10