Gloomhaven

Gloomhaven is a dungeon-crawling fantasy board game. First released in 2017, it revolutionized the genre and was hailed as one of the best co-op board games of all time thanks to its intricate mechanics, deep customization, wealth of secrets to unlock, and branching story. In 2019, Flaming Fowl Studios released a digital version (in early access, which was completed in 2021), which I played, so I can now confirm that the accolades Gloomhaven received are undoubtedly well-earned. While the digital version massively streamlined many points of the experience, it also introduced a few annoyances.

The game is divided into missions, each of which takes place in several rooms arranged on a hexagonal grid. Each mission has a unique map and goal, although most are about three rooms long and involve killing all the enemies. Gameplay is divided into rounds. Player characters have a hand of action cards, each of which has three components: a top action, an initiative number (ranging from 1 to 99), and a bottom action. Each turn, each player chooses two action cards to play, and selects the initiative from one of those two cards. All players reveal their cards and an action card (which will have an action and initiative) is drawn for each enemy group, and then the turn is resolved among players and enemies from lowest initiative to highest. 

Enemy turns are fairly straightforward: each enemy performs the actions on their card. There are rules for how to select the order the enemies within each group operate, how they move, who they target, and so on, but the program handles all of that for you. On each player’s turn they play the top action (which usually involves attacking) from one card and the bottom action (which usually involves movement) from the other. Typically you know which top action and which bottom action you will choose when selecting the cards, but you technically don’t make the selection until your turn, which does give some flexibility for the unexpected. It’s an interesting system that certainly takes getting used to; the first few missions we’d constantly select a pair of cards, only to realize we were trying to do two top actions or two bottom actions. 

Most character decks have about ten cards, and once you've played a card you discard it. You then recover discarded cards back to your hand by resting. There are two types of rests: long and short. A long rest takes your entire turn, heals 2 health, and lets you permanently burn one discarded card to recover the rest. A short rest happens during the card selection phase, does not recover health, and burns a randomly chosen card (although you can redraw one time at the cost of 1 health). There are also some items that refresh upon a long (but not short) rest. 

As a result, Gloomhaven is very much a game of planning and allocating resources. Each card can only be used once per rest cycle and you can only use one half of each card per rest cycle, meaning each round you need to think carefully about what you’ll likely need in the next couple of turns. Additionally, burned cards are lost for the rest of the scenario, so when resting you must consider what cards can be given up and what will still be needed. Additionally, some actions are burned rather than discarded after use (but generally have more powerful effects), and so require you to balance power with longevity. 

Of course, the game is designed to be manageable. Defeating all the enemies before you run out of cards is honestly not that difficult. 

Defeating all enemies while looting their treasure and gaining experience, however, is much harder. In most video games you automatically gain loot and experience from defeating enemies, but that is not the case in Gloomhaven. Each enemy drops a gold pile when they die, but you don’t automatically pick it up. Instead, you need to “loot” it, by ending your turn on that square or using a “Loot” action. (“Loot X” means collect all treasure within X squares of your character.) Scenarios can also start with gold piles or treasure chests on the ground, which follow the same rules. Experience, on the other hand, isn’t tied to enemies at all. Instead, each character has certain actions that grant experience. Perform the action, get the xp. It sounds simple, but prioritizing experience-granting skills often ends up trickier than it seems. Plus, experience is often tied to burn cards or using an element (explained in the next paragraph), which add additional challenge. Also, you need to actually use an ability to get the experience. If you select an ability which has an attack and grants experience, but there are no enemies within range to attack, you don’t get the experience. 

The final main gameplay piece that needs to be managed is elements. Gloomhaven has six elements (light, dark, fire, ice, earth, and wind), each of which can be inert, weak, or strong. Some abilities create an element, which sets that element to strong at the end of that character’s turn. Other abilities can use a strong or weak element (setting it to inert) to amplify its effect. (There are also some elemental-based enemies that can be weakened if its opposing element is active.) At the end of each round each weak element becomes inert and each strong element becomes weak. What this means is, for a character operating alone, if they create an element it will be strong the rest of their round (after their turn ends), weak on their next turn, and then inert after that. In other words, when operating alone, you only have one turn to use an element after you create it. 

