I've been playing the steam version and it's pretty fun. It's on sale right now. Didn't realize it's be a year before the campaign released though.
What's the Steam version like these days? I recall a year ago it was in pretty rough shape and pretty much just a toy. Is there an actual campaign now? Do the mechanics work? Is it fun?
I've been playing the steam version and it's pretty fun. It's on sale right now. Didn't realize it's be a year before the campaign released though.
What's the Steam version like these days? I recall a year ago it was in pretty rough shape and pretty much just a toy. Is there an actual campaign now? Do the mechanics work? Is it fun?
It's playable and the only way I'll ever get to play it so it's ok. Campaign isn't available yet, just an adventure mode with random missions I believe. Campaign will be a 1:1 copy of the board game.
It's playable, and fun, but I miss the personell quests and playing with other people. One of the draws was you didn't know what another player was going to do.
But I tried like 3 different groups in tabletop simulator and they never went anywhere so maybe I'll be able to actually play the game now. It was too hard for my to justify abourchase of the board game to play with my girlfriend.
I've been playing the steam version and it's pretty fun. It's on sale right now. Didn't realize it's be a year before the campaign released though.
What's the Steam version like these days? I recall a year ago it was in pretty rough shape and pretty much just a toy. Is there an actual campaign now? Do the mechanics work? Is it fun?
It's playable and the only way I'll ever get to play it so it's ok. Campaign isn't available yet, just an adventure mode with random missions I believe. Campaign will be a 1:1 copy of the board game.
It's playable, and fun, but I miss the personell quests and playing with other people. One of the draws was you didn't know what another player was going to do.
But I tried like 3 different groups in tabletop simulator and they never went anywhere so maybe I'll be able to actually play the game now. It was too hard for my to justify abourchase of the board game to play with my girlfriend.
I played a bit of online multi over Christmas break and it works really well. Having also played in real cardboard/plastic and over TTS I'd say this was my favourite implementation as it has all the automation and you can trust it to work. They just need to get that proper campaign in now.
Lost a scenario in Forgotten Circles. Didn't even get out of the first room (granted, only two rooms in the scenario).
I'm noticing a theme where every scenario just has a ton of bad guys to carve through. Which sucks, because you're required to play the Diviner who basically doesn't get to attack at all.
Also, we lost one of our players; he helpfully gave us a replacement player, but ugh these scenarios suck for teaching new players.
The best part about the Gloomhaven video game is that it does all the enemy turns and LoS stuff for you, which is imo the most tedious part of the board game.
Tried scenario 99 again. Folks had to call it a night at the three hour mark, when we were just finishing up the first room. Everyone took notes on their status, and we'll try to resume next time. I believe we had finished eight rounds of play.
This scenario would maybe be ok if we weren't saddled with a Diviner. This is the most front-loaded with enemies of any scenarios we have played, I think, and the Diviner is all long term value. If I had a character that could do some quick offense, that would make it a bit more reasonable.
Incidentally, next time someone complains about Oozes, I'm going to have them try this scenario.
With quite a few hours of puzzling, I managed to solve the cipher introduced in scenario 97, with only one of the in-game clues. Feeling pretty smart right now.
Vague discussion of the cipher. Specifies which clue I had to work with:
Dominic came through big! His clue, along with a few educated guesses about what kinds of words were likely to appear in the text, allowed me to eventually get all of the alphabetic characters. Couldn't do the digits, obviously, and I'm shaking my fist at presumably Marcel for putting those in. Still, I had enough to know I had the right answer.
Quite a lot harder than the cipher in the base game. Which I worked out by hand from a single message, not realizing that the decoder was included in the box and intended to be used, oops.
With quite a few hours of puzzling, I managed to solve the cipher introduced in scenario 97, with only one of the in-game clues. Feeling pretty smart right now.
Vague discussion of the cipher. Specifies which clue I had to work with:
Dominic came through big! His clue, along with a few educated guesses about what kinds of words were likely to appear in the text, allowed me to eventually get all of the alphabetic characters. Couldn't do the digits, obviously, and I'm shaking my fist at presumably Marcel for putting those in. Still, I had enough to know I had the right answer.
Quite a lot harder than the cipher in the base game. Which I worked out by hand from a single message, not realizing that the decoder was included in the box and intended to be used, oops.
With quite a few hours of puzzling, I managed to solve the cipher introduced in scenario 97, with only one of the in-game clues. Feeling pretty smart right now.
