Gloomhaven

I started getting into board games recently and heard about raving reviews about the Gloomhaven board game. Found out that it was free on Epic so decided to give it whirl... I don't think this game is very good... at all.

Gloomhaven is a card based tactical dungeon crawler. There are two modes, the Guildmaster mode and the Campaign mode. The Guildmaster mode is a more free form mode with less strict rules and randomized encounters, while the Campaign mode is identical to the board game's campaign. I decided to play the Campaign mode to get the "authentic" Gloomhaven experience.

The game is extremely complex, deep and tactical. It's the kind of game you can spend hours figuring out the best builds and character synergies. It's also extremely difficult, and I could not even complete the first mission on Normal difficulty until the fourth try. To say the least, this is a tough game that requires near-perfect play just to beat even the first few levels.

There are many aspects that will drive players mad such as...

• Each character is limited to 9-12 cards. Once all of those cards are burned, that character is exhausted and dies. You are always forced to play optimally and aggressively or risk losing by exhaustion. Depending on the mission objectives, if one character is exhausted the whole mission is over. It doesn’t help that each character must use two cards per turn and there are numerous occasions where you will spend one card to move the characters and do absolutely nothing with the other card.
• Each character has a goal. Once they reach their goal, they retire. They don't leave any gold, items or experience for your other characters so it feels wasteful spending all this time figuring out the perfect build for your character only for them to permanently go away. The only benefit is when a character retires it unlocks a new character
• The modifiers are just plain bullshit. Modifiers can increase/decrease or completely nullify your attacks. Ex: Having the Brute use “Overwhelming Assault”, which deals 6 damage and having it do 0 damage because of RNG. There are ways to mitigate the modifiers, by gaining Perks, but Perks are only available after you successfully finish an encounter or level up.
• The random encounters range from beneficial to completely irritating. Each time your crew ventures out of Gloomhaven, there is an encounter. These encounters have you choose from two decisions that can affect your whole party. Some of these encounters are devastating like wounding your whole party or forcing them to discard two cards before the mission begins.
• I think some missions are impossible to complete with two characters, especially if you choose characters with limited movement options like the Brute and Spellweaver

Once you get over the difficulty hump of roughly 20 hours, Gloomhaven becomes more palatable. Rolling with a crew of 3 high level characters, it becomes quite simple to crush through missions. At this point, I lost interest in playing any further. There isn’t much of a story and the only incentive to keep playing is to unlock new characters. The novelty of using a new character is fun at first, but then there is the dread of spending the time and effort figuring out the new character and losing a lot of missions along the way.