Gloomhaven: Forgotten Circles
Expansion of: GloomhavenGloomhaven: Forgotten Circles, the first expansion for Gloomhaven, features twenty new scenarios that take place after the events of the original Gloomhaven campaign and involve one new character class — the Aesther Diviner — and her attempts to prevent an approaching calamity.
The expansion also features seven new monster types (including three new bosses) and fourteen new items.
60m - 120m
1 - 4 Players
Ages 12+
borsook
Adds more scenarios - as if I could finish those in the base game, one new character and a few monsters. The content is unnecessary and hard to reach.
ApostropheN
While getting back to Gloomhaven beyond the original campaign was great, the player who chooses to be the Diviner felt rather "stuck" given the plot of this expansion required the Diviner to be in play for so long—and in certain scenarios, it felt like there was just no possible win with the characters we were playing. Also, the book itself routinely took away from the fun: grinding things to a halt while we translated runes mid-scenario to continue, and the constant "now flip to section/page" in some scenarios made things more painful than fun. As a whole, we did mostly have fun, but near the end of the thread of scenarios to unlock the ultimate scenarios, many had an admixture of "chore" feel to them, with overly complicated pressure plate solutions, or the near-constant "okay, now flip to this page, hang on, I need to translate this..." interruptions. Even worse were the final few scenarios in the thread where so often the Diviner had to so desperately hoard every turn—she only has nine cards, and of course her most powerful and useful cards reduce that number, and *has* to survive every scenario or the scenario is lost—that the player was stuck long-resting instead of feeling valuable, especially during "Escourt" missions where the speed of the NPC meant you had to survive 14 or more rounds. So, this felt like Gloomhaven written by someone who tried to fix what wasn't broken, and instead ruined the joy of the original, most especially through the limitation of someone having to be locked in to the Diviner for the whole campaign. Once we "won," none of us felt like going back and doing the four or five scenarios that remained to us, which is telling, since with the original Gloomhaven, we wanted to make sure we'd done every scenario we could. I should point out we have the first printing, too, where the Diviner's cards don't seem to be as good as they ended up in the second printing, which... If that much needed to be tweaked (nearly every card was altered) it feels like playtesting maybe missed the mark before release of the first edition.
AKASlaphappy
Truly enjoyed this expansion, beat it with my game group, and played through it solo. Insert, reusable stickers, and metal coins.