Vague discussion of the cipher. Specifies which clue I had to work with:
Dominic came through big! His clue, along with a few educated guesses about what kinds of words were likely to appear in the text, allowed me to eventually get all of the alphabetic characters. Couldn't do the digits, obviously, and I'm shaking my fist at presumably Marcel for putting those in. Still, I had enough to know I had the right answer.
Quite a lot harder than the cipher in the base game. Which I worked out by hand from a single message, not realizing that the decoder was included in the box and intended to be used, oops.
Completed scenario 101 today. I think it's my favorite Forgotten Circles scenario so far (which is, admittedly, a low bar at this point). It does something actually clever with the scenario being split over multiple pages, which surprised and delighted me.
It only took us two years, but we finally completed Gloomhaven. All scenarios we care to do are done. (There are a few random unlocks, and some that are locked, and some that don't lead anywhere any more, but there's no real poin in doing those.) All classes are unlocked, all envelopes unlocked. Prosperity just shy of 8.
So, Forgotten Circles next.
The diviner solo quest, is that unlocked from the start (assuming high enough level diviner), or is that unlocked through progression in the FC campaign?
You have to earn access to the Diviner solo quest, it is not automatically available.
I'd recommend figuring out whether you have the first or second edition of Forgotten Circles (easy way to tell: 2E has the scenario book split into two parts). There were some substantial changes to several scenarios that you'll want to note. There were also changes to almost every Diviner card; I think the second edition Diviner is much more interesting, but it's a lot of DIY to update and the first edition is perfectly playable.
Something I've been looking for if anyone has an answer. All covid we've been playing over zoom with print and play for the players not physically at my table. So far I've only found early editions of cards, which always require me to manually review for errata with the virtual players. Can anyone source digital class decks of the most current edition?
Something I've been looking for if anyone has an answer. All covid we've been playing over zoom with print and play for the players not physically at my table. So far I've only found early editions of cards, which always require me to manually review for errata with the virtual players. Can anyone source digital class decks of the most current edition?
We played the first scenario of Forgotten Circles last night. Squidface, lightning, and diviner. All lvl 7, scenario lvl 4.
We got our asses handed to us.
We ended up redoing the scenario at lvl 2. That, perhaps unsurprisingly, was a cakewalk, but felt about as difficult as most scenarios we played in regular gloomhaven at normal difficulty (i.e., really easy).
We played the first scenario of Forgotten Circles last night. Squidface, lightning, and diviner. All lvl 7, scenario lvl 4.
We got our asses handed to us.
We ended up redoing the scenario at lvl 2. That, perhaps unsurprisingly, was a cakewalk, but felt about as difficult as most scenarios we played in regular gloomhaven at normal difficulty (i.e., really easy).
Yeah, the design lead for Forgotten Circles intended it to be harder than the base game by about one difficulty notch, so if you were playing at +1 difficulty before, you might want to play at the "correct" difficulty for FC.
I will recommend that whoever is playing the Diviner take a few minutes before each game looking at the scenario setup and having a good think about how it's likely to go down. The Diviner more than any other class can really pivot how their deck functions by switching around cards, and the FC scenarios fully expect that. The second scenario in particular demands some particular cards from the Diviner, so make sure to bring those.
Some of the later scenarios will highly reward specific higher-level cards from the Diviner, which can be frustrating if you chose other cards at level up. It's still possible to win without them, though, and/or take different forks in the campaign.
We played the first scenario of Forgotten Circles last night. Squidface, lightning, and diviner. All lvl 7, scenario lvl 4.
We got our asses handed to us.
We ended up redoing the scenario at lvl 2. That, perhaps unsurprisingly, was a cakewalk, but felt about as difficult as most scenarios we played in regular gloomhaven at normal difficulty (i.e., really easy).
Yeah, the design lead for Forgotten Circles intended it to be harder than the base game by about one difficulty notch, so if you were playing at +1 difficulty before, you might want to play at the "correct" difficulty for FC.
I will recommend that whoever is playing the Diviner take a few minutes before each game looking at the scenario setup and having a good think about how it's likely to go down. The Diviner more than any other class can really pivot how their deck functions by switching around cards, and the FC scenarios fully expect that. The second scenario in particular demands some particular cards from the Diviner, so make sure to bring those.
Some of the later scenarios will highly reward specific higher-level cards from the Diviner, which can be frustrating if you chose other cards at level up. It's still possible to win without them, though, and/or take different forks in the campaign.
I'm the diviner, so I'll bear that in mind. (We also cheat by allowing "respec"; I can only have 1 lvl 7 card at a time, but I can pick which one I want at the start of the scenario.)