Of course, you aren’t operating alone. Having teammates create an element on their turn that you want to use on your turn is one of the simplest ways you can synergize characters. While the element system may sound harsh and complicated, there’s actually a lot of elegance in the design that makes it pretty manageable. First, the vast majority of characters only use at most two elements, and most use one or none. What that means is you don’t need to track the status of six elements—just one or two (if that). Second, having such a short window to use elements means that you only ever need to plan at most one turn in advance. While managing six elements over many turns would be crazy (with everything else going on), thinking about one element a turn in advance is pretty easy. 

So you have to manage your hand, resting, elements, treasure, and experience while fighting the enemies. (Plus status effects, scenario effects, and items, and other more niche systems like minions.) Which is a lot to deal with. But at the same time, all you need to do on your turn is select and play two abilities. So there’s a lot of depth and moving pieces, but interaction with the game is relatively simple, allowing you to get used to the game at your own pace. This is also where having Gloomhaven as a video game becomes a massive boon, because it means all you truly have to do is control your character. On tabletop you’d need to deal with enemy movement, adjudicating status effects and difficult terrain, learning line of sight rules, and so on. 

While combat comprises the core gameplay of Gloomhaven and provides a solid foundation, I think that discovery, growth, and customization is the game’s soul. Characters have a multitude of ways to customize. The most basic is items: you can equip gear, which you can then use in combat. Some items provide a passive bonus, but most require you to activate or automatically trigger under certain circumstances. Next is leveling. When you level up your health increases, and you get to choose a new ability card to add to your deck. Each character has two possible cards to choose from at each level (although you can also take a previous level’s card instead). (Note that your hand/starting deck will always be the same size, so as you level up you don’t get to take more cards into the level, you just have more options to choose from.) 

After that is perks. Each character has a bag of perks, which is a numerical modifier. Starting perks range from -2 to +2, and there is a x0 and x2 modifier as well. Whenever a character attacks they draw a perk from their bag and add it to the attack value. (When attacking multiple targets, you draw one perk for each.) This means you never quite know exactly how strong an attack will be. Perks aren’t put back into the bag, except when you draw a x0 or x2, in which case all drawn perks are put back. So as you draw more perks you might have a better idea of what’s likely to be drawn (and the digital version shows you this info), but you can never have perfect knowledge (since the lowest the pool can get is the x0 and the x2). Each player character has their own perk pool, while all enemies share one. However, each character can upgrade their perks using perk points (which I’ll explain in a bit). Each upgrade modifies your perk pool, either by removing or adding perks (or both). While your starting perks are just numerical modifiers, upgraded perks can have additional abilities, such as inflicting status effects, granting a shield, or creating an element. (While I didn’t mention it in the combat system, Gloomhaven also has an advantage/disadvantage system: if you have advance or disadvantage, you draw two perks and take the higher or lower one, respectively.) 

Finally, there are enchantments. Certain cards have dots on some abilities (like “Attack 2・”), which indicates a slot for an enchantment, a permanent upgrade to the ability. The exact upgrades that are available depend on the ability type, but you might be able to increase attack strength, number of targets, move range, heal strength, or even add a status effect or element. Each numerical enchantment only increases the value by one, so it’s up to you to figure out which will be the most impactful. (Increasing the number of targets or adding a status effect might have a bigger impact than one damage—but if it’s an attack you use every rest cycle, that one extra damage can add up over a scenario.)

