Gloomhaven

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Alan
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Gloomhaven

Post by Alan »

Someone on my Facebook feed posted a photo of the Gloomhaven box that they just received so I went looking around to find out what it was.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/04/ ... ngly-good/

It looks pretty interesting. Hefty price tag though.
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Jonathan
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Re: Gloomhaven

Post by Jonathan »

I've been playing for 9 months or so. AMA

Jonathan
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Re: Gloomhaven

Post by Jonathan »

Couple things, actually.

We're playing first edition. I have no experience with the second printing.

I personally feel like the play experience is best with four players. The rules are given for fewer, but some encounters are very challenging without a specific array of cards. More players gives more variety.

The basic mechanics are very tight and satisfying. I really like how they used decks for randomness. I do wish the initiative mechanic wasn't balanced around no table talk.

Monster adjudication isn't hard, exactly, but there's some corner cases you need to understand. We basically have one guy decide monster target and movement because he's got the rules down cold.

The tone of the plot events can be uneven. Sometimes I'm not sure what kind of party this is?

It does do a pretty good job of balancing persistent state with missing players. I'm happy to play it every other session, or whatever.

Alan
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Re: Gloomhaven

Post by Alan »

How easy is the game to learn for novices?

I know I'll be able to pick it up, but for people who have played D&D maybe once or twice in their lives and whose board game experience is limited to Settlers, would this go way over their heads?
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Jonathan
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Re: Gloomhaven

Post by Jonathan »

Assuming someone (aka you) stepped up to learn the monster rules and run the monsters/encounter events, then the player's ruleset is pretty self-contained. All the stuff your character can do is in your hand of cards, so there's no memorization. You just read from the cards.

D&D or other tabletop RPG experience isn't necessary. The "RPG" stuff is "RPG-lite". You make decisions at the table as a party. You do interact with NPCs and stuff, but the dialogue trees are all fixed, like a CRPG. Probably the most personal decision the player makes is how to spend his or her gold.

That said, it is a tactical game and requires some thinking. It's not a good fit for younger kids, for example. It's at least as complicated as Pandemic to try to play at a high level. I know it took me several sessions to understand the implications of the mechanics. This is because Gloomhaven really doesn't resemble any other game I've played, so the optimal plays can be non-obvious to the novice player. Some of the character classes are more straightforward than others (Inox is easy; Orchid is hard).

Even once the whole party is comfortable with the rules and their powersets, we have to shift tactics and strategy for different scenarios. There's not a one-size-fits-all plan. A player probably needs a modicum of grognard tendency to enjoy the game over the long haul.

A lot of coop games we've played have not had much longevity because inevitably someone will grok the game at a deeper level, or think he does, and squawks when he sees someone make a misplay. Then the game degenerates into pseudo-single-player and isn't fun. Gloomhaven does an excellent job of avoiding this pitfall and keeping even the least experienced player invested in the outcome.

It seems like the rules as written do support one-off players, though I have no experience with that so I can't comment on how fun it is. For example, the starting level of a new character changes as the main party advances. There's rules for retiring characters and unlocking new classes to be integrated into the existing party. Such new characters don't feel out-of-whack with respect to the power level of existing characters.

The author wrote this design philosophy summary:
  • Accessibility when playing for the first time.
  • Room to expand and refine strategies over many repeated plays.
  • Many opportunities for deep decision making and a minimization of randomness.
  • Challenging and complex systems to explore.
Which I think is accurate.

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