Game: Gloomhaven

[liv]

So, Gloomhaven. It's the most ridiculously hyped and by some measures the most popular board game from the last several years. I wasn't completely sure I wanted it in my life, but in the end jack and I decided to get it for each other for Christmas.

Gloomhaven is just on a ridiculous scale. It's the size and cost of three or four solid Eurogames. It's story-based, with persistent effects from one play to the next, and you could play it for hundreds of hours and still not to get the end. There's so many components and such a complex, branching story, I can't really get my head round it.

My main impression of it can be summarized as that quip about "dancing about archtitecture". It's an amazing achievement but it's not at all clear why it was implemented in a tabletop boardgame. It might make more sense as a source book for dice and paper roleplaying, or a computer RPG, or possibly even a novel. But it isn't, it's a 10kg box packed with hundreds of pieces of cardboard and decks of cards and sealed envelopes and a 30 page rules manual. It takes up an entire dining table and set-up and take-down take forever. You can easily spend an hour finding the right components for an hour to 90 minutes of play time. And even during play you're often scrabbling about looking for the right combination of tokens and paper notes and stickers to mark the extremely complex state of the game.

GH gets away with all this nonsense because it's actually that good. It's a really original way of telling the story, and it has a good mix of strategy and character development. Each individual scenario is fun and engaging and the meta story that links sessions, complete with a really wide range of meaningful branching choices, is exciting and original. I love that the world has a bunch of fantasy races which aren't at all Tolkien / D&D with the serial numbers filed off. The art is lovely so the plethora of tokens and cards and just bits is pleasing to own.

Probably the most impressive aspect of the game is how well it's balanced. The creators understood that the kind of adults who can afford a game like this also can't guarantee to get a consistent party of four together every week for a year. So you can have players drop in and out and still feel like there's continuity between sessions. The complexity of the choices means that the designers couldn't predict what order you'd be playing scenarios in, so it has to scale well as the party levels up and acquires more powers and stats, as well as player experience.

I'm not sure I would recommend GH over, say, Pandemic Legacy, but that's a very high bar. And I don't want all games to be like this; it would be shame if this dense story-based design were to displace things like Terraforming Mars and Scythe where the games are standalone but with scope to be knitted together into a story-rich world. But I think we've had more fun out of GH than three Eurogames which aren't in the top 5%, and I am looking forward to where the story goes next. It's frustrating and fiddly, it's very much a gamers' game, but it's also really good if you enjoy complex games and if you have space and budget for it.

Comments

[finding_helena]

We really enjoy Gloomhaven and we've been having a pretty consistent Gloomhaven party for the past year! It appeals to me because I like the mechanical aspects of D&D, so the battles are fun, but have a hard time dealing with the roleplaying bits. Being offered choices of "do you do X or Y?" is about as much as I can handle. We have a web app we use on the iPad to track initiative and HP/XP and monster decks, and we each have deck apps on our phones for our own decks. We've had a few snags along the way with this stuff, but I think we've mostly got them worked out now. The only place where it's tricky is when we have to keep track of how many total curses or blessings are present, so we still have the physical cards and pass them out to the right recipient just as a marker, though they're adding it to their electronic deck for actual gameplay. Then when they draw it out of their electronic deck they can throw the physical card back in the pool.