This essay is an unabashed rip-off of this wonderful essay by the indomitable video game theorist Alex Kierkegaard but applied in greater detail to the tabletop space. So go read that, learn from it, and report back when finished. … You finished? Great! Let’s get started. ‘Gameplay’ is one of the worst words ever. Now typically when I don’t like a term or phrase in the gaming vernacular I just incessantly whine to my friends until they claim to agree with me to get me to shut up, but for this particularly cancerous cluster of phonemes I’m going to approach the situation with as much clarity and gravity as I can muster. Why? Because I whole-heartedly believe that using the word ‘gameplay’ severely damages people’s abilities to have effective conversations about games and game design, and thus the art form as a whole. The biggest problem with ‘gameplay’ is that the word is so exceedingly vague it seems to serve no semantic function other than putting up a smokescreen in front of an opinion that the person using the word doesn’t know how to adequately articulate. And you know what they say: behind sloppy talking is sloppy thinking. Did someone say that? Well I’m saying it now. I often hear ‘gameplay’ defined as the interaction between the player and the game, or the overall feel of a game while playing it. To that I say a word THAT broad is useless. We don’t have a word for the overall feel of a movie, or what it’s…
At the time I am writing this, Gloomhaven is sitting comfortably in the number one spots for thematic, strategic, and overall rankings over on Board Game Geek, and will likely stay there for the foreseeable future due to its insane, and (somewhat) understandable popularity. After all, Gloomhaven, by Isaac Childres, is the game that finally supplanted Cosmic Encounter as Tom Vasel of The Dice Tower’s favorite game of ALL-TIME after all these years, so it must be amazing, right? Well, at the risk of undermining whatever shreds of credibility you could’ve potentially afforded me before I even properly begin my first review, let me just say… it isn’t. Welcome to the first review in the Bozo’s Guide series — a series purely about analyzing and critiquing table top games. For this review, we’ll be taking a look at the second printing of the retail edition of this ultra-hyped colossus of a game. Gloomhaven is a cooperative dungeon crawler set in a rather generic fantasy universe featuring every popular board game mechanic that has surfaced over the last decade and a half: campaign play, legacy elements, deck-building, card drafting, simultaneous action selection/movement programming, storytelling, secret objectives, light role-playing, you name it. Before going any further, I’d like to posit that this alone explains a huge portion of the game’s popularity already. Even for the strategy purists and euro-gamers, the game’s elimination of dice from its combat system is extremely promising. Heck, on paper Gloomhaven appears to be the only game you’ll…