Gloomhaven - roguelike dungeon-crawling adaptation of the board game

[Lacrymas]

The UI is fine and I'm allergic to shit UIs.

 

[Sacibengala]

The UI is fine and I'm allergic to shit UIs.

It should have larger fonts, though. My eyes hurt for trying to read it. Maybe with the console port they'll fix it.

 

[agris]

Also I like how you zoom way the fuck in to make it appear more cluttered than it is, no one plays the game like that

Those are all embeds straight off the steam page

That bird should be directed towards yourself. You took a screengrab meant to show off creature models and pitched it as representation of how it actually looks while playing

Listen man, I know times are tough. But just bc someone comes along and says your favorite recent TBT game has a shit UI is no reason to start screaming “bad faith” and accusing them of purposely staging shots to make the game look as bad as possible.

I accept your apology.

I took no screen grabs: rather, I saw Pink Eye speak favorably about the game in another thread. Knowing he is afflicted with a similar degree of autism as myself, and curious about the game, I decided to look into it. Those screens are from steam’s cdn: how could I manufacture them?!

Finding a bloated console/mobile UI doesn’t make the game bad! But defending it the way you all are - with insinuations of bad faith and weird conspiracy theories - is by no means convincing.

 

[Pink Eye]

I took no screen grabs: rather, I saw @Pink Eye speak favorably about the game in another thread. Knowing he is afflicted with a similar degree of autism as myself, and curious about the game, I decided to look into it.

Aww thanks! That means so much, but, I looked at this thread cause I wanted some new games to buy and saw some good comments from Grunker and Lacrymas - I think those people have good opinions about video games - so I got my brother to buy it. Haven't played it yet though.

 

[Grunker]

The Codex Diversity Squad piloted by the monocled mr. Jaedar and myself has set out to seek fame and fortune:

Playing on Hard. After an easy first mission, the poor sods got trounced by an ultrahard sidequest and decided to do the next main quest, which we very very barely lost. It did level up our kind Spellweaver though, so now it's back to Gloomhaven to lick our wounds. Our Scoundrel has now afforded herself a pair of boots to accompany her helmet and inivisbility cloak, while the Spellweaver picked up an invisibility cloak as well. The Tinkerer is set to retire once he has dumped his life savings to The Temple of the Great Oak, so that's where all his money goes. Cragheart is saving up for an armor once he gets his first perk, which will negate the negative effects of heavy armor.

Surely, the glory of such a prestigously named Mercenary Guild is all but assured.

 

[Jaedar]

Playing on Hard.

Which I am totally not regretting, having done the whole tutorial before starting this campaign.

Gloomhaven does not scale to my level.

 

[Yosharian]

You guys are tempting me to pick this up even though I don't really like card games

 

[Grunker]

You guys are tempting me to pick this up even though I don't really like card games

I realize I'm shilling for this game at this point so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but it's not really a card game in the sense of 99% of the roguelikes on Steam. Cards are used to represent your abilities, sure, but you don't draw them from a deck. Rather, you have all of them available at the start of a scenario, and then you slowly expend them. Then you rest, removing one of them from your deck for the rest of that scenario, and get all the rest back. So it's not what you think of when you think "card game," there's no randomized drawing, in fact there's no drawing at all.

However you shouldn't go in expecting an RPG. It's an extremely complex board game with RPG elements - but it's still a board game.

 

[Jaedar]

, but it's not really a card game in the sense of 99% of the roguelikes on Steam.

Yeah, I agree. It feels like they're only cards because shuffling decks is the best way to get randomness over a dynamic set of stuff in a board game environment. Dice are nice but suffer from some issues: you can't make a d13, and removing the '5' result on a d6 means lots of wonky rerolling, etc.

If they rewrote all the rules to remove references to cards and just wrote stuff like "enemies randomly pick their moves each turn" you'd never be able to tell.

 

[Grunker]

, but it's not really a card game in the sense of 99% of the roguelikes on Steam.

Yeah, I agree. It feels like they're only cards because shuffling decks is the best way to get randomness over a dynamic set of stuff in a board game environment. Dice are nice but suffer from some issues: you can't make a d13, and removing the '5' result on a d6 means lots of wonky rerolling, etc.

If they rewrote all the rules to remove references to cards and just wrote stuff like "enemies randomly pick their moves each turn" you'd never be able to tell.

Which is probably exactly what they'd have done if the game had started as a digital product (evidenced further by the changes made to the Enhancement-system, which is less card-like in the digital game because it doesn't have the board game's restrictions).

It does make sense for the player abilities though. The dynamic of picking 1 ability out of 2 "grouped" abilities, then the reverse from another group, are just obviously best visually represented by a card. But that's just it; it's only a visual representation - almost none of what you'd normally associate with the term "card game" is actually in Gloomhaven

 

[Parabalus]

, but it's not really a card game in the sense of 99% of the roguelikes on Steam.

