1684

The digital version also leaves out a lot of the detail about special scenario rules that often feel important. The worst offender I can think of offhand was a specific boss battle where the boss would despawn and respawn in a set pattern. On the table you have easy access to the spawn location progression, but in the digital version you get none of that. Like, we were trying to figure out if there was any rhyme or reason to the spots he was spawning in on thinking it was just a random place on the board. Finally somebody looked it up and it turned out it was just a set rotation of 6 or so spots. Made the scenario much less frustrating and way more tactical to be able to plan around.

1685

Agreed. They did a phenomenal job on recreating the game in a technical sense, but not as well at providing all the information that the board gamer got. Only affected a very few missions, but those became frustrating.

1686

From my perspective, it felt like one of the advantages that the board gamers had was having to know all the rules of how enemy movement works. Since, you know, they were the ones that had to move the enemy pieces. I don’t feel like the computer game made enemy behavior clear like that, which I think provides real tactical advantages.

Speaking of which, how does the game handle this sort of scenario? Three tile wide hallway with an obstacle in the middle. E = Enemy, O = Obstacle, P = Players. How do the rules determine if the enemy unit moves SW or SE? Is it random or is there an order of precedence?

| _ _ _ |
|   E   |
| _ O _ |
| P _ P |
| _ _ _ |
1687

Player with the lowest initiative get the focus of the enemy

1688

I used this version of the manual on GitHub to learn how the enemies operate. There have been a few edge cases where I think the digital version gets it wrong, though I have to believe on the whole it adheres to the rules better than I would. https://github.com/m-ender/gloomhaven-rules

1689

And if they’re tied (i.e. both at 99 doing long rests) I think you go with the one with the lowest health. I think.

1690

This is incorrect–after initiative, there is no tiebreaker, so it’s player choice: Gloomhaven RuleBook - Page 30. But it’s so rare for there to be equally distant targets with identical initiatives (both cards, remember!) that it doesn’t really matter–outside of long rests, fair point.

FWIW the case that happens a lot more frequently than the one @KevinC outlined is this:

 E 
. .
 A B

The enemy E, with, say, move 2 attack 2, focuses on player A (due to lower initiative, say). It can move into either of the dots with one move and be adjacent to A (it’s a hex board, remember, which is hard to draw here). By the board game rules, the players get to decide which of the two the monster moves into, as there’s no reason to preference one or the other. So if player B has a melee attack, they can move the monster to the right hex, and then B doesn’t have to use a move to get into position, and vice versa if B has a ranged attack.

Oh yeah, 100% agree, this was insanely frustrating. Even the little stuff like “add a curse to each player’s attack deck as a scenario effect”. How the hell are you supposed to know that perk is worthwhile if you never see this?!

We don’t have any other games. ;) We could invest the money and effort into a new game, but the real investment for us is the time when the kids are in bed and we don’t have some urgent task or other that needs attention. And it’s not worth the risk that we won’t like the game, when we already have one we’re happy to play. (FWIW, competitive games don’t really work that well between us. Maybe a couples counselor could help with that, but, yeah…)

1691

Thanks, I couldn’t remember the rule. I actually had it happen this weekend when playing JoTL (both characters doing long rests).

1692

Spirit Island. Great for couple, can be done solo, has no competitive mode, is challenging, requires brain use. If you can grok Gloomhaven you can definitely handle Spirit Island imho.

1693

Thanks for the suggestion! Someone at work was actually talking about how much they love the game and were definitely going to get suckered into their latest Kickstarter. I will definitely add it to the list, though right now we haven’t even started Frosthaven yet…