Congrats! That first mission is a tough way to start.
The mechanics and strategy are far enough off the beaten path that it takes some time to get comfortable, but imho, well worth it.
I assume you noticed the difficulty levels. Definitely a game where it’s advisable to tone down the difficulty while learning, and then notch it back up after a few dungeons when you are comfortable with the way things work.
Notably all the difficulty level does is change the strength of the monsters slightly, which means they will hit slightly less hard and/or have slightly fewer hit points. So it’s definitely not the equivalent of a video game’s Story Mode (or whatever), there’s still plenty of game to be had and you’re still training yourself for later levels (and for harder difficulties).
That’s not quite true. There’s an inflection point around midway where they’ll start to inflict status effects or have extra shield or similar depending on enemy type.
And being aware when you’re heading into a mission with an enemy with a lot of shields can be really important. I can’t think of anything else where it might be quite so critical to potentially switch up your decks/items than that. Up against a 4 or 5 shield enemy while you have no pierce or ability to wound? Good luck!
There are some missions that lean pretty hard into enemies with poison or wound, and that’s useful to prepare for, but nowhere near as much as shield. That said, when there’s only that one Vermling shaman with four shield, you can sometimes just bull through it with a couple big hits. For fire demons, though, yeah, you’re gonna want at least a repeatable wound option (if you can’t pierce), as they very rarely come alone.
Or a Cragheart who has cards equipped that just do damage and aren’t attacks(and therefore bypass shields). I think Cragheart might be my favorite character for its just well-rounded skillset plus plenty of health and a good hand size.
Oh yeah, that’s another good one. That particular approach starts to lose effectiveness at higher levels (when these shield effects come more into play) because they’re capped at one or two per turn, but you can still make it work with some judicious use of stamina potions.
I also love the Cragheart. Kind of tricky sometimes as you’re a bit of a jack of all trades with middling initiative, but so versatile. Plus reshaping the battlefield is so fun and powerful.
I tried out the digital version last night (thanks, Epic). It works well and Gloomhaven is still a great game! I have a feeling I’m going to be playing it for a while…
I figured I’d spin up a party of the four that haven’t seen any action on our table: brute, mindthief, rogue, and tinkerer. I don’t regret it at all but it takes quite a lot to play four-handed! My wife and I are working through Forgotten Circles two-handed, on the table, and so far it seems that it takes roughly the same amount of time and energy to play four-handed, solo, digitally, as two-handed, with two players, on the table.
Also, I figure now I’ll figure out how good at this game I really am, since I’ll follow all the rules. (I don’t cheat intentionally, of course, but I figure that the unintentional rule-skipping probably falls in player favor, because that’s how brains work.)
So far, I’ve learned:
I will admit to doing “restart round” a couple times in the first scenario to revert some mis-clicks. AFAICT the monster action (and attack?) draws are the same when you do that, i.e. you get the same “random numbers”. I kind of wish it didn’t do it that way, but oh well. What I really wish is that there were a more fleshed-out undo system.
With that caveat, I did manage to beat the first two scenarios on the first go!
Well this is wacky. Apparently Childres announced today at PAX Unplugged that they will be Kickstarting a Gloomhaven TTRPG next spring, using the same card-based combat system? But also using a gamemaster. It’ll be ‘fully compatible with the two previous games’ whatever that means.
I guess I’m interested in whatever this will be, but only from a distance, somewhat academically- hell, I didn’t even back Frosthaven. My stance on these things has always been that these days I want TTRPGS to be about something other than combat, and I’ll take these campaign adventure boardgames for that sort of thing. I think the mechanics of the *Haven games are brilliant, but they don’t make me want to play them as a more free-form thing.
The RPG got a lot of attention but some Frosthaven backers are fuming that they still await shipping notices while the game is on sale at the con.
Cons are a time-limited important business opportunity that don’t care about where in your fulfillment your Kickstarter is, so it makes perfect sense to me that if you have some copies earmarked for that con you’d sell them even if not every backer has received theirs yet. And some folks absolutely have, but it also had tens of thousands of backers and the fulfillment companies only have so many people to pack and ship.
What I regard as pretty uncool is games ending up at (non-backer) retail before backers have finished getting theirs. Because that is an ongoing contract.
Tangentially related to kickstarter, deliveries etc.
Byt not worth a new thread.
I got my copy of Aeons Trespass: Odyssey yesterday.
Anyone heard of it?
I be was in the crowd for the rpg announcement. Polite applause but a lot of “welp I ain’t ever gonna play that!”
Saw the KS, ultimately passed on it. Kinds struck me as the next evolution of the Kingdom Death: Monster sort of thing. Seems like it was really late, too? Though I guess not nearly as late as the second KD:M KS, heh.
