I've been playing a great deal of Gloomhaven over the last few months. If you don't know what it is, you can get some details about it
here.
My top level summary of it is that it is a tactical combat board game for 1* to 4 players where you have a persistent world, so your all of your actions, especially which scenario to play has a knock on effect to everything else.
Rough list of reasons I think it's great:- There are absolutely loads of classes. The game starts with 6 or so available - the rest are all in sealed boxes and must be unlocked. You get given a life goal and once you achieve it you unlock a class, and you must retire your character. This means things keep getting changed up - starting with the obvious fact that you have a new character so abilities, equipment and tactics need to be adapted, which has a knock on effect to the whole party make up and tactics
- Similar to the above there are loads of other various sealed boxes, envelopes, stickers and logs, so there is a continued sense of wanting to discover what the game has to offer
- The abilities are represented by cards, and to use the abilities you must "spend" 2 every turn, then once spent you get all but one back. This means towards the end of scenarios you are in danger of having used up all of your cards and becoming exhausted. Essentially this makes for a very interesting set of tactical decisions since your cards are your resource
- The story itself is well written and intriguing - embellished by some lovely card artwork
- There is a good range of enemies, and the tactics for each room often need to be thought about very carefully
Things I don't like so much- We aren't playing this massively frequently meaning sometimes I have forgotten what happened previously in the different story arcs, so have difficulty making an informed choice about which scenario to choose next
- Set up takes ages
We have a regular kernel of 2/3 players. One thing I like (that may be particular to our situation) is that there is a free slot that we can frequently fill with a guest adventurer which means we can see how various group make ups can shift the tactics we need to employ.
So has anyone else played this or interested in giving it a go? If so, any favourite classes / items / ability combos?
* There are a number of solo scenarios and I am aware that there are some people that play through these, and do the group ones in a pretend group but I personally would find that much less fun
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