Menu Close

*** Gloomhaven (2017) – Isaac Childres

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 ever need! But, as we all know, things that seem to good to be true typically are.

The first thing I took issue with when setting up Gloomhaven for the first time is the rulebook. While it functions fairly well as a mid-session rules reference, the complete lack of a proper “How To Get Started” section made the initial learning curve way more difficult than it needed to be. Kingdom Death: Monster’s prologue chapter is a great example of how to introduce players to a complex campaign loop in an engaging and intuitive manner, why there is absolutely nothing of the sort here is beyond me. The blurb at the beginning of the campaign book says next to nothing about how to introduce the game, leaving it to the player group to tackle that problem on their own. Besides that, the campaign book gets the job done and has a more-than-generous amount of content to go through, but dear lord is the binding a pain. Every single time I pop to the back to check off a treasure box the pages start failing out! Which is far from being the game’s only QA issue what with the missing components and misaligned print jobs plaguing many copies of this printing, my own included. And there aren’t enough monster standees in the box depending on how certain scenarios play out, so you may find yourself having to improvise. Even looking past THAT, the cardboard and card stock used here is thin and cheap, but hey I get it, there is a lot of stuff in that massive box and Cephalofair ain’t got the manufacturing pipeline of, say, FFG. So let me be clear in saying I consider none of these issues to be serious criticisms. On a positive note, the stat sleeves for the monster sheets and the health and experience trackers are nice touches and offer a lot of utility to the player.

Art-wise, the game is mostly unappealing, with forgettable (and sometimes flat-out ugly) character and enemy designs. The map tiles and cards look mostly like colorful nothing. Set up and teardown take forever, as each scenario features a custom layout and unique set of enemies and terrain, with no real way of speeding up the process even with very liberal use of baggies and planning. But the game has a lot going on and lends itself to very long play sessions, thus I also don’t really consider this much of a knock against it. Overall, the sheer amount of content and materials in the box and the production’s emphasis on functional components over flashy ones makes forgiving the aforementioned blunders quite easy.

As referenced earlier, the setting of Gloomhaven is largely identical to every other fantasy-themed board game to take influence from Dungeons & Dragons or the WRPGs derived thereafter. Sure, the tanks have horns and you can play as a telepathic rat person, but as far as the world you adventure in and the things you do in it, don’t expect to see or participate in much you haven’t already. You and your friends are a band of mercenaries and you fight skeletons and bandits and elemental demons and fill-in-the-blanks. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, it’s a popular and desirable theme for a reason, but Gloomhaven does little to buck the fantasy tropes that inspired it. And with the unbelievable amount of missions Childres cooked up for his players to go on, I’d be honestly amazed if it did. Also, while the campaign’s choose-your-own-adventure structure is not particularly new either, the number and variety of branching paths and ways to unlock new scenarios is head-and-shoulders above most others of its ilk.

Speaking of the scenarios, a typical one starts with a paragraph or two of flavor text then pits 1-4 player-controlled heroes against a dozen or so monstrous opponents, tasking the players with manufacturing their enemies’ demise while looting anything not bolted to the floor, of course. Before a scenario begins, each player drafts a hand of ability cards from a specific set available to their character’s class which affords them various methodologies of delivering swift death or snagging swag. Once a scenario is completed successfully, you read a couple of more paragraphs, unlock a few new missions, then go back to the titular town of Gloomhaven to level up, buy new gear, and partake in simple, randomized story events. Rinse and repeat. And repeat. And repeat again. Hope you’re having fun, because that is Gloomhaven.

If I appear to be over-simplifying how the game works, it’s because I am. Allow me to elaborate further. Along with your hand of ability cards there are several other facets that affect how the scenarios unfold: diverse map layouts, terrain tiles, occasional boss encounters and enemies with unique skills, a scaling difficulty system that determines enemy and trap strength (although unfortunately the enemy AI does not scale in the same way, once a stupid zombie, always a stupid zombie, I suppose). To combat the growing strength of the baddies, as you level up you’ll add new ability cards to your available pool and make tweaks and adjustments to your attack modifier deck that acts as Gloomhaven’s perhaps-too-clever deck-building solution to the dice-chucking RNG systems that plague many other dungeon crawls. Trust me when I say prune that thing early and keep it that way; the fastest way to no-fun town in Gloomhaven is an uncooperative attack modifier deck. And although this deck is one of the game’s only real mechanical innovations, after much deliberation I have concluded that it does not meaningfully improve on dice-rolling in any way. You could easily accomplish something just as unique and malleable with custom dice, and then the tactile, physical feel of the attack event would not be lost. Imagine the tension and excitement of dice tumbling noisily down a tower or across a table during a Twilight: Imperium battle being replaced with silently flipping a series of cards. Personally, I’d rather not.

