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+
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.
benjeye
If you like Gloomhaven, do not play Forgotten Circles it will ruin GH for you. It tries to change it up but does so poorly. It breaks the game without any real guidance on how to put it back together again. Not even all the kings' men could do it.
Black_Howling
This expansion is frustrating for my group and myself. There are many new ideas that would have been better served in a pen & paper game, not as a Gloomhaven campaign. It does not work to force players to stop everything and solve a riddle in the middle of a scenario (scenarios 98 & 106 for example), especially since players have a limited number of turns before becoming exhausted. Many scenarios are unreasonably difficult for two players, where one character is tied up as the Playable NPC and/or not directly contributing to the scenario. Some scenarios are better at reduced difficulty or playing with fewer summons (99), but at least one involves arbitrarily guessing the correct puzzle order for the best outcome (106), which is nearly impossible with only two players. Gloomhaven is my favorite game, but we would rather forget that Forgotten Circles exists.