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[Gloomhaven] A small, quick party game
joshofalltrades
Class TraitorSmoke-filled roomRegistered User regular
Class TraitorSmoke-filled roomRegistered User regular
Gloomhaven is Cephalofair Games new casual gaming experience and is the Kickstarter brainchild of Isaac Childres.
It's a calming, simple romp based out of the titular town of Gloomhaven. Contrary to certain love-it-or-hate-it games such as Cosmic Encounter or Monopoly, it is universally beloved and balanced such that everybody from the total beginner to Garry Kasparov can enjoy it equally.
Once you purchase this game, you will notice how easily it fits onto your shelf alongside other, larger games:
But it's when you open the box that you wonder how there could be so much game in such a small component package:
After a measly 10-minute rulebook reading, you'll be ready to play, but not before you spend a paltry $80 and 6 hours gluing time on a box organizer so the elegance of your tiny collection of game pieces looks even more chic:
_________________________________________________
In all seriousness, here there be spoilers. Please refer to character classes (other than the starting 6) by their tuck box symbol. Put anything that isn't in the rulebook behind labeled spoiler tags! This includes but is not limited to: in-depth character class discussion (other than the starting 6), city/road events, campaign scenarios, the contents of the sealed envelopes and town records booklet, pictures of locked minis, boss enemies, etc.
Per @azith28 :
Naming conventions when marking spoilers: Use these descriptions:
01 - Brute
02 - Tinkerer
03 - Spellweaver
04 - Scoundrel
05 - Cragheart
06 - Mindthief
07 - Sun
08 - Three Spears
09 - Concentric Circles
10 - Moon/Eclipse
11 - Cthulhu
12 - Lightning Bolt
13 - Music Note
14 - Spiky/Angry Face
15 - Saw
16 - Triforce
17 - Two-Mini Class
A list of Some Class guides, and action card reviews. These are just the opinion of the player who wrote them, but for someone new to a new class, it can help give you some insight into what the class is good at, and what kinds of builds that might be the way you want to go with.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Gloomhaven/comments/6lmxz3/class_guide_repository/
Also, be aware that they do sell a 'gloomhaven refresh set' that includes all the stickers for you to reapply so you can start from scratch if you want.
GLOOMHAVEN!
joshofalltrades on
+6
Posts
*bites knuckles*
The Broken Token organizer is so good. The only problem I have with it is that some of the tuck boxes for monsters are kind of bursting when you load them up with everything that's supposed to go in there, and when you encounter a new monster type in a scenario you have to dump the whole thing out before you can take what you need. So if you need bandit archers, you gotta dump all three archer types out on the table and then reload everything when the last archer dies.
But it's still so much better than baggies. Ermagerd.
Yeah checking the rulebook random scenarios are by definition casual play, so while you can get gold/XP from them you can't contribute to the campaign, which includes donating.
@LeumasWhite
The box may be huge, but I was reasonably impressed with how functional everything in there is; the 5 gold coins are useless, but there's not a lot of the usual Kickstarter cruft otherwise. They could probably slim it down with generic terrain tiles and smaller dials and so on, but as it is it nicely rides the line between attractive and practical.
That said you will need some kind of storage solution if you don't want to spend half an hour every session sorting it all out. I just went with a trio of Plano boxes for the monster tiles and cards, and that cut things down enormously.
The 5 gold and 10 xp markers function mostly to keep things neat in larger scenarios. You actually do want them sometimes.
I'm also kind of planning on running two 2p campaigns at once, has anyone tried that and had it go horribly wrong? My worry is just that one party will get to do all the cool stuff and the other party will be sad.
I'm also thinking about ordering that broken token organizer, anyone actually have it? Does it help setup time a lot?
Don't pick the Tinkerer unless you have 3+ people. She's good, but with 2 characters you don't really need a dedicated support character. Probably the safest 2 character party is Brute/Spellweaver IMO.