We played scenario 100, with three players instead of our usual four. Combat-wise, it felt pretty good; not having the largely dead weight of the Cragheart around was a big help. Also, it's a more puzzle-focused scenario, so the monsters are tuned down a bit.
The puzzle(s) in this scenario fail(s) in a number of ways. It's a playable scenario, but the puzzle portions feel bad. We ended up cheating on the final turn, because we had the combat completely under control and loads of cards and HP left, but felt robbed by the puzzle flaws.
I like the idea of the scenario, but reading some designer comments, it seems there's a bad intersection of some puzzle info being cut during editing, and the designer being slightly out of touch.
We unlocked the Diviner solo scenario earlier in the week, so I played it today. Pulled a win out of my butt on my final turn before running out of cards, because I had spent too much time screwing around in the earlier rooms.
I took about an hour of real time trying to figure out how to win after opening the final room with only four turns of cards left. And I had to get lucky rerolling the result of one short rest, or it would have been literally impossible.
The scenario design is pretty clever. Particularly, the enemy selection: the ability cards of the enemies have significant variations, so it could be very rewarding to use the Diviner cards that let you peek at or stack those decks. Though I didn't adopt that strategy for my run.
Man, our group is really not enjoying FC. The puzzle design is just... bad, at least in the scenarios we're picking. Solutions, or even whole goals, that are completely un-intuitive without just running through the thing a second time. We've ended up looking at intended solutions twice now, rolled our collective eyes at what they would have required, and just pretended we'd done it right after all. Not a great feeling!
Scenario 106: our party was bested by the puzzle. The flavor text for our wrong answer indicates we were close, but the game effect for that wrong answer was severe enough that we wouldn't be able to try a second answer on that play. Hopefully we'll have learned enough that we can correctly solve it on our next outing.
Jaws of the Lion appears to be at an all time low price on Amazon. I'm probably going to pick it up, some of the characters have some neat designs.
I thought 102 was fine? Obviously it's very different from every other scenario, but in a way that's apparent from setup, so you can tweak your deck for it. Also it's short and not mentally taxing, so I saved it for a day my players were saying they were especially drained from real life.
We had two characters who just couldn't participate due to deck options. It also just wasn't interesting. We passed, but it was a solved problem going in and then it was just flipping cards to see if we got unlucky or not. It badly needed more influenceable outcomes or decisions.
Which characters did you feel couldn't participate? Diviner was great for it, our Brute was pretty good, and Lots of Circles did fine (though he had to make massive changes to his deck and how he used it)
I liked that the As and Bs had different distributions of stats, so you were incentivized to approach them differently. It did feel like the scenario could have used a little bit more of something though. I would like it if Frosthaven had one or two scenarios in a similar vein but with a little more refinement.
We had two characters with highly distributed decks and unreliable modifiers with base 4 value cards, which meant way too high a risk rate at difficulty 5. We completed it, but we crunched the numbers first and the best way to do it was for the two sub-par characters to just sit around and wait, which sucked. Random rolls of a -2 and a crit miss both placed success at risk, which further emphasized the conservative play.
As the Diviner, I dished out several blesses, then played a bunch of cards to stack modifier decks for the other players. In the event of missing a check, with a stacked deck you can know for 100% that your next attempt will get it. If the top of the deck is garbage, bless that person again to shuffle it.
Yeah, we have a portal Diviner so we didn't have that. Could've rebuilt the deck for some of it but then that comes back to the problem with Forgotten Circles. The Diviner needs to play really specific, assigned ways and the puzzles and mechanics are a bit of a stretch outside what's actually the fun gameplay of the game.
I guess if you don't like tweaking your deck for each scenario, yeah, that mission could be a problem. But even if your Diviner doesn't want to focus on stacking decks, one of the portals is good for dishing out blesses, and one of her level one cards is a strong, non loss heal, and her modifier deck is good, so there are still good ways for her to contribute. If I were making a list of FC scenarios I actively dislike, that one wouldn't have been on it.
Got my copy of Jaws of the Lion today, and just punched it. I already like a lot of what they've done here. To call out one specific thing, the enemy ability cards have descriptive names, which is both more evocative and better for communication. I much prefer saying "the vermlings are using Dual Daggers" to "they're using the one where they don't move but attack two targets at range."
Of course, there are still plenty of Move+0 Attack+0 among the various decks. Those are all called "Nothing Special." :p
Posts
Still won it first try, but with one character standing on their last viable turn.
What's the Steam version like these days? I recall a year ago it was in pretty rough shape and pretty much just a toy. Is there an actual campaign now? Do the mechanics work? Is it fun?
It's playable and the only way I'll ever get to play it so it's ok. Campaign isn't available yet, just an adventure mode with random missions I believe. Campaign will be a 1:1 copy of the board game.
It's playable, and fun, but I miss the personell quests and playing with other people. One of the draws was you didn't know what another player was going to do.
But I tried like 3 different groups in tabletop simulator and they never went anywhere so maybe I'll be able to actually play the game now. It was too hard for my to justify abourchase of the board game to play with my girlfriend.
Will it have online multiplayer?
I'm noticing a theme where every scenario just has a ton of bad guys to carve through. Which sucks, because you're required to play the Diviner who basically doesn't get to attack at all.
Also, we lost one of our players; he helpfully gave us a replacement player, but ugh these scenarios suck for teaching new players.
Steam: CavilatRest
This scenario would maybe be ok if we weren't saddled with a Diviner. This is the most front-loaded with enemies of any scenarios we have played, I think, and the Diviner is all long term value. If I had a character that could do some quick offense, that would make it a bit more reasonable.
Incidentally, next time someone complains about Oozes, I'm going to have them try this scenario.
Granted, some of that was delays due to a new player, but still. Barf. Just too much to carve through.
Vague discussion of the cipher. Specifies which clue I had to work with:
Quite a lot harder than the cipher in the base game. Which I worked out by hand from a single message, not realizing that the decoder was included in the box and intended to be used, oops.
Is it another stupid alternate reality game?
It is not bullshit, and in fact it's pretty cool!
So, Forgotten Circles next.
The diviner solo quest, is that unlocked from the start (assuming high enough level diviner), or is that unlocked through progression in the FC campaign?
I'd recommend figuring out whether you have the first or second edition of Forgotten Circles (easy way to tell: 2E has the scenario book split into two parts). There were some substantial changes to several scenarios that you'll want to note. There were also changes to almost every Diviner card; I think the second edition Diviner is much more interesting, but it's a lot of DIY to update and the first edition is perfectly playable.
PS Thanks for the answer
Try this?
https://gloomcards.netlify.app/
Or this
https://github.com/any2cards/gloomhaven
We got our asses handed to us.
We ended up redoing the scenario at lvl 2. That, perhaps unsurprisingly, was a cakewalk, but felt about as difficult as most scenarios we played in regular gloomhaven at normal difficulty (i.e., really easy).
Yeah, the design lead for Forgotten Circles intended it to be harder than the base game by about one difficulty notch, so if you were playing at +1 difficulty before, you might want to play at the "correct" difficulty for FC.
I will recommend that whoever is playing the Diviner take a few minutes before each game looking at the scenario setup and having a good think about how it's likely to go down. The Diviner more than any other class can really pivot how their deck functions by switching around cards, and the FC scenarios fully expect that. The second scenario in particular demands some particular cards from the Diviner, so make sure to bring those.
Some of the later scenarios will highly reward specific higher-level cards from the Diviner, which can be frustrating if you chose other cards at level up. It's still possible to win without them, though, and/or take different forks in the campaign.
I'm the diviner, so I'll bear that in mind. (We also cheat by allowing "respec"; I can only have 1 lvl 7 card at a time, but I can pick which one I want at the start of the scenario.)
Thanks for the tip
The puzzle(s) in this scenario fail(s) in a number of ways. It's a playable scenario, but the puzzle portions feel bad. We ended up cheating on the final turn, because we had the combat completely under control and loads of cards and HP left, but felt robbed by the puzzle flaws.
I like the idea of the scenario, but reading some designer comments, it seems there's a bad intersection of some puzzle info being cut during editing, and the designer being slightly out of touch.
I took about an hour of real time trying to figure out how to win after opening the final room with only four turns of cards left. And I had to get lucky rerolling the result of one short rest, or it would have been literally impossible.
The scenario design is pretty clever. Particularly, the enemy selection: the ability cards of the enemies have significant variations, so it could be very rewarding to use the Diviner cards that let you peek at or stack those decks. Though I didn't adopt that strategy for my run.
I thought 102 was fine? Obviously it's very different from every other scenario, but in a way that's apparent from setup, so you can tweak your deck for it. Also it's short and not mentally taxing, so I saved it for a day my players were saying they were especially drained from real life.
I liked that the As and Bs had different distributions of stats, so you were incentivized to approach them differently. It did feel like the scenario could have used a little bit more of something though. I would like it if Frosthaven had one or two scenarios in a similar vein but with a little more refinement.
Of course, there are still plenty of Move+0 Attack+0 among the various decks. Those are all called "Nothing Special." :p