds like a lot to me, but the Mindthief has a small hand to begin with.
Maybe that was a bit of an exaggeration; I had 6 cards left last time, which is… 3, rest, 2, rest, 2, rest, 1, rest, 1 = 9 admittedly choppy and restricted rounds if I don’t lose any by any other means.
Your calculation of remaining cards sounds about right to me, @ooomalley, but I’m still learning too. The Mind Thief doesn’t have too many “one-use” cards, so it’s plausible to me you might have avoided losing many of them. By contrast, my Spellweaver’s deck is full of one-use cards, but to compensate the Spellweaver can use an ability to recover all the lost cards.
We won the first mission on easy difficulty, but it was a close thing. Now we’ve wandered from the main quest, and we’re having more trouble. Also, our road quests have been a hoot. We’re having lots of fun.
After getting bored with pc gaming at the moment, I started playing board games again with my gf (Pandemic Legacy S1: we love it!) and this thread has got me interested in Gloomhaven (sorry, Tom. I don’t have more hundred dollars in my gaming budget right now for KD:M) . Problem is, where can I buy it? For 140? Amazon has a bunch of sellers that say it’s coming mid to late March. Is there a shortage of this game, and is everyone waiting for another print run? I’d like to get it for MSRP or lower, if possible.
We’re actually cragheart (me) and spellweaver (her). My hand of eleven usually goes pretty far, but she needs to very carefully plan her card losses and recovery. Our third scenario last night was super close, though; we took out a lot of dudes by laying down some obstacles (me) and using a ranged summon (her) but then we were fairly well blocked in and had to sprint to get the last three enemies. They didn’t cooperate by regularly drawing no move actions, either. Finally, down to two cards, I drew a critical hit that finished the game and completed my battle goal, which I’d given up on. It was a thrilling note to end on!
I got it at the local game store for MSRP. I’m in the Boston area, and had heard that a couple stores around had one copy each.
Crossposted from the boardgame storage thread:
Gloomhaven insert assembled and filled:
I turned over the sheet pads for three of the four characters on the active tray because they’re unlocked classes and I didn’t want to spoil anyone. (Saw, Music Note, and Cthulhu, for the curious.)
And two stages of box filling, because it’s a deep box and there are a lot of trays:
I thought I’d taken a photo of the final stage but I guess not. From the second image, you then put in the manual and scenario book, add the remaining token trays to the right of that, add the map board, and then stick the big tray with all the tiles carefully layered on top, w/ sticker sheets, party pad, etc. It all works very neatly. I ended up with a bit of box lift but I didn’t quite arrange things how they intended at the very end of the process (with the stickers etc) so I might well be able to get it to lie flat if I had.
PS: The box that I have the health/XP dials from second edition in is supposed to be for the character minis, but my copy is first edition and i opted out of minis. I’m not actually 100% sure where they intended those dials to go - maybe in the active character trays? They do more or less fit but they felt kind of wobbly and overstuffed there when I experimented with it, so I bailed on that. Might revisit as the game sees play.
Yeah, why on earth does the intro advice recommend anyone (especially the spellweaver!) a power potion over a stamina potion?! Granted, the (minor) stamina potion only buys you one more turn in the long run, but the ability to re-use a pair of cards in the right circumstances can be huge. While the (minor) power potion gives one extra damage to maybe three enemies (realistically that’s the most I’ve hit at once), once.
Of course, the modifier “minor” implies there’s a major one… can’t wait to see that! (And how funny would it be if there weren’t.)
That looks so cool, @malkav11. But the biggest storage issue for me is the monster standees. Where do you keep those and are they sorted in any way?
-Tom