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+
baghaan
Verry good game, but by far not as good as Vanila Gloomhaven. still a lot of fun and mostly a good time
Alycat
Gloomhaven is one of my favourite games so Forgotten Circles gets a big tick from me by default because it's more Gloomhaven to play! We've now played through all the scenarios and unlocked all content, including getting the Diviner to level 9. Overall I preferred base Gloomhaven as Forgotten Circles doesn't quite give you as much freedom to play around and explore what your class can do as there are often quite specific tasks you need to complete rather than something simple like "kill all enemies", and there's often a lot of flicking through the scenario back to different sections and back which disrupts the flow of the game a little. However having said that there's plenty of variety and every scenario feels quite different so it doesn't get boring. One person must play the Diviner (the new character included in the expansion) and I get the impression that the experience of the person playing the Diviner (which wasn't me) can be somewhat at variance to the players controlling other characters as the Diviner sometimes has certain tasks that only they can do and this can end up rail-roading that player into playing a certain way. If you have the first edition of the game, please look up the second edition changes to the Diviner cards as it makes a huge difference and makes the class more viable/fun. At later character levels the Diviner player seemed to be having fun flitting around doing all sorts. Forgotten Circles isn't perfect but it's still got the excellent Gloomhaven mechanics at its core so if you like Gloomhaven then I'd recommend this.
afriestman
I'm ambivalent about Gloomhaven, it's fine but the rest of the table enjoys it so I can find my own fun amidst it all. But this expansions has been miserable to play through. The cross referencing and staggered setup makes the game slow down constantly, there's tons of mid-game translation that's important in the moment and slows everything down while one person works on it, the scenarios are all needlessly overwrought and fiddly without any actual complexity to them. I hate it so much. It's like they took ever scenario that got cut from the main game for being unfun and sold them as a pack. Special mention to scenario 106, for a terrible riddle with no clear answer that you have to translate in parts during different turns. I will never buy any game from the dude that wrote that one ever, it's that bad.