Enchantments are meant to be a late-game customization option, and are priced accordingly. The price of an enchantment depends on the enchantment type, ability level, and whether it’s a multi-target ability, and goes up fast. Maybe you can buy a cheap enchantment or two early on, but you’re generally going to be waiting until you’ve completed your item build to drop serious money. And a word of warning: in the physical game, enchantments are permanent across characters, because there the enchantments are handled with stickers you put on the ability cards. The digital version of Gloomhaven has a “house rules” settings where you can tweak some rules from the physical version, and one of those rules is making enchantments character-specific rather than permanent to each class. We chose to turn on that house rule (since we thought that would allow for greater flexibility and experimentation), and I think that was a mistake. In the late-game, we’d build up a character and dump several hundred gold on their enchantments—which would be washed away as soon as they retired. Enchantments are priced on the assumption that they will persist from character to character, so yes, while making enchantments character-specific theoretically allows for more experimentation, the gold cost makes experimentation prohibitively expensive. I recommend just sticking with the classic option. The fact that they’re permanent might seem intimidating, but by the time you have the money to purchase enchantments you’ll understand the character and game well enough that it’ll be fine. 

So as you might surmise, between classes, abilities, items, perks, and enchantments, there is a massive breadth of character customization. Two people given the same class are unlikely to play them the same way, even if they go for similar builds. It’s a lot of fun exploring what each class can do and coming up with various builds for them. 

(One thing I will note is that, unless you use an online guide, (in the first two-thirds of the game) it’s difficult to do real craft-building the first time you play a class, since you don’t know their abilities until you level them up. It’s not uncommon for a class to have a build that centers around a higher-level card, but you obviously can’t build towards it if you don’t know it exists. I say the first two-thirds of the game because as you progress you gain the ability to auto-level your characters to higher and higher levels. So if you can auto-level characters to level seven, you can create a new character, level them to level seven to see the first seven level-up options, retire the mercenary, then re-create the character and level them up for real.) 

And that’s just for the player characters. The other side of the equation is the scenarios and enemies. There are a ton of scenarios in the game (over 100!), which provides a massive amount of playability. While most maps essentially just require you to kill everything, there’s still a decent amount of nominal variety in objectives, as well as unique scenario-specific rules you sometimes need to contend with. Each scenario felt unique or distinctive in some way. There probably are actually some scenarios that are similar to each other, but they were placed far enough away from each other that we didn’t notice—plus challenging even the same scenario with a different team will provide an entirely different experience. It felt like every scenario had something to make us groan—which is a good thing, because a groan means there is a nontrivial problem, and a problem requires engagement to solve. 

On top of all that, there are two additional objective sub-systems that provide further variety within scenarios: personal quests and perk missions. Every character gets a “personal quest” when they’re generated, which is a mission they need to accomplish, such as gathering gold, completing missions in a certain part of the game world, or defeating a specific type of monster. Completing a personal quest causes that character to retire (and become unusable), but grants a new character class, new quest, or new item for purchase as a reward (along with a point in “prosperity,” which is the most valuable resource in the game). When starting a scenario, each character also gets a “perk mission” (each character chooses from one of two options) which is a goal they need to accomplish during the scenario. Perk missions include objectives such as killing monsters (or not killing monsters), using items (or not using items), looting gold piles (or not looting gold piles), staying near walls, staying away from your teammates, and so on. Completing a perk mission will award one (or sometimes two) perk points, and getting three perk points unlocks a new perk selection for that character. 

So personal quests and perk missions stack on an additional layer of objectives, which deepens the puzzle of combat even further and makes scenarios even more varied. Perk missions always vary from mission to mission, so even replaying a scenario with the exact same characters twice in a row would lead to two different experiences. (Assuming you attempt to complete the perk missions, at least; there’s no penalty to not completing a perk mission, so you can just ignore them if you want.) 

It’s not a perfect comparison, but Gloomhaven reminds me a lot of Monster Hunter in this respect: they’re both games that provide a complete, unchanging gameplay loop from the very beginning, and seemingly endless variety by dividing the game into missions with a multiplicative variety of factors (such as weapon, monster, and map in Monster Hunter, and classes, monsters, and objectives in Gloomhaven). Additionally, in both games, as you progress a large portion of your increased power comes not from in-game stats but from mechanical and strategic mastery of the game systems. 

