Gloomhaven - Tactical Combat in a persistent world!

It’s totally worth trying solo. But ignore the really dumb attempt at “balancing” the solo game by boosting the difficulty up one level. I have no idea what the designer was thinking when he suggested that.

-Tom

It’s very playable solo. You’ll need to play at least two characters - I’d recommend three.

Someone playing with perfect information about which party member is acting when will have an easier time than the default of multiple people not allowed to share the initiatives or other numbers on their cards. That said, the first scenario is quite hard, especially for someone who is just starting, so I wouldn’t bump the difficulty up until you’ve come to grips with the game.

But never to the degree that if offsets boosting everything a level. I can appreciate plenty about Gloomhaven, but sometimes I get the impression that Isaac Childres has no idea what he’s doing when it comes to game design.

-Tom

Early on that may feel like it’s the case but my experience has been that the difference isn’t as sharp as it might seem. We are generally playing bumped up a level anyway, and when three of four of our characters were support classes we ran +2 for a while.

I’m playing in a two-person team, and it’s marvelous that way.

I suspect three might be even better if you can keep things moving along at a good pace.

I’ve been tempted to start a solo campaign at the same time, mainly because we can only get together for two-player sessions twice a month and I want to GO FASTER. But I’m holding off for now so that we’re both discovering the game at the same time.

Yeah, that’s what I meant to say. It’s pretty ridiculous when you first start playing to push the difficulty up a level. I’m sure it’s less painful once you’re playing with more developed characters.

-Tom

Yeah, like I say, definitely wouldn’t recommend it out of the gate.

Co-op games in general should not have awkward “You can’t talk about these things” mechanics, as it is just a crutch for bad game design. Upping difficulty a level because you have all the information as a solo player is just an extension of that bad bit of design.

Agree here. People inherently want to work together to set up combos and work efficiently. Needing to abstract that stuff just leads to a bunch of cognitive dissonance and feel-bad moments when something doesn’t order correctly.

Actually, I think the intent might have been to keep the game from grinding to a halt. If even one person has analysis paralysis, it can make every turn drag on.

We’ve house-ruled it so that we can be a little freer with information as long as we’re snappy about it.

I don’t agree that it’s bad game design. In fact, it’s one of the core design elements of some really interesting coop games, and is a great way to make it matter that you’re playing with other players instead of it functionally being solitaire the way Tom’s always going on about, without sabotaging the cooperative spirit of play the way things like traitor mechanics do.

In the case of Gloomhaven, it prevents your team of disparate mercenaries from working like a hive mind of perfectly oiled murderbots and simulates the confusion of combat. It’s by no means my favorite part of the design (that’s the ticking clock of hand depletion and loss cards), but I think it contributes to the overall quality of the game.

Does everyone actually play with the secret info rule in place? Our group is very comfortable with sharing, though it’s often in the form of hints, suggestions, etc, as opposed to mapping out every turn. Makes it more fun for them and I secretly up the difficulty by a level to offset it. We generally plan out our own turn but allow small changes to keep up the fun factor when necessary.

You can still give hints and indicate things.
“I’m going fast.”
“I’m going slow.”
“I need you to not go super fast.”

It works pretty well. Once everyone starts to know the other people’s characters it makes those statements stronger, but that meshes fairly well with the RP-idea of these mercs getting to know each other’s abilities over time. You know that dude over there is crazy fast (ie you know most of the numbers on his cards that he uses a lot), he also knows how much you can do (ie he knows your fastest card). So when you need to go before him for whatever reason, you can get the message across.

I like it. It keeps the Alpha Player problem fairly low, while still allowing for some coordination, but ultimately combat is still chaotic. It’s not XCOM where I can have Dude 2 go before Dude 1 so that he can open the door after D2 kills the guy on overwatch or whatever. Add in the unknowns of the enemy and when they’ll go and it stays interesting.

Exactly. I wouldn’t like it if the game expected you to never talk about your plans at all (though things like Magic Maze show that it can be quite enjoyable to have a no-talking restriction if that’s one of the main challenges), but you’re allowed to, you just can’t give precise numbers.

Edit: Like Shiva said…
Yeah, my wife and I are pretty careful. We do allow things like, “I’m acting pretty fast this turn”. We don’t mention what actions we are going to take.

The rule we started with was that you had to say things that you would say if you were role-playing the character in battle. So no “I’m going to take a 13 and use my poison AoE on these three hexes,” but “I’m going to try and go fast to use my poison AoE” is okay.

But like I said, I’m pretty lax about the rule overall.

The fast, slow sort of thing is mostly what we do also. Maybe mix in an occasional “I need to move there!” or "Wait, I needed that fire! “

Exactly. Which is one of several reasons I don’t think Isaac Childres is a very good designer. And if players are just communicating with stuff like “I can go fast” or “I can go slow”, for Pete’s sake, why not just tell each other the numbers. The only legitimate reason for this half-baked “oooh, don’t share information with the other players!” nonsense is pacing, as @malkav11 says. At which point, why not leave that up to the players instead of trying to force it with some loosey-goosey suggestion about forcing players to be partially blind?

There are plenty of games where limited information sharing is an integral part of the design. Magic Maze, that fireworks game where you hold your cards backwards (Hanban, or something?), traitor games. But Gloomhaven isn’t one of them. Crutch, indeed.

-Tom

Because there are 99 initiative values and “fast” could cover about 30 of them. If you need to go after someone, them telling you they’re going on a 27 lets you play that 29 in perfect security. Them saying they’re going “fast”, you might have to settle for 54 or 60 to be sure. And then, well, there’s a good shot the monsters will go before you too.

That’s an interesting decision, which direct information would obviate. And that seems like pretty integral design to me.

I enjoy the limited information-sharing element of the game. The design rationale I heard was to somewhat simulate the fluid nature of a combat encounter and prevent the game from being overly analytical. For us it works well. We allow general descriptions of turns: “I’m going to move super slow and try to kill the last skeleton.” kind of thing. It works to keep the game moving and the miscommunication often adds humor. So yeah, we like it.

Setting aside the argument as to whether Childres is a good designer, I’m struggling to agree with the argument that limited communication in co-op games is bad design. Some iconic party and card games have it as a core mechanic (charades, canasta, off the top of my head). It seems to me that building a game around limited communication can make certain types of games quite fun.

Limited communication is also everywhere in society. It’s an element of war. It’s in sports (giving/stealing signs in baseball, crowd noise in football). In negotiation you’re often reading a partner’s mind when communicating with others. To bring an element like that into a game seems like a perfectly natural thing to explore as play.