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Board Gaming Era |OT| (Mostly) Unplugged Gaming
- Thread starter XShagrath
- Start date
the worst part of gloomhaven is table and board set up. It fuckin sucks and takes too long. Also there's very little narrative, but a lot of "story" if that makes sense
The actual dungeon crawling is top tier imo. the choices of top/bottom action on the cards (and the way the cards are your abilities AND stamina and you can do all sorts of cool shit with em) is so fun
I have a place I can leave the game up for a month at a time. I'm having a hard time justifying 120$ for solo play.
I play it 2p. About 25 sessions in. A lot of game left in it too.
It is an an expensive game and a big investment, yes. However, in terms of bang for your buck, it is actually ridiculously cheap compared to other dungeon crawlers when you consider the excessive amount of content (including very good post-release support, including 3 free printable campaigns).
Depending on how you feel about solo play, maybe it's worth waiting and seeing how the digital release will be like.
Alright, here are my 2 cents about Gloomhaven:
I've very recently completed the main campaign (mostly) solo, and played a few sessions of the Forgotten Circles expansions.
While this is undoubtedly a great game and a lot of fun, it definitely is not the holy grail of board gaming that everybody on BGG wants you to believe. I think a lot of people are way more in love with the idea of the game than with the game itself.
First let me list a few points that I really enjoyed about Gloomhaven:
- The game is expensive, but it has A LOT of stuff in it. Cards, minis, unlockable boxes, cardboard monsters, campaign tracking board, more cards... And the quality of the components is good.
- The card management system is unbelievably clever and fun. I've never seen something like this in any other games, and it works very well. It's definitely the main draw of the game.
- The RPG elements, like the whole character development aspect, are nicely done. Unlocking new classes that suddenly become available to play never gets old.
Now for the parts of Gloomhaven that are not good:
- This is a "soft" negative as it can easily be rectified, but you absolutely need to spend a few more bucks for an organization system of some sort. With baggies and the small insert that is coming with the box, it takes way (WAY) too long to set up and take down the game. Long enough to discourage people from playing.
- There are a lot of weird difficulty spikes throughout the campaign. Enough to sometime completely halt progression, especially if you play with only two characters (which is the recommended number of characters for solo play). I remember hitting such a wall at least five or six times during the campaign. Which leads to the following point:
- The game plays very well solo, but I recommend playing with at least three characters instead of two. It's because the difficulty balance throughout the campaign is not good, and some scenarios are just impossible to clear with some classes combinations, which I found very frustrating. With three characters, at least there's the chance of having a class in play that is needed for some of those problematic scenarios...
- The story throughout the campaign ranges from uninteresting to bad.
- The character retirement mechanic is badly designed. Sometimes you can get retirement conditions that are impossible to meet depending on your progression in the campaign. That completely blocks the classes unlock process.
- The reason I was personally playing Gloomhaven was for the RPG elements (such as character progression), the dungeon crawling, and the card management system. Yet, once in a while the game insists at throwing at you very badly designed puzzles. For me it was such a drag...
- Unlocking character classes is so much fun! But unfortunately, every other unlocks in the game are a major disappointment. The game makes such a big deal of its locked boxes and envelopes! And working so hard to unlock an envelope to then only be greeted with something completely meaningless is very frustrating to say the least. Also:
- One locked envelope in particular really left a bad taste in my mouth. Unlocking it gives you another very badly designed puzzle that you have to solve throughout the campaign. My copy of the game even had a typo at some point that completely prevented me to solve this puzzle without searching for the solution on the internet. But I think that the most disappointing part of it all was what solving it unlocked. After all this work, the solution gives you something that, if you actually want to use it, makes you spend more money because you need to print all the components yourself. This thing you just unlocked doesn't come in the box...
A note on the expansion:
- The expansion is not very good. It's very puzzle-heavy, and the puzzles are even worst that in the main game. And unforgiving too. It means that you'll need to play many scenarios at least twice: once to figure out the puzzle (and fail the scenario in the process), and a second time to actually clear it.
