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+
acornley29
Can totally see why this is number one game for years …. It's absolutely incredible. Most played game now
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.
Achire
I feel terrible giving this game such a low rating, because it's clearly a game that a lot of thought & effort went into, and one that many people love. However, I found it painfully boring. It felt like grinding in an old dungeon crawling video game. The monsters are fairly similar to each other, the AI feels somewhat dull, and some characters feel quite disadvantaged for gaining loot (for example, if your character is fragile with ranged attacks, you have to keep your distance from enemies, which means you never get the loot... a shame. I loved the premise of top and bottom actions, but I didn't find the cards as exciting as I hoped. It's a real masterwork of a dungeon crawling simulator, but at the end of the day, it just felt boring to me and it would be torture for me to play it again. I will not be continuing with the campaign; one of my friends will probably take over my character. Pros: combines dungeon crawling with multi-use cards and a 'deck is your life' system, nice miniatures, lots of content Cons: Long and you have to repeat the very dull scenario if you fail, all dungeons feel the same, theme didn't feel especially immersive, the semi-coop of everyone being out for themselves is annoying as your teammate steals a coin from you while you work to help the team; I'd rather be competing or cooperating, downtimes can get very lengthy if someone is struggling to make a decision, the rewards are dull, and the game is just far too long for what it it.