Another seemingly solid system that quickly loses its luster is the way turn order is handled. All players simultaneously select their action cards in secret then reveal them alongside a randomly drawn AI card for each enemy type. Initiative values printed on the cards then determine who goes when for that round. This system is annoying for a number of reasons. Having to independently determine the turn order for each round is a chore made even worse by further questionable design decisions. The co-operative nature of Gloomhaven would lead you to believe it is an open information game. It’s not. Players are instructed not to share specific information about their upcoming turn and are instead encouraged to follow some vague instructions about what is and is not appropriate table talk. Explicitly stating your initiative value, for instance, is considered by the rules to be inappropriate table talk. This, coupled with the random secret objectives that players are dealt at the beginning of each scenario, can lead to some seriously silly player interaction. In one particular situation I wanted to be the first person to enter a room as it would help me score my secret objective. But because I could not share my specific initiative value when choosing ability cards, another player accidentally placed himself before me in the turn order and would’ve had to waste his entire turn to allow me to enter the door before him. To put it lightly, when a system makes something as simple as deciding who goes through a door first a clumsy experience, you know there are some problems with it.

A lack of mechanical polish pervades nearly every aspect of Gloomhaven. One especially goofy rule disallows you from looting a dungeon after completing the scenario objective, leading to some truly ridiculous moments when you’re putting off killing that last skeleton so you can run around in circles picking up loose change. Thematic! Another startling flaw of Gloomhaven’s is its unholy mismatch of hand fatiguing — as you take actions you lose cards from your available set for the remainder of the scenario, which effectively acts as a timer — and the random card draws for enemy AI and attack modifiers that dictate so much of the action. To be succinct, timers plus randomness is not immersive, innovative, or fun. It’s just bad design. Watching helplessly as a group of enemies repeatedly summon monsters or heal themselves while your hand is dwindling due to no fault of your own can be incredibly aggravating and reduces many scenarios into tiresome games of attrition. Simply put, way too much of the emotional and mental investment you put into Gloomhaven comes down to hoping for lucky draws so you don’t have to burn too many cards. Not exactly gripping or revolutionary stuff.

At their absolute worst, the core mechanics of the game can feel like a knowing attempt to convince the players they have more agency than they actually do. And when a game walks along the razor’s edge of difficulty as Gloomhaven often does, in which a single swing in either direction could be the deciding moment of the entire two-hour session, it sucks to be able to trace back your victory or defeat to a few lucky (or unlucky) card draws. To make matters worse, if you reduce the difficulty in an attempt to mitigate this issue, all tension in the game just completely drains away. At the end of the day, when you compare the mechanics of hand management in Gloomhaven to something like Vlaada Chvatil’s Mage Knight Board Game, in which players have an almost oppressive level of control over the way their turn plays out, the cracks in Gloomhaven’s twenty pound armor really begin to show.

Be all of these things as they may, it is not to say Gloomhaven can’t be satisfying. The unique tactics of each character class are impressively realized and worth exploring, especially when integrating their disparate move sets into synchronized strategic visions. Exploring the possibility space of a new ability deck is almost certainly when the appeal of Gloomhaven is at its highest. In addition, the allure of discovering what is locked away in the sealed envelopes and tuck boxes is stronger in this game than any other I’ve come across by a factor of about a thousand. Childres recognizing the potential of marrying legacy mechanics to an RPG-in-a-box deserves acclaim in and of itself, and his game’s genre-spanning ambition and scope is certainly laudable and refreshing to see.

To date, I’ve had six long sessions with Gloomhaven ranging from three to six hours, and individual scenarios typically took between ninety minutes and two-and-a-half hours. I’ve played it solo, two-player, and three-player. I definitely found it best at two as the amount of monsters on the map with three or more players requires way too much admin and slows down the game’s pace considerably. It’s really not fun to manage eleven monsters across four different types while trying to plan out your own turn at the same time. Even at two I had more fun watching the world and story progress and preparing my character for the next scenario than I did actually playing through them. As far as complexity goes, players familiar with similar board games should be able to play with a pretty clear head after a turn or two. The biggest barrier to entry for me was how unclear and unrewarding the first few scenarios are. You fight way too many monsters way too early before you get the chance to acclimate yourself to the game’s idiosyncrasies. Additionally, there desperately needs to be a playable tutorial of sorts to introduce players to the campaign as what’s here is essentially just a pile of rules you have to assemble yourselves.

Gloomhaven is almost everything, for everyone. Lovers of RPGs, dungeon crawlers, miniatures, deck-builders, euros, ameritrash, everyone. But in its relentless pursuit for mechanical breadth, it ultimately has sacrificed having much of an expressive identity of its own and succumbs to an impermeable shroud of bloat and clumsiness. #1 game of all-time? Nowhere close. But it’s certainly not a bad game, and I think it would be very hard to argue that it is. It just needs some work, that’s all. Considering this is only Childres’s second published design, color me impressed. And despite all of its flaws, I’m still looking forward to my next session — if only to finally see what’s inside one of those stupid envelopes.

Gloomhaven gets a rating of THREE out of FIVE, indicating it is WORTHWHILE.