Gloomhaven
Gloomhaven is a game of Euro-inspired tactical combat in a persistent world of shifting motives. Players will take on the role of a wandering adventurer with their own special set of skills and their own reasons for travelling to this dark corner of the world.
60m - 120m
1 - 4 Players
Ages 12+
46 and 2
This game was a huge disappointment. I cannot understand the throngs of people who praise this game. Leaving aside the weird, NPC-type character races (your choices are quite limited up front) and the badly-organized box (its half-assed attempt to provide some sort of organizational structure for the myriad decks of cards is insulting), my problem with this game comes down to the opening scenario. To say it is brutally difficult is an understatement. It is downright impossible. Changing strategies, characters, skill/spell loadouts, all yielded fast, frustrating death, if not in the first room, soon upon entering the second room of three. Forget trying to meet the (randomly-generated and very, VERY odd character goals) for the scenario. You'll need to seriously ratchet down the difficulty, beyond what the game even allows, basically house-ruling a way to win the first scenario. IE, the only way to win that first scenario is to cheat. What a fun way to play a game. After running into loss after loss on the first scenario, I boxed this game up, sold it, shipped it, and never looked back. There is no reason for a game to punish players who have just started. It's bad game design. A well-designed game can teach as it goes, introducing players to the complexities of gameplay as it progresses. A dedicated gaming group will not tolerate a game that dishes out constant losses, no matter how good it might get later on. There will be the inevitable responses of "get gud," etc, but a game has to have a hook to draw gamers in. This has only disappointment and frustration at the outset. Gloomhaven is not a well-designed game, no matter what may come later on.
Adalis88
Definitely not the best, neither the worst dungeon crawler out there. We've played through the whole campaign during COVID for more than 1 year. The plot barely pulls you in or you just simply forget what happened 5 city development stage before, we felt rather disconnected sometimes. The amount of gold and gear you get is ridiculous, you are forced to grind but even if you do have the gold, 95% of higher tier items are crap, you don't feel special at all (too situation heavy / one time use effects). Upgrading your cards require hundreds of gold and even the hardest scenario rewards + loot yield you around 50 if you are with a fast moving looter character. The slow movers are left out of the shopping party which is demotivating and frustrating. You can't freely trade loot between each other, why? I always felt an invisible barrier here which can be neglected by farming random scenarios - no, thank you. Quests are repetitve or some harder main quests require special setup, if you don't have you fail miserable. It happened quite a few times that either an enemy asspulled 2x DMG, or you failed to land a hit in crucial moments and you ended up dead, luck mitigation is non existent and frustrating.
Actorios
Currently playing the campaign on the digital version. I'm having a blast. All the limitations from the physical board game (the effort to set-up, the difficulty to make time / organize for it) are gone. Waited for the software to be fully implemented (with the campaign) to propose it to some friends. I'm not regretting it. Looking forward to discover and enjoy the campaign.