So, now that it’s here, still look cool? Though I guess this is more a question for the boardgaming thread.
Yeah, after three failed attempts my co-op friend and I moved on to other things and haven’t been back. It’s a profoundly off putting start to what looks like a really cool game otherwise. Does it get better? If it’s one of these “play the same scenario 6 times til you get strong enough to beat it, then play the next one 6 times til you get strong enough to beat it and so on” games, I don’t really see much reason to bother.
That first scenario isn’t representative of the rest of the game. Even ignoring that it’s way too easy to not grok the decision-making around burning cards the first time through(and therefore exhaust way early), I think it’s just a poorly balanced scenario for level 1 characters without items.
I’ve been part of a weekly online Gloomhaven session for the last year now and I’d say we probably beat about 80% of scenarios on the first try. And for the ones we fail I don’t think we’ve ever failed them twice. Once you know the game it’s pretty easy to diagnose where you went wrong and to adjust the approach next time through. Also, you pretty quickly have a half dozen or so scenarios to choose from at any time, so you can always just try a different one.
No, I gave up. Just too hard.
That’s fair, life is short. It is a pretty damn good game, though. ;)
I think one of the problems with the digital game in this respect is that you can’t accidentally cheat. When you sit down to play the first scenario you’re going to mess up a ton of rules, and odds are they’re going to be in the player’s favor because I think that’s just how people’s brains are wired, they’re more likely to remember things that benefit themselves. You can’t do that in the digital version! (And as mentioned above, the digital version also takes away a certain set of “player decides the ambiguity” cases–for good reason, it would be tedious–and those add up.)
None of that to take away from the fact that it’s a terrible first mission. Like, I can’t believe they went with it. I think they probably just fell victim to the playtesters all becoming quite experienced with the game and forgetting what it’s like to not know what the hell to do on turn one.
Frosthaven starts with a special “scenario zero” that’s simplified, just for learning the game (and really, learning your class).
In related news, we finally finished Forgotten Circles, and therefore Gloomhaven. (It’s extremely unlikely we’re going to be going back to any of the side scenarios we have open and uncompleted, what with Frosthaven just sitting there.) The last scenario of FC had the same effect on me as Gloomhaven’s–I set it up and thought, “how the hell are we going to kill that big baddie?” and got ready for a loss followed by some grinding, but it turned out to be not all that scary. What saved it from being anticlimactic was (1) a whole bunch of special rules, (2) the build up in the lore (kind of minor, the writing / plotting of the game is so-so, I mean, it’s a board game, not Shakespeare), and (3) the fact that we just got to unload with all our level 9 characters without holding anything back (really fun to get some big numbers on the board).
My overall review is that it’s not quite as good as Gloomhaven, though it definitely did some interesting (and fun) things with scenario design. The Diviner was an interesting (and fun) character, though we ended up using a lot of her one-off weird abilities, rather than the her stack-the-deck(s) mechanic. (We did get some use of of the rifts.) Some of the scenarios were unfortunately quite “puzzley”, and puzzles are just hard to get right, IMHO. (The Envelope X puzzle in Gloomhaven angered me, for example.) I also made the mistake of reading a bit online and the designer (not Childres) had some comments to the effect of “It’s supposed to be hard, it’s for experienced players” which is just a huge cop-out to me. So I’m not interested in pursuing more of his stuff, though we did have a good time with FC, to be fair. My major complaint is that there was way too much flipping through the scenario book, and some of it was dreadfully exacerbated by whatever puzzle they were trying to set for you–for example, in one scenario a certain move would send you to page X section Y, which would immediately redirect you to another section, just so you wouldn’t know in advance you’d already triggered that effect. I see why they did it that way, but it should have been a clue to them that the puzzle was not fit for the game format. (Frosthaven has a (huge) scenario book and a (huge) section book, with the explicit purpose of reducing the amount of page flipping, so I’m hopeful they’ve taken the problem seriously.) In the end, though, I’m glad they made FC and I’m glad we bought and played it.
We cheated and opened the two envelopes we didn’t unlock in the game–one character class (what we get for playing two characters) and envelope A. I was quite annoyed that we never hit the conditions for opening envelope A (finding ancient gear thingies), but having opened it, I’m mollified.
Next up: Frosthaven. Just got to figure out what class to start with…
I continue to be amazed by people still having an appetite for more after finishing Gloomhaven’s campaign. It’s an incredible game but there is so so so much of it and I just ran out of steam before even finishing, let alone doing Jaws of the Lion, Forgotten Circles, or getting another giant pile of content in the form of Frosthaven. And I do have other games. So many…
Same. Damn do I have too many of these things.