Also, like Monster Hunter, Gloomhaven is extraordinarily forgiving at a macro level, which allows it to be ruthless at a micro level. It’s nearly impossible to lose any progress or resources you’ve gained (although more than possible to miss things). When a character runs out of health or cards during a mission, they don’t die, they are “exhausted.” They can’t participate for the rest of the scenario… and that’s it. (In fact, there are some personal quests and perk missions that require you to exhaust characters.) The only way to permanently lose a character is for them to complete their personal quest or for you to choose to retire them (and then you can just create a new character of the same class). Similarly, items can only be lost by selling them to the merchant (from whom they can be re-bought). Even “consumable” items are consumed on a per-scenario basis, rather than permanently. And if you fail a mission… you keep all the experience and gold you gained. 

The difficulty is dynamic, which also ensures you won’t get stuck. Every scenario scales in difficulty based on the number of characters (you can have two to four) as well as your team’s average level. That means every scenario is viable to play with any team at any point in the game, and you can never reach a wall you can grind out of. There are additional optional difficulty adjustments on top of that, if you still find the game too difficult or want additional challenge. 

That being said, because we played the digital version of Gloomhaven, there was another factor that made the game a lot easier than it likely would otherwise have been… 

We save-scummed like mad. 

It’s not the proudest thing to admit, but I’ll be open. It felt like a necessary evil. We probably could have save-scummed less than we did, but I challenge anyone to complete a full, no-reloading campaign of Gloomhaven digital without going crazy. The issue is, during a round you can reload to the card-playing phase of that round, and that’s it. Minor mistakes that would be a quick fix in paper require a full round restart in digital. “Oh, sorry, I have two cards with 41 initiative and I mixed them up.” Swap the cards in paper, restart the round in digital. “Whoops, I had a brainfart and took both of these cards for their bottom actions.” Swap out one card in paper, restart the round in digital. “Wait, I thought my attack had a range of 4, not 3, so I should’ve moved the full 3 spaces I was allowed instead of just 2.” Move your pawn that extra space in paper, restart the round in digital. “Hold on, I was supposed to use an item to create fire on my turn!” Mark the item as used and fire as strong in paper, restart the round in digital. 

Naturally you make these sorts of technical mistakes much more often when you’re a beginner, so the game teaches you to solve every problem by save-scumming. So when that’s what you’re taught… that’s what you do. And once you learn to save-scum to fix minor technical mistakes that wouldn’t be a big deal in paper, you start using it when you step on your teammate’s toes, or draw a bad perk modifier, or the enemies take an action that’s bad for you…. And yes, you can just not save-scum, but, at least to me personally, wasting 40+ minutes of your life (from losing and needing to replay the mission) because of a stupid mistake that you could have fixed (and, given the nature of the game, should be able to fix) but chose not to just does not sound fun. 

The same goes for coordinating actions. I’m sure a decent chunk of our reloads could have been avoided if we planned together better, but fully going over both of our anticipated turns every round just seemed like a huge pain. It would essentially require going through every round twice, once in planning and once in practice. It was much easier to just each do our best and reload when our paths crossed. (That’s not to say we didn’t coordinate at all—but rather than fully going over every proposed action, we checked on general points. “Can you be the one to enter the room this turn?” “Are you going to finish off this enemy this turn, or should I?” “Which hex do you plan on moving to this turn?” “Are you able to create light? How early?”) 

There are some reloads that I feel entirely justified in doing, specifically reloads we used to gain information that we would’ve had in the paper version. Every scenario is divided into rooms (and enemies don’t trigger until you enter the room they’re in). In paper you know the contents of every room (since you need to set them up), but in digital you can’t see what’s in a room until you enter it. So some scenarios have multiple side rooms, where one side room has a treasure chest and the rest just have enemies. So we’d go into all of them to find out which has the treasure chest and then reload—since in paper we’d have that information, and we didn’t feel the need to deal with extraneous enemies. 

(Regarding save-scumming the perk modifiers: the RNG is set at the beginning of the round, so you’ll always draw the same perks in the same order. So you can’t save-scum until you pull a x2 modifier. But if you try to do a big attack and pull a x0, you can save-scum and use a weak attack on the x0 instead.)

