Gloomhaven Makes Your Favorite Dungeon Crawl into a Coopertive Board Game
Gloomhaven will give you that fantasy-adventure RPG feel, with the rules and experience of a legacy-style board game.
There are dungeon-crawling games, there are board games, there are cooperative games, and there are tactical skirmish-style games. But what if you don’t want to chose between all of those and instead want to play all of them at once? Gloomhaven is all of that and more.
Gloomhaven
Gloomhaven is a cooperative, skirmish-based, fantasy-adventure board game. Players work together to get through various combat scenarios. But this isn’t just a one-off dungeon-crawling adventure game. Gloomhaven is built for campaigns. One to Four players go through up to 95 scenarios with a branching story. The campaign feel of the game is comparable to some other games’ “Legacy” formats.
Created by Isaac Childres, and illustrated by Alexandr Elichev, Josh T. McDowell, and Alvaro Nebot, Gloomhaven was first dreamed up in 2013. Childres was inspired by popular fantasy movies and games like Final Fantasy, Willow, Labyrinth, Diablo, and of course, Dungeons and Dragons to make his own fantasy game that was a little like all of those… But also a little different. The game was first pitched as a 2015 Kickstarter campaign, raising $386,104 from 4,904 backers. Then in 2017 a second crowdsourcing campaign raked in a whopping four million dollars from more than 40,000 unique backers. After all of this, Gloomhaven finally started to see a retail release.
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Gameplay
To travel through your party’s adventure and scenario, players and monsters alike move on hex tiles. These tiles represent the various dungeons you’ll be diving through. If you’ve played any tabletop roleplaying game with a hex-grid style map, you’re already very familiar with what you’ll be looking at.
Players pull two cards from their attack modifier deck to play each turn. Each card has a bottom and top half that are pretty different, so players will play one card’s top and another card’s bottom. This is what allows players to move, heal, attack, and generally take actions throughout a Gloomhaven session. As the game progresses, character increase in power. They gain new abilities, and their players can improve the cards in their decks to reflect this.
Typically, dungeons and scenarios in Gloomhaven last between ninety and a hundred and twenty minutes. Each adventure is on the longish side for a board game- though definitely not even close to the longest we’ve seen. But these sessions are often a fair bit shorter than most D&D or tabletop RPG sessions.
Expansions, Alternates, and Sequels
Due to its popularity, Gloomhaven has been expanded upon in a few ways in the last decade.
- Gloomhaven: Forgotten Circles was the world’s first expansion and was released in 2019. It included a new character class (the Aesther Diviner), twenty new scenarios, new items, and new monsters. The story for this expansion was set shortly after the original game.
- Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion was a smaller version of the game that worked entirely standalone. It was originally released in 2020 as a Target exclusive with a goal of appealing to more casual game fans. It has twenty-five new scenarios, some of which are game tutorials. This version is set before the events of the original Gloomhaven campaign.
- Gloomhaven: Buttons and Bugs is a 2023 single-player version of the game.
- A digital release of Gloomhaven game to Windows in 2019 and then macOS in 2021. As of 2021, seventeen characters and all 95 scenarios were available in the digital version.
- Gloomhaven: Grand Festival
- Frosthaven is Gloomhaven‘s standalone sequel. This game takes place in a small northern outpost that mercenaries are trying to protect.
- Gloomhaven: The Roleplaying Game. It’s a tabletop RPG based on a board game based on fantasy movies and tabletop RPGs.
Reception and Awards
It’s fair to say that Gloomhaven is popular. It was 2017’s top rated board game on BoardGameGeek, and has been called a “masterpiece” by players. And of course, it has sold many, many copies. Gloomhaven has also been nominated for thirteen game awards since 20217, and won all but two of them. Some of these awards include the 2018 Origin Award’s “Game of the Year”, the 2018s SXSW Gaming Award’s Tabletop: “Game of the Year”, And the 2017 Golden Geek Awards for Best “Overall”, “Strategy”, “Cooperative”, “Innovated”, “Solo”, and “Thematic” games.
Is Gloomhaven a D&D Game?
No, but it is inspired by D&D. Gloomhaven has much different mechanics and gameplay. But the core of adventuring and dungeon crawling are similar.
How Many Hours Does Gloomhaven Take?
Each session will take between one-and-a-half and two hours. To finish the entire story, you could be playing a cumulative 120 hours or more. Game length depends greatly on your group, how distractable everyone is, and how dedicated they are to completing 100%. But it can take a long time.
Is Gloomhaven Replayable?
It is. But many aspects of the story will no longer be surprises. If you do play to replay, don’t mark or write directly on any of the game components. Instead, write on other paper or tracking sheets. But if you enjoy re-playing video games for slightly different gameplay with slightly different characters, you’ll probably enjoy that in Gloomhaven as well.
Is Gloomhaven Meant to be Hard?
Honestly, yeah. This is a game that’s designed to be somewhat challenging. Difficulty may depend on your character’s level and how many other people are in your party. But scenarios aren’t supposed to be easy to blast through, there’s meant to be a little challenge to it.
Happy adventuring!
