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Game details Designer: Isaac Childres

Publisher: Cephalofair Games

Players: 1-4

Age: 12+

Playing time: 90-150 minutes

Price: $99 (£77) on Kickstarter, $140 (£109) at Amazon Isaac ChildresCephalofair Games1-412+90-150 minutes

Gloomhaven, the new cooperative, campaign-driven dungeon crawl board game from designer Isaac Childres, is big. Really big.

The game’s campaign—which is composed of a possible 95 different dungeons—will easily take you 100 hours to complete. Riffling through the game's box for the first time, I couldn’t stop laughing at the absurd bounty of it all. Eighteen oversized punchboards holding hundreds of tokens greet you as you start diving through the contents; beneath them are thousands of cards belonging to dozens of decks, seventeen miniatures (each held in their own little box), various wooden pieces, and an enticing array of sealed boxes, envelopes, and books.

But beyond the game’s huge box and mind-boggling amount of content, Gloomhaven is also a very big deal in board game land. The game’s 2015 Kickstarter pulled in a respectable $386,000 from almost 4,900 backers, but with the benefit of a couple years of steadily growing hype and effusive praise from early reviews, the game’s second printing, now on Kickstarter, has secured over $3.1 million from over 32,000 backers as of this writing. When it comes to overall buzz among hardcore board gamers, Gloomhaven is about as big as it gets.

Note: Because of Gloomhaven's length, I have not played the entire campaign. I can't definitively comment on late-game story or balance, but I don't foresee much changing from what I've already experienced.























A new hope

It’s not difficult to understand why dungeon crawlers are so massively popular in gaming. Perhaps only second to true tabletop RPGs, dungeon crawls are the ultimate in escapist fantasy. There’s something undeniably seductive about the idea of descending into dark catacombs, knocking down doors that should probably be left closed, and introducing a beholder to the business end of your axe. If you’re not into straight-up roleplay, a dungeon crawl board game lets you get an RPG fix without the “talking like an elf” overhead.

For the majority of games in the genre throughout the years—from old school classics like Warhammer Quest all the way up to modern genre mainstays like Descent or Imperial Assault—dungeon crawler gameplay has generally remained comfortably familiar. Your character has a spread of RPG-like stats, and you use movement points to hop around a grid and skirmish with monsters. When you attack those monsters, you throw some dice and see what happens.

But the board game world is so lousy with campaign-driven dungeon crawl board games that any new entry into the genre needs to justify its existence. More and more, game publishers seem to be trying to elbow their way into the crowded marketplace by shoving as many plastic miniatures into their designs as possible.

But Gloomhaven is different. Gloomhaven characters do not have ability scores, nor—blasphemy of blasphemies—is there a single die in the game. Instead, Gloomhaven has cards... and they work really well.

Hand management

Characters start each scenario with a certain number of cards (usually around 10) dictated by their class. Everything you do in the game—moving, attacking, healing, looting, setting traps, spawning familiars—everything is determined by these cards and the order and configuration in which you play them.

Each card has a top action and a bottom action. You have to play two cards each turn, and you have to pick the top action of one card and the bottom action of the other. Generally, top actions let you attack, while bottom actions are keyed to movement abilities (and you can always use a top action as a generic “attack for two points of damage” and a bottom action as a generic “move two spaces”).

Take the card to the right, for instance. If you play it for the top action, you can attack two adjacent enemies for three damage apiece. The bottom action, on the other hand, would let you move three hexes (and since you’re jumping, you can vault over obstacles and enemies).

But not all cards stick to the “attack/move” archetype. The top action on the brute’s "Eye for an Eye" card lets you retaliate for two points of damage every time you’re hit by an enemy. Its bottom action lets you heal yourself or an adjacent ally. And those are cards from the game’s simplest class. Take a look at this starting card from the more complex “Mindthief” class:



The number in the middle of each card is your initiative. The lower the number, the earlier you’ll act in the round. (You pick one of your two played cards to be your “leading card” and use that card’s initiative).

You can discuss tactics with your teammates, but you have to speak in general terms. Instead of saying, “I’m going to move on initiative 23 and hit that bandit for three damage," you'll say something like, "I'm going to act early in the round, and I'll try to finish off that bandit." It sounds a little weird on paper, but it works surprisingly well at simulating the chaos of battle while still letting you work effectively with your party.

Also adding a wrinkle to combat are the game's combat cards, which act as modifiers to your attacks. Each player has his or her own deck of 20 of these cards, and every time you make an attack, you'll draw a card from the deck and apply its value. They range from -2 to +2, so their variance is pretty low, but they provide a bit more uncertainty to the proceedings.