Recent reviews by good.duck

Gloomhaven delivers the turn-based top-down dungeon crawler experience through the limitations of a ~10 card deck. Your deck diminishes over the course of the dungeon, using cards for actions or movement. Taking excessive damage will also cost you cards, sometimes more than half your deck in a single turn if you are very unlucky, which can make your run very short.

The idea of fusing movement and actions into a limited set of action cards is novel, but ultimately given the games aggressive RNG this will mean most players will exhaust their turns part way through a dungeon. There are certain classes with the ability to restore discarded cards, which my party relied on heavily.

The game itself is designed to be punishing, but mostly not in a way that can learned or overcome. In our experience, rolls typically skew unfavorable. Using one of your ~10 cards for an action doesn't mean it will happen, often you will fail a dice roll and just waste one of your precious cards. Our party began at Normal difficulty, and after failing to clear the first mission more than 6 times, we tried other missions, and also failed all of those. Eventually we began periodically lowering the difficulty which allowed us to finally progress. There appears to be a massive disparity between the games easiest difficult and all other difficulty settings. Ultimately we had to choose between an unchallenging easy difficulty and an unassailable Normal difficulty. As you progress the game does become somewhat manageable as you can afford items and unlock new cards.

The game also has "encounters" which occur between dungeons. They involve a bit or story followed by a binary choice. Regardless of the choice, most encounters will hurt your party, either by taking away your progress towards action points, money, or giving your party a debuff at the start of the next dungeon. There is no way to predict which choice will provide what detriment, the only way to learn this is through experience and repetition. There is also a chance that encounters can benefit a party, but these appear to be extremely uncommon.

Playing with friends, the game needs to be reset roughly every other dungeon due to technical issues such as desync, crashes, and other bugs. The game has a dedicated bug report menu, which our host used frequently. The game does not allow players to rejoin mid-turn: you have to wait until turns are over, so the host ends up having to play many of other players moves. Rejoining is not a guarantee that users will be able to retake control of their characters and we experience several soft locks where our only solution was to kick all players and stream the hosts perspective in a voice call.

I write this review after having narrowly completing an escort dungeon by one turn before exhausting our last standing players deck. We are not sure if it was a deliberate design choice or buggy pathfinding AI, but the NPC we were required to escort would not move if any enemies anywhere in the dungeon were positioned in a doorway space. It took many turns during the session to even understand how to get them to move, as they just stood by at the entrance turn after turn.

The game is not bad, I personally think the aesthetic of the game is wonderful. The dungeons feel somewhat underwhelming in design, but the game definitely captures a tabletop map and deck game motif. The abilities are varied and choosing which card to play definitely involves understanding, strategy, and a degree of chance. It definitely involves a different mindset. The games story is largely driven by each dungeon, episodic and sparse. The game does provide art and narration.

This is perhaps one of the few games where I do not feel a sense of accomplishment when overcoming difficulty, and unfortunately felt strongly enough to leave a negative review. It's a nice game if you're a glutton for punishment, but I do not think most people would find this game enjoyable. The game will roll the dice, and bad rolls are extremely punishing and will make your experience short.

yes

they should make a sequel

its got puzzles