Scenarios Completed: 58

Classes Played: Mindthief, Beast Tyrant, Elementalist, Spellweaver

Growing up, I was all about games. And in fact, I still am (*Insert shocked emoji here). However, it wasn’t until a few years ago that I found my passion for tabletop gaming. During college, I amassed a sizable collection of board and card games – which I pestered all of my friends and roommates to play. Over time, the games I had interest in grew more complex until I found out about Gloomhaven. I was so excited to receive my cardboard-packed, 25 pound monster of a board game and a couple of my close friends shared in this excitement.

I played the physical game maybe five times and I honestly doubt I will ever play it again.

I know that seems dour (fitting for a game with “Gloom” in the name) but I actually really liked the game! Setup was a nightmare, gameplay was just as complicated to keep track of, especially when running several of several different monsters in every dungeon, and it was hard to keep other players engaged. I doubt a single one of my sessions had the same party because every session would end with someone giving some criticism of the game and not wanting to play again, at which point I would begin brainstorming who might want to try next. It was really depressing that this game that I was so excited about and that in context of my meager budget I had spent so much on was collecting dust on my shelf because no one was interested in playing.

The digital version of Gloomhaven was barely on my radar, as I figured if I bought it, it would just be another video game to sit in my ever growing backlog and I would face the same issues of not having other people to play it with. I know it can be played solo while piloting two characters, but gaming with others, especially in a game like this, is half of the fun! It was to my surprise upon logging into Epic Games back in September that I saw Gloomhaven was one of the free games! I immediately downloaded it and sent Discord messages to any of my friends who I thought might have even the slightest interest in trying it.

I was amazed when I first tried the digital version. It was everything great about the board game with only the tedium removed. It was snappy, had fun animations and sounds, rule pop-ups, and with the removed time of setup and cleanup, we could get through several more sessions at a time! I tried it with a full party of friends, one of which had even played the tabletop version with me prior, and was hopeful that they were enjoying it as much as I was. I was met with disappointment.

The exact same thing happened. There were complaints about it being too slow, too hard, repetitive, not keeping interest, and more. I could see where these thoughts were coming from but despite the difficulty, I found the game immensely engaging, and was unfortunately left without a party yet again. However, after trying again with others, one of my previous roommates and close friend who had felt fairly benevolent about the tabletop version also really enjoyed what we played and decided he wanted to play through the campaign.

Two was good enough and my experience was saved(!!). It’s now the back third of November and we have completed every available mission in a duo and retired several characters each, my favorite of those being the Mindthief and his the Quartermaster. The missions were fun if not frustrating at times and it was especially enjoyable to find interesting character and item synergies for powerful effects. Our last mission had three turn cycles in a row where I dealt four damage to every enemy in the room and then made fire so that I could recover my cards and do it again the following turn. His broken endgame build revolved around abusing and refreshing useful item effects and dealing massive single target damage. We defeated the “final” encounter, which ended up being our second to last, on our first try! 

The plan now is to try the digital-only “Guildmaster” mode and when we are done with that, we will both be getting Jaws of the Lion. I doubt we will replay or continue (with no incomplete available quests) the main game, though I am a bit disappointed that we didn’t manage to unlock the last three characters or see a whopping 37 of the quests that the game had to offer, either for picking different branches of quest trees, not encountering or picking the wrong options on events, or simply having them be tied to locked characters. Another very slight annoyance is that there was *one* quest where we didn’t get the treasure chest and since it was tied to a character retiring, we couldn’t access the quest again and the “available treasure” icon was forever visible but untouchable on the map.

Overall, and despite my complaints and struggles, I loved Gloomhaven and would recommend it to anyone, pending they knew what they were getting themselves into. I’m looking forward to continued play in the extended parts of this game and I am eagerly awaiting an announcement of Frosthaven on digital platforms.

What do you think of Gloomhaven? Let me know down below!

-Ghost