While our original favorite series of games (Railways of the World) was sufficiently complex, it was never the "hotness" of the hobby tabletop board game community. However, in 2018 we ramped into a lot of the Board Game Geek top 20 list and have found a lot of love in Terraforming Mars, then Viticulture, then Pandemic Legacy Season 1 (see shadowbox below, minor spoilers, made as an awesome gaming room decoration by Kelley following our completion of the campaign), then Spirit Island, and finally Gloomhaven. As you can see, a move towards legacy games and also towards co-op games.
Yes, I took the plunge on Gloomhaven at the end of 2018 when I could get it on a deal. And then proceeded to soak in a lot of YouTube videos, reddit threads, and the like on both organizing the behemoth of a game, and then preparing for our first plays. Indeed, I think organizing the game was almost as much fun as preparing for the first play, but that's just me. For reference, I went with the YASS solution using Plano boxes and a separate file folder for the map tiles, to make setup as quick and easy as possible. Better cost-wise than investing in one of the Broken Token organizers, as I don't want to commit to doubling the cost of such an expensive game until I know it's a household classic for us. We will also be playing with the Gloomhaven Helper app, as it cuts out over 50% of the fiddly component overhead and smooths the gameplay experience significantly, in my opinion.
Kelley initially expressed intimidation by the sheer bulk of the game components, etc. but I think it's about the same or perhaps less complex than Spirit Island, which we've both taken to really well (it doesn't help that the theme, while very Game of Thrones, does not appear to be really her thing). So we will see how it goes. If nothing else, I think I will play the game solo even if Kelley doesn't like it for the long term, as the puzzle-solving nature of the scenarios is a lot of fun for me. As hobby gamers, it would be silly for us to not try the consensus number 1 game of the past 3-4 years, so we'll try it and see if it hits as well as the other complex and/or campaign games we've been enjoying.
So to the campaign. Since this is a narrative story, I'm going to keep records of how we did to look back at later and enjoy, assuming (again) that we end up loving this game over the long haul. Our party starts with a Cragheart named Hamilton (me) and an as-of-yet unnamed Spellweaver (Kelley). We grab some initial items from Gloomhaven town and head out on our first mission.
Black Barrow, Scenario 1
On the road we had a chance to shoot at some birds to try and make a meal, but we opted not to waste our arrows. Having no negative effect, we climbed down the stairs into the Barrow and faced our multiple rooms of opponents, mostly some guards and archers. I didn't do a full on rules explanation to Kelley beforehand, so we just played with all Level 1 cards and learned as we went. I also set the difficulty on easy (0) because this is apparently the hardest the game gets when your initial characters don't have much perks/items and you don't know what you're doing yet. Only major rules mistake from Scenario 1 that I know of is we forgot to draw Battle Goal cards, so we didn't end up with a chance to earn some checkmarks towards perks on the character sheet.
Regardless, we handled the three rooms of the Black Barrow without too much hassle. The Spellweaver ended up within a turn or two of running out of cards exhaustion, but it feels like that's going to be normal given the small beginning hand size of 8, even with the one card that allows her to reclaim all from the lost pile. We made it to the end to find that our quarry was in another castle, so to speak. We did manage to loot the treasure chest in the final room, opening up a new scenario off in the mountains that looks a bit intimidating for our starting party.
Although we kept the personal goal cards secret during the first scenario/play, after more research online it seemed that our duo would work better if we knew about each other's personal goals and quests. Not so much to be able to predict or control character retirement, but just to help explain the motivations of the characters and give them more depth. So we did that, Kelley is on the quest for augmenting ability cards which we obviously haven't unlocked yet. My quest is element hunting, which requires completing a scenario in 6 different world regions on the map, so that will take Hamilton the Cragheart a while as well.
Barrow Lair, Scenario 2
For our second play, we started up by just going to the linked second scenario rather than heading back to town, as we didn't earn enough gold or XP to make any big changes yet. We did up the difficulty to normal (level 1) based on how successful we were when on easy in the first scenario. In this scenario, you work through an initial small room and then go into a central room with 4 other new doors leading off of it, which is also where you have your first encounter with a boss character. His special abilities are (1) raise the dead and (2) jump around the room opening those other 4 doors, which of course have rooms with more bad guys behind them. He also had 2-3 times more health than a normal minion we've encountered so far, so this will be a grind of a fight.
To be continued...