Of course, the reason Gloomhaven grew so popular wasn’t just because of its gameplay, but because it had a deep, engaging, branching story entwined with it. Allegedly. I can believe that Gloomhaven’s story, at the time it came out, compared to other campaign games available then, was great. But isolating it on its own merits, I found it merely passable. 

There are two issues holding back the story: scenarios need to be modular, and there can be no set protagonists. (Perhaps I should call them “necessary evils” rather than “issues,” since they’re endemic to the game format.) Your adventuring party can be any combination of classes at any time, so you can’t write any set protagonist into the story. It’s always just a generic “you.” And since the game is open-ended and features multiple paths and side scenarios, the story can’t reference or rely on any events outside of that scenario’s quest chain, which means the depth to which a larger narrative can be woven is severely limited. Don’t get me wrong, I love having a story attached to the campaign, but it feels very much like the window dressing it is rather than a substantive plot. 

I do think playing in digital may also lessen the impact of the story compared to paper. There are branches and alternative paths to the story—but in digital that’s adjudicated automatically and out of sight. There was one side scenario where we were given a clear choice, but other than that we generally just played the quests we were given, which felt linear even if it wasn’t. If we had to manually track the plot flags, we’d see where branches were splitting, which I think would help make it feel like we were making and owning our actual choices. Additionally, playing in digital makes me compare the story to other video games, rather than to board games. 

As far as the stories themselves go, it’s fun learning about the world, and they do a good job of situating each mission. Even though it has no mechanical impact, being told that you’re trying to stop a band of raiders, or raiding a booby-trapped vault, or exploring an ancient temple still furthers differentiates the feel of various missions. The overarching plot, however, just kind of comes out of nowhere at the end and then the game is over. 

There are two other places the story seeps in: road events and city events. Every time you go to a mission outside of the city of Gloomhaven you encounter a random road event, and every time you return to Gloomhaven after a mission you may do a city event. Each event requires you to make a choice from at least two options. They further build up the game world and lore, and have both positive and negative effects. Most events are discarded after drawing, meaning they are only encountered once, and some get shuffled back in, so you can never run out of events. (Some events unlock items and scenarios, so making the wrong choice loses them forever.) There are also events that get added to the deck only after satisfying certain conditions, which means they are a way for the game to continue plot threads. One disadvantage digital has against paper is that you can’t see the result of the other choices you could have made. Which is really more of an annoyance than a real hindrance. There were just a lot of choices where I feel like we definitely made the better choice but got a negative result, and I want to know if those were events where you had to choose between two negatives or if the other result was somehow a positive. 

One thing I want to make clear about the game and the story is that there is essentially no role-playing. Before playing the game I was under the impression that Gloomhaven had role-playing elements like a TTRPG (and I know other people had the same impression)… and it doesn’t. If you want to think like your character you can, but there’s really no opportunity to “role-play.” The only choices they’d really show up in is the character and city events, and those are handled as a team. Plus, the characters are consistently retiring and switching out, so it’s not like you have a dedicated character you’re playing as the entire game. (Actually, you do—because technically you’re not the characters on the missions, but a manager of the mercenary group those characters belong to.) I’m not criticizing Gloomhaven for this, but just making it clear what it is and isn’t. 

Gloomhaven certainly deserves its reputation. Do I think it’s the best board game ever? Probably not. But it’s a fantastic co-op dungeon crawler with strategic depth, lots of customization, and a ridiculous amount of content. You could likely play it forever—but the campaign also provides a great stopping point. The most fun parts of the game were discovering and learning about new classes, so once we found all the classes that part unfortunately stopped, but exploring the possibilities offered by all the classes was fun enough to carry us to the end. The digital and paper version each have their own strengths and weaknesses—but I think the digital version is far superior on balance. (Given how fiddly the game is, it’s really tough to beat the automated set-up and take-down.) So if you like co-op dungeon crawlers, Gloomhaven will definitely not be a haven of gloom for you.