any more owning and this place can no longer label itself socialist
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I only ever played Gloomhaven once at @bibās house where I half understood the game and just kinda floated along drinking from his rare soda stash.
On a whim the other day I picked up the stand-alone expansion Jaws of the Lion because it seemed like a solid 2-player game to enjoy with my gf during quarantine. Weāre really into it!
I gather that itās a little simplified from the original Gloomhaven in order to reach a wider audience turned off by the original gameās gigantic, expensive box. But thereās still a satisfyingly difficult and complex dungeon crawler in there! The four characters in the box seem to play very differently, but complement each other nicely. My gf is an exiled warrior caste himbo named Brother Doobis, and Iām a void sand wizard named Coarse Black Sandy. Weāre having a grand old time pushing magical giant tumor monsters into traps and then hoovering up their gold to buy potions.
Iām kind of eyeing that new full-on sequel theyāre working on called Frosthaven. It looks pretty cool! Apparently itās going to have, like, a city building system in it, which I am a sucker for in RPGs.
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Played Splendor last night with the wife, was a good time even if my strategy of hoarding all the ruby mines didnāt work out and she won.
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I donāt think anyone here has yet mentioned The Crew. Itās a cooperative trick-taking game thatās very good. And inexpensive. Each of the 50 missions has a minor variation in the rules that requires you to approach things differently. Iāve played through maybe 20 of the missions so far. Up to five players.
(image source)
Also, hereās a game that was out of production back when I was introduced to it, Trambahn. If you like Lost Cities, you would probably like this game as well. (It is different enough from Lost Cities not to be redundant with it, but they have similar appeal.) Like Lost Cities, it is strictly two-player.
You should absolutely play real Gloomhaven next, I canāt stop proselytizing this wonderful game. Just the ideal pure dungeon crawler, and somehow manages to regularly produce skin-of-your-teeth situations
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Weirdly, I bounced off Gloomhaven hard. My first impression is that Iād rather be playing an āactualā ttrpg or war game, a board game thatās less fiddly, or a video game adaptation that handles all the fiddly bits for me.
Feels like Iām missing something because literally every one of my friends who plays it loves it.
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do you remember what you had
Not at all, Iām afraid!
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this was also my experience fwiw
Me too. It was very fiddly on top of being brain burny, the combination of which was agonizing for me.
I donāt think itās really fun until two things happen: one, you internalize the rules such that it stops being fiddly (this only takes a couple missions if you have a gamer brain); and two, you let go a little bit, so it stops being so ābrain burny.ā It gives you the impression that itās of the utmost importance that you pick the 2 perfect cards every single time, but thatās not really true. Thereās more flexibility than you think, and you can usually adapt a Perfect Plan into an Okay Plan once you turn over the monster cards and realize they are gonna fuck up your Perfect Plan. You must relax and be free
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this is good board game design in general imo and encapsulates a lot of what made that design space so refreshing in the late 00s and early 10s against what was going on videogames at the time; gloomhaven seemed to me like they were circling back around to losing sight of those goals, or at least substantively checking themselves in order to do things that videogames and proper ttrpgs do better
Itās weird that you would say something like āttrpgs do it betterā; Gloomhaven is definitely a better tactical combat game than any ttrpg Iāve played. Like thatās 100% of its appeal: āwhat if you took ttrpg tactical combat and made it the whole point and stripped out all the roleplayingā.
Itās much closer to videogame space, but I dunno, you can convert any board game to a videogame. That insight standing alone doesnāt say much about anything.
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right, so at that point youāve taken out all the free-form roleplaying and youāre left with a videogame with one hand tied behind its back that makes you do sumsā¦
I feel like Iāve played loads and loads of interesting tactical combat videogames that are extrapolated much further from the narrowest possible dungeon setting because thereās an actual literature of tactical combat videogames for them to draw on and complicate and subvert, whereas this is working on a far shallower level without anything to spice it up
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I actually tend to really dislike SRPGs because so much of the math is hidden, or probability-based in fine-grained ways that arenāt intuitive or predictable. Gloomhavenās math is very simple and it is all completely transparent. The fact that you can tell with 100% certainty what the enemies are going to do after you flip their cards is a huge boon. The only videogame I can think of that operates this way is Into the Breach which is actually more simplistic (fewer available player mechanics/actions), less forgiving (due to strategic-layer punishment that Gloomhaven does not contain), and you canāt play it with your friends.
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yeah, I didnāt like into the breach very much either, because it seemed too obviously paper prototyped in a way that neglected a lot of the meta that usually comes out of that genre
as for being able to play it with friends ā I canāt help but play up the pathos of this framing ā I donāt, personally, really like to minmax in public, but there are some types of games in which I otherwise really like to minmax! and speaking as someone who really likes both eurogames that tend toward the chaotic (but otherwise demand weighing short-term and long-term choices with clear consequences) and complicated SPRGs, I thought gloomhaven really muddied the strengths of either genre (saying nothing of ttrpgs!) and I was and am still concerned about its popularity becoming a distraction
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I also donāt like scythe very much though so itās fair to say that Iām pretty opposed to the current trend of adapting 4X designs to standalone boardgames with massive art budgets
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My friends are obsessed, I donāt really like trick-taking games but Iāll give this a go every now and then. Itās on Tabletop Simulator and that version plays well, havenāt tried the hard copy version yet.
Everything Cuba said is true.
Gloomhaven is cool because it finally takes tactical rpg combat out of the realm of doing statistics in your head. Thatās what it has over strategy rpgs (particularly nu-xcom), trad ttrpgs, war games, and earlier dungeon crawl board games like Descent and Heroquest.
Instead, itās a deterministic(edit: okay, mostly deterministic, you can still end up doing no damage if you draw a bad damage multiplier, but the game does that standard eurogamey thing of failure with a caveat) but chaotic system. Simultaneous action choice ā discontinuous player turn order is one of my favorite board game mechanics of all time. Each round has a perfectly honed decision tree and the game avoids what gums up so many games of this sort (especially ttrpgs that focus on combat and wargames): information overload. I gather this is slightly contentious because the rules of the game are relatively an info overload, but on any given turn, you only have a few choices to make based on readily available information.
I can understand how it can feel brain-burny especially in comparison to other games in the genre, but it is also that quality that makes it so different and valuable in an overcrowded space: you canāt autopilot your way through a turn. Every chance to make a decision ends up being a meaningful decision.
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iāve played gloomhaven with a few people who just donāt have an appetite for what itās doing, but for everyone who is inclined toward it at all it just completely whips ass
i feel like i still hear some variation of āit might as well be a videogameā sometimes, and i guess thatās broadly true of some parts of it, but the actual skeleton-- you have a hand of nine cards and each has two halves and you pick two of them on a turn-- would just look incredibly dumb in a videogame context and yet is bewilderingly graceful in board game space