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+
Beebsman
Obviously a great game because it’s still Gloomhaven which is the greatest. However, the more puzzle filled scenarios which may take a few tries to understand, coupled with the constant flipping to other pages to see what’s in other rooms makes the scenarios extremely sluggish and tedious. What made gloomhaven great was the fast paced flow of the scenario while still offering a bunch of interesting decisions and combat tension. This still offers the same decisions but in a dragging puzzle that has to come to frequent halts. We will not be finishing this campaign but rather stopping to play more gloomhaven side scenarios and jaws of the lion until frosthaven comes out.
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.
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.