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Founders of Gloomhaven


90m - 120m

1 - 4 Players

Ages 12+
This mechanic requires you to place a bid, usually monetary, on items in an auction of goods in order to enhance your position in the game. These goods allow players future actions or improve a position. The auction consists of taking turns placing bids on a given item until one winner is established, allowing the winner to take control of the item being bid on. Usually there is a game rule that helps drop the price of the items being bid on if no players are interested in the item at its current price.
Auction/Bidding
Hand management games are games with cards in them that reward players for playing the cards in certain sequences or groups. The optimal sequence/grouping may vary, depending on board position, cards held and cards played by opponents. Managing your hand means gaining the most value out of available cards under given circumstances. Cards often have multiple uses in the game, further obfuscating an "optimal" sequence.
Hand Management
Tile Placement games feature placing a piece to score VPs, with the amount often based on adjacent pieces or pieces in the same group/cluster, and keying off non-spatial properties like color, "feature completion", cluster size etc.
Tile Placement
Variable Player Powers is a mechanic that grants different abilities and/or paths to victory to the players.
Variable Player Powers
This mechanism requires players to select individual actions from a set of actions available to all players. Players generally select actions one-at-a-time and in turn order. There is usually(*) a limit on the number of times a single action may be taken. Actions are commonly selected by the placement of game pieces or tokens on the selected actions. Each player usually has a limited number of pieces with which to participate in the process.
Worker Placement

Fantasy

54.00€

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Board Game Geek Reviews


  1. 3 out of 10

    Founders is a good game on paper. Spatial logistics puzzles, city-building, Concordia-esque card play and a thematic world to bring it all together. However in practice, it's an inelegant, overflowing mashup of mechanics and ideas. The worker placement is superfluous, the hand management lackluster and the voting is a weird blind auction using an overly-complicated resource in two flavours (fleeting influence and lasting influence, the former only temporarily available). The scoring is clunky and the logistical movement of resources, which should be the keystone of the whole game, becomes a visually confusing system of 8-exit roundabout road tiles that make it difficult to assess and influence. The game wants to be deep game of logistics and shared incentives but falls drastically short of its goal.

  2. 4 out of 10

    For me this came down to a few things, but overall the visual aspect of the game is the issue. With so many connections, small tiles, and indistinct art the game just didn't flow well and left a lot of people drawing connections through other's bridges etc by mistake. Seems like a clunkier version of things like Tigris and Euphrates, or Qin.

  3. 6 out of 10

    I would only play this solitaire, and there are many other games I'd prefer to do that with over this. That said, if you enjoy tile layers and spacial puzzles, this is worth a look. The negativity surrounding it, I suspect, was from people who wanted more Gloomhaven and didn't find it.

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Description from the publisher:

Founders of Gloomhaven is a competitive tile-placement, action-selection, city-building game in which each player controls a fantastical race working to build the city of Gloomhaven and gain influence over its residents. This is a standalone game set in the same universe as Gloomhaven. The events, however, take place hundreds of years before Gloomhaven and depict the original construction of the city.

In Founders of Gloomhaven, players use action cards to place resource buildings on the map of the city, use these resources to create more advanced resources, then deliver them to proposed building sites to earn prestige. An individual player, however, cannot do everything on their own because they can import only a small number of resource types, depending on their race. To create more advanced resources, they have to work with other players.

The game also features an auction mechanism in which players vote periodically to determine which new building proposals come out and where they are placed on the board. Players can also add the influence they’ve gathered to increase the strength of their vote.

Ages

12+
Players

Solo, 2 Players, 3 Players, 4 Players
Play Time

90m – 120m
Designer

Isaac Childres
Mechanics

Auction/Bidding, Deck, Bag, and Pool Building, Network and Route Building, Hand Management, Tile Placement, Variable Player Powers, Worker Placement
Theme

City Building, Economic, Fantasy
Publisher

Cephalofair Games
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