Yeah, I agree. It feels like they're only cards because shuffling decks is the best way to get randomness over a dynamic set of stuff in a board game environment. Dice are nice but suffer from some issues: you can't make a d13, and removing the '5' result on a d6 means lots of wonky rerolling, etc.

If they rewrote all the rules to remove references to cards and just wrote stuff like "enemies randomly pick their moves each turn" you'd never be able to tell.

Which is probably exactly what they'd have done if the game had started as a digital product (evidenced further by the changes made to the Enhancement-system, which is less card-like in the digital game because it doesn't have the board game's restrictions).

It does make sense for the player abilities though. The dynamic of picking 1 ability out of 2 "grouped" abilities, then the reverse from another group, are just obviously best visually represented by a card. But that's just it; it's only a visual representation - almost none of what you'd normally associate with the term "card game" is actually in Gloomhaven

There's the random discard on short rest, but that's a stretch.

It's a really great system.

 

[Sacibengala]

From Discord:

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT

everyone Hi to all & to each and every Mercenary! We have important news to share regarding the future of Gloomhaven. We want to let you know what the plan is for the months to come.

As you may already know, Saber Interactive are busy working on the console versions for Gloomhaven but they also started to work on the PC version.

They have developed a deep understanding for the game during the many months they have already spent working on the console version, and we are excited to expand their involvement even further, especially regarding PC.

We are actively discussing with Saber Interactive to define exactly what this involvement will mean in the future. Gloomhaven is an important game for us and we are continuing to support it with Saber, ensuring it gets the attention, love and support it deserves.

A very heartfelt THANK YOU to Flaming Fowl Studios for the absolutely incredible work they have done on Gloomhaven, and once again, we also thank you all for your continued support these past 3 years. No one could have done it like them, with such passion, dedication, and availability to the community.

We wish them all the best as they start work on their next project and we can’t wait to play it!

And finally, to our amazing community, we hope you will keep on being present and active like you've always been – you guys are the reason we do what we do! And you're a key part of what this game is made of.

 

[pakoito]

Hmmmmmmm

 

[Vic]

Just started playing this game and so far a very pleasant experience going through the tutorial missions. But the game seems to have some performance issues on PC.

 

[Serus]

The UI is fine and I'm allergic to shit UIs.

It should have larger fonts, though. My eyes hurt for trying to read it. Maybe with the console port they'll fix it.

THIS! I like the game but i just skip some of the text for the same reason. I only know the Jaws of the Lion part 100% but only because i'm playing it in boardgame form.

Vic​

Strange. No problems for me. At least not anything worth mentioning.

 

[pakoito]

I'm craving some Gloomhaven but not Gloomhaven. What other boardgamey tactics/crawling games are recommended? Tainted Grail?

 

[Lacrymas]

I'm craving some Gloomhaven but not Gloomhaven. What other boardgamey tactics/crawling games are recommended? Tainted Grail?

Trials of Fire and Tainted Grail at the top of my head.

 

[Grunker]

I'm craving some Gloomhaven but not Gloomhaven. What other boardgamey tactics/crawling games are recommended? Tainted Grail?

Despite searching for exactly that I’ve yet to find anything that really satisfied me.

Trials of Fire is nothing like Gloomhaven. It’s a roguelike card game.

 

[pakoito]

I didn't like ToF a lot either. I'll try Tainted Grail if it doesn't fry the steam deck.

 

[covr]

pakoito It runs well on a steam deck. Tainted Grail is more like Slay the spire, and I guess you are looking for more combat related experience. I recommend SOVL, base game is free, it is basically 6th edition of warhammer fantasy battles. Really fun game, see other thread on Codex, but as it's free there's no risk in trying it out.

 

[Lacrymas]

What does a wargame have to do with Gloomhaven? But added to my to-try list anyway ;d

 

[ERYFKRAD]

What does a wargame have to do with Gloomhaven?

Gloomhaven is just war on a budget.

 

[pakoito]

What does a wargame have to do with Gloomhaven?

Gloomhaven is just war on a budget.

It's more resource maximization puzzle than anything else, but eh, why not try war too.

 

[whydoibother]

What does a wargame have to do with Gloomhaven?

Gloomhaven is just war on a budget.

Gloomhaven is a puzzle game more than anything else. Which makes the random attack rolls extremely infuriating, and the main stretegy is averaging the results out.

 

[Lacrymas]

Now that I've thought about it some more, there are 3 other games that come to mind - Warhammer Quest 1/2, Etherlords 2 and another one which someone will have to help me with. It's literally like Gloomhaven with characters and cards and shit, but I can't remember its name. I thought it was HeroQuest at first, but it's not. I'll try to find it. It has more simplistic graphics than Gloomhaven and iirc it's *not* based on a tabletop game, but plays and looks like one. Grunker might know because iirc he was the one who told me about it.