- They also changed the way the scenarios are presented to the players. The map is now revealed room by room instead of having the whole layout accessible from the beginning. A good idea on paper, but what it ends up doing is creating huge downtime moments during play each time you open a door because you need to stop the game, search for the components, and do the setup for the room.
So this was my experience with Gloomhaven. I feel the need to mention (especially for this game...) that what I just wrote represents my own opinion that was formed after my own experience with the game.
For me the nature of the negative points were enough to make me stop playing after a few sessions in the expansion. I shouldn't have bought it to be honest, I doubt I'll play again.
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I don't know how it is to set up solo, but with two people handling the set up it takes us about 3 minutes which isn't to bad.
Granted we bypassed some of it by just using an app for the monsters.
Thank you very much. You just saved me 120 dollar's.
That was a great review. It covered everything. Thanks again
Keep in mind that a lot of people really like Gloomhaven! I guess it depends on what you like, and what you consider being a deal breaker for your enjoyment in a game. For me, the things I found to be negative in Gloomhaven were very major points.
They maybe don't contain as many components as Gloomhaven, but I think there are better games out there. Especially for solo play, whether you like puzzle solving, or theme-heavy games.
Gloomhaven's biggest issue for me was that it felt like you were solving these high level puzzles on every quest. It became a serious case of analysis paralysis and stopped being fun.
I would have been happy if Gloomhaven was a smaller more manageable game that had simply kept the core hand management.
And yeah, haven't heard great things about the xpac. I'll wait for Isaac's big box xpac instead.
I think that would have been awesome! I hope it could actually happen someday.
There are so much stuff and so many mechanics in this game... And unfortunately, the more I played Gloomhaven, the more all of this stuff kind of began falling apart. I'm really standing by my statement saying that many people are way more in love with the idea of this game than with the actual game itself. After playing the campaign for a while, a lot of bad design flaws become very obvious.
You can regularly find it in the $80 range FYI if you are interested just not 120 interested
It's 99 at cool stuff right now too
I still absolutely love the game (though setup is a slog), but I do admit I house-rule whenever I find things unfair or unfun (especially personal goals).
Oh wow. Thank you for the info. I'll definitely give it a whirl at 80.
Talk about not being true to your word.
I may back Trudvang Legends after all and for all game content addons to boot, now that they've introduced the daily stretch goals to at the very least give backers the plastic/content they're paying for with the 100$ base pledge. But they could've really reacted earlier, been less tone deaf with their campaign and greedily spaced stretch goals and not entirely rely on KS exclusivity for actual game content.
Thing is, I don't like CMON's approach to KS campaigns one bit, but their minis are pretty impeccable for boardgame standards and I'd really like to paint a set. While I don't feel the need to own any mini heavy area control game or a Zombie survival tabletop of theirs, being a narrative, seemingly pretty relaxed game with the token pulling mechanic I might like quiet a bit (could elegantly combine character progression and RNG into a pretty streamlined and fun mechanic) , Trudvang is the game I'd say hamight have very good chance of getting played for me. Not being a 200h campaign affair helps the game more than it hurts it. I'm fine with spending 180h painting and 20h playing. 😝
And lastly, while their Zombicide games and Massive Darkness have the comic style characters I don't like as much and I'm not too interested in Blood Rage or Rising Sun (or Ankh), Trudvang's minis are very faithful to the fantastic artwork and its style.
Still it's going to be the first and last KS game I'm getting from them. It's just the one game in their portfolio that I'd say really speaks to me n terms of what game it is and its style. Not that TL and Altar Quest aren't fixing my mini painting itch for about the next five years anyway...
I may back Trudvang Legends after all and for all game content addons to boot, now that they've introduced the daily stretch goals to at the very least give backers the plastic/content they're paying for with the 100$ base pledge. But they could've really reacted earlier, been less tone deaf with their campaign and greedily spaced stretch goals and not entirely rely on KS exclusivity for actual game content.
Thing is, I don't like CMON's approach to KS campaigns one bit, but their minis are pretty impeccable for boardgame standards and I'd really like to paint a set. While I don't feel the need to own any mini heavy area control game or a Zombie survival tabletop of theirs, being a narrative, seemingly pretty relaxed game with the token pulling mechanic I might like quiet a bit (could elegantly combine character progression and RNG into a pretty streamlined and fun mechanic) , Trudvang is the game I'd say hamight have very good chance of getting played for me. Not being a 200h campaign affair helps the game more than it hurts it. I'm fine with spending 180h painting and 20h playing. 😝
And lastly, while their Zombicide games and Massive Darkness have the comic style characters I don't like as much and I'm not too interested in Blood Rage or Rising Sun (or Ankh), Trudvang's minis are very faithful to the fantastic artwork and its style.
Still it's going to be the first and last KS game I'm getting from them. It's just the one game in their portfolio that I'd say really speaks to me n terms of what game it is and its style. Not that TL and Altar Quest aren't fixing my mini painting itch for about the next five years anyway...
In case you thought Tiny Epic wasn't tiny enough
My Invader pledge arrives today. I think I'm excited? But I probably need to work on selling off all my other Zombicide stuff since I don't really touch that anymore. Invader + Massive Darkness should scratch my Zombicide itch moving forward...
Looking for some advice here:
How do some of you manage to not be absolute hoarders of board games? I have ~350 games in my collection, and I really need to make space for more, but I'm having a hard time getting over the "Oh, we played that once and really liked it." thoughts that pop into my mind. I know it isn't totally rational, because that one time we played it was 4 years ago and we haven't played it since. It's just really hard for me to let go of some stuff that I really should be OK letting go of. Anyone else ever dealt with this? How did you break out of it?
How do some of you manage to not be absolute hoarders of board games? I have ~350 games in my collection, and I really need to make space for more, but I'm having a hard time getting over the "Oh, we played that once and really liked it." thoughts that pop into my mind. I know it isn't totally rational, because that one time we played it was 4 years ago and we haven't played it since. It's just really hard for me to let go of some stuff that I really should be OK letting go of. Anyone else ever dealt with this? How did you break out of it?
Here's one thing I noticed different between Troyes and Black Angel in the dice selection.
In Troyes you can use multiple dice, which is really interesting given you can use opponents dice but have to pay for it and each coloured die represents one of the three different types of cards. It's layers upon layers of options to calculate the best move, until you give up and just go with your gut.
In Black Angel it looks like only one dice gets chosen. Perhaps they streamlined it but the choice there is limited. The complexity i suppose is in how to manage all the different systems as best as possible. I'm still trying to work out the game though.
This is how. ;)
But really, I did a substantial culling a few years back. I mean, I didn't have NEARLY as many games as you, but I went through and pulled games that were just sitting on the shelf taking up space. I only regret getting rid of one game (my near complete collection of Runebound 2e). But otherwise, I looked at it as a way to justify getting NEW games for my collection!
I just got back into board gaming for about a year now and have gotten games faster than I can play. There's just too much good stuff out. Honestly I've set my limit at 100 games, (150 if you include expansions and other small add ons). That's 2 games per week for a year which is so many already. Not only does it take up a lot of space but it's mentally tiring to have a backlog. Also I'm at about 80 games now and have spent about $2000 all up. Having a big game collection means sinking a lot of money into cardboard and plastic and it just makes a lot of sense to have a smaller collection and more cash on hand. Or in other words, there's just no real point to having $10k of cardboard just sitting there.
So personally it makes a lot of sense for me to usually not go for kickstarters, the shipping to Australia usually makes it same as retail anyway.
I'll wait for the retail release plus a bit of a discount before I get a game.
Watch videos online and read the rules first, usually that sorts out the bad eggs.
See if there are any games that are worth more than what you got them for and sell them if you're not going to play them. Usually good games get reprinted anyway.
For me it's mostly thanks to both space, cost and time limitation, so I don't have a choice ^ ^. I have a hard time selling things I already own, so I limit myself when it comes to buying new stuff ( that's how I pretty much stoped my manga collection from growing too much after it got to ~600 volumes ).
That being said I still buy more boardgame than necessary given the few opportunity I have to play them, but that's still only like.. 5-6 games a year ( but often big ones/kickstarters )
Gifting games was also a solution. My parents love Tickets to ride games more than I do, so I gave them my europe copy, and gifted germany and england version on birthday. I still get to play them but I get other people to hoard them for me !
I think Dice Tower did a video on the subject might be worth checking out.
I have a single bookcase for my games. Anything that doesn't fit on the bookcase has to go. So I've reduced the collection down to only games I love.
I have this same exact issue. I have games my wife has never played and we have been married for 10 years. What we are doing is making a list of games and playing every one once. Then we will critique it the next day. If we are on the fence, it will go.
This is our start anyways.
I'm just getting into boardgames, really falling for painting minis too. I've stayed away for so long because I know I don't have space so I'm worried about being in the same boat.bthankfully I have the friends who got me into this who have like closets full of games, so if I wanted one anyway outside of brand new ones, there's a good chance they already own them and they're the ones I'm gonna play with anyway haha.
Fast forward a year and Ive replacedy couch with a pile of board games anyway somehow
Fast forward a year and Ive replacedy couch with a pile of board games anyway somehow
I'm currently going through a purge myself and it's actually quite nice to pair the collection down to the really good stuff. My come to board game Jesus moment was when I realized just how many games I have that we like but never play. XCOM, for instance, is one that my group has liked the few times we've played it but that's just it, in the more than three years I've had it we've played it three times. It may be a good game but there's clearly much more we'd rather play so, to the sell pile it goes. I'm also trying to limit how much of one type of game type I have. I have the WoW adventure game, the Witcher adventure game, and Runebound 3e (plus other games like Legends of Anor that aren't exactly the same but similar). Warcraft is a keeper because of the theme, Runebound because it was a lot more content, which means The Witcher is going. I have both versions of Doom and Gears of War, I don't need another sci-fi shooting game.
Where I give myself some leeway are deckbuilders and dice allocations games. Those are my favorite mechanics as well as my gf's so I have a good bit of those, but still am trying to pare them down some. With the Cerberus Engine games from Cryptozoic I have Street Fighter, all the LotR/Hobbit stuff minus the Smaug expansion, Attack on Titan, and a ton of DC stuff. I like the games but I don't need that many, and since the Tolkien stuff is the most basic it's probably going, though I've not made final decision yet. Though my gf and I did decide that Thunderstone Quest would be the last new deckbuilder we get without getting rid of an existing one.
Apologies for the bit of rambling, just trying to show examples of my process on getting rid of stuff. It sounds like you know the rationale for doing so, you just need to take those first actions. And after you start getting rid of stuff it becomes easier. It's also nice to have trouble deciding what to play because all you have left are games you love instead of just having so much to choose from.
If it's been over a year and you haven't even thought about playing a game, would you really miss? Put some post-its on games with some dates on it (6 months, 1 year, 2 years, whatever you want). If the deadline passes and you still haven't bothered getting them played, get rid of them.
Buying boardgames does not buy you time to play them.
BGG has such poor priorities and that logo isn't inclusive at all, while lazily following current trends for logo redesigns. 🙄 Would it be so hard for them to improve the search function? Forum searches are garbage and the advanced board game search still doesn't let you search by best/recommended number of players.
Yeah that's a huge difference I saw, and it's a huge downgrade.
As bad as I've heard it is, my copy of Time Stories Madame is coming tomorrow and I'm playing it next weekend
Have you played all up to that? My crew try to do 2 a year and we are bad at it, our last one was the dragon one and we sadly hated it. I own them all to be ready though. I hope next one in line is better
I don't have any advice for you, but I hope you can find some comfort in the fact that you're not alone. I'm in pretty much exactly the same situation.
Yeah I've played them all of them up to this point
Here is how I'd rank the expansions I've played
Asylum
Expedition Endurance
Lumen Fidei
Brotherhood of the Coast
Marcy Case
Under the Mask
Prophecy of Dragons
Estella Drive
Of which I'd say the top 4 are all excellent, Marcy is good, Mask and Prophecy are meh, and Estella was terrible
Do you think we should skip the awful ones ? Or man up and just do them all? I already bought them haha
It's hard to say since I have no idea how they plan to have season 2 call back to season 1.
With the announcement of Zombicide 2nd Edition, I'm wondering if this was borne out of the Night of the Living Dead entry failing to come together or if that's going to be offered as some sort of expansion for the KS itself.
Gen Con was interesting attending this year without having followed the industry closely in the past several months. Part of it was the advantage of not feeling like I was missing out on certain products, but I was pretty lost on where to be and who to look in on. Felt I stuck more to who I knew (Nauvoo, Greyfox, the Op, Stonemaier, CMON, Renegade) than being able to look in on everyone else who had smaller booths that were more difficult to either notice or look in on.
Gen Con was interesting attending this year without having followed the industry closely in the past several months. Part of it was the advantage of not feeling like I was missing out on certain products, but I was pretty lost on where to be and who to look in on. Felt I stuck more to who I knew (Nauvoo, Greyfox, the Op, Stonemaier, CMON, Renegade) than being able to look in on everyone else who had smaller booths that were more difficult to either notice or look in on.
Institute a "one in, one out" policy. Get to a number you feel comfortable with and then go from there. I would also recommend adding up exactly how much you've spent over the last 6 months or year. If it makes you uncomfortable, you're probably spending too much and having statistics and actual figures can hopefully help you curtail the high we all get from the promise of a new experience.
I don't even need to add up and am uncomfortable.
Thanks for the suggestions, everyone!
This is my first and probably only CMON Kickstarter pledge. Something about the game really appeals to me. I'm going to get all the gameplay stuff except for the plastic tokens. That new Thorn Beast companion/add on is impossible for me to say no to, lol. I've never painted mini's but I really want to give it a shot with this one.
I did. It was a very small slice, one round of combat, but it is a very interesting battle system. I am really looking forward to the KS now.
What board games have really good fan made content? I know custom scenarios exist for time stories and arkham horror tcg but I've mostly seen pretty bad reviews for them. Not exactly looking for examples of great house rules, but actual new content.
Shadows of Brimstone has Hexcrawl if that counts? Also, a lot of Zombicide games have fan made scenarios. And A Feast for Odin has a bunch of custom solo scenarios over on BGG.
Those are the ones that come to my mind.
I haven't been as hyped up for a game in a while as I am for Dinogenics. I read something rules and watched an unboxing of the first printing version and I want to play it yesterday! Gonna be a long wait for February.
Sabotage from Fowers Games will be shipping soon; copies are supposed to have arrived within the last few days. I watched his tutorial vid and read the final rule book and I think it is going to be a hit for the people who play it. I did see pretty positive reactions from those at GenCon who tried it. It makes me want to boot up some old Splinter Cell for some Spies vs Mercs while I wait. Here's hoping they get the copies turned around and back out the door quick because the Burgle Bros 2 Kickstarter goes live on the 15th, I think, so I need Sabotage to tide me over.
Sabotage from Fowers Games will be shipping soon; copies are supposed to have arrived within the last few days. I watched his tutorial vid and read the final rule book and I think it is going to be a hit for the people who play it. I did see pretty positive reactions from those at GenCon who tried it. It makes me want to boot up some old Splinter Cell for some Spies vs Mercs while I wait. Here's hoping they get the copies turned around and back out the door quick because the Burgle Bros 2 Kickstarter goes live on the 15th, I think, so I need Sabotage to tide me over.
We went through a culling not too long ago. For each game in the collection I asked myself "Would I ever suggest this over something else in my collection?" If not, I asked my wife if she would (I'm the major game hoarder in the family). If the answer for both of us was no, then out it went. The only exceptions were Kill Dr. Lucky since my son loves that one and Dominion since I want to give it one last play to be sure. But since I haven't touched it since before Seaside came out for it and didn't even take the shrink wrap OFF Seaside until earlier this year, it's probably gone as well.
Descent has quite a lot fanmade content. Since I haven't tried any of it, I can't say anything about its quality. But I recently saw that some people designed a complete addon (Sands of the Past). There seems to be quite a lot dedication at least.
That thing is sick! I'd get it for painting alone. But also the newer stretch goal minis were rather good sculpts imo.
That whole campaign is starting to slowly move uphill again and the set of minis is starting to look very compelling. Unfortunately "all in" on gameplay addons already means 245$. 165$ for all the things they label as KS exclusive...
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