If you're going to run two campaigns at once, use a tracker app for the one that meets less frequently. I personally wouldn't bother with it because there's hundreds of hours of gameplay in the game right out of the box and running two campaigns would mean it would take ages to see all of the content.
The Broken Token organizer is civilization, buy it and use it. It takes time and effort to put together but once you've done it setup and teardown are about 1000x faster.
I'd actually suggest avoiding Spellweaver, whose hand management gets complex, but agree about the Tinkerer being best with 3+. Any combination of the remaining four is probably fine.
For my solo party, I had a lot of success with Brute and Scoundrel. Brute could soak up damage and deal with multiple lesser monsters, and Scoundrel could do some nasty spike damage to elites / bosses.
I have a solo party and a party with my friends going fairly successfully. Not really a spoiler, it is about generic mission sequencing but just in case:
It's true that Spellweaver has probably the most complicated hand setup out of any of the starting classes, but really once you understand that Reviving Ether is a mandatory card and that you should hold off on playing it to regain lost cards until most of your cards have gone into the lost pile, you're golden. And she is amazing.
I'm just thinking about running 2 parties because I'll be playing with two different groups of people- it's fine if neither party ever sees all the content IMO.
Thanks for all the advice! I will definitely pick up the organizer then and avoid the Tinker for the 2p games.
The Brute is mandatory for any group smaller than four, I'd say. You really need the big guy out there soaking up damage.
My solo campaign is Brute/Scoundrel/Tinkerer. All are level 4, but the Brute and Scoundrel are both going to retire quite soon, so I'm looking forward to rolling out two new classes. I bought a bunch of minis from Reaper's Bones line-- Hellhounds, Skeletons, Cultists, Archers-- which really enchance the game, I find, and they won't bankrupt you.
If you have the recent CONAN game you can probably put a decent set of mooks together just from that.
A properly-equipped Cragheart, if you kit him out for tanking, is actually damn tough. But out of the box? He's a ranged damage / healing guy, for sure. I ended up playing him primarily as such to about level 5 in our initial set, because we had a Brute, but the option's there depending on perks and itemization.
The big drawback is that you have to wait 'til like level 4 to get another good melee attack, so you're relying on his kind-of-bad initial ones for a long time.
Yeah he's probably the best at it if you really focus him on that, but IMO it's easier to turn him into a crowd-destroying ranged monster and if he's murdering things left and right you don't need to tank damage because everything dies.
I don't know how anyone plays Cragheart without enchanting curse onto his tornado card.
I just stickered more damage on his single-target attacks so I could hit guys harder with Backup Ammunition going, but I can see that being a winning plan too.
There are other organizers that are good and take less time to assemble, but the thing that put the BT organizer over the top for me is that they made space for four characters to have a whole tray to themselves. It's amazing and cuts setup time down significantly.
If you're thinking of recovering Reviving Ether, that one is explicitly lost for the rest of the scenario; can't be recovered under any circumstances. Sadly.
I'm slightly worried our Spellweaver is going to be in it for the long haul, because their quest is both expensive and something we haven't actually got access to yet.
Smoke Bomb -> Any good damage single target is often a huge spike and often much overkill, I am enjoying scoundrel very much so. Eagle Eye if it's a boss and between having thinned out my deck with perks and getting bless cards, decent chance of critting on it for 4x damage without spending too much on cards. Also important to avoid the null, guaranteeing the 2x is more important than getting that 4x but I like to open on bosses with it and see what happens so that we don't overkill.
re: that final goal
but not perfectly implemented. At least you're presumably playing a Version 2 copy? Several got shortened there.
"Oh I'll use this insane card, ho ho, I'll get it back in a minute"
I went the opposite route and took a quest that feels incredibly wrong for my Scoundrel, hopefully it should be fun:
Spoiler for personal quest
(pls don't spoil me on what the axe actually does or whether this choice was good or bad, I want to be surprised)
That's my Brute's quest, I am going to try my damnedest to get my group onboard with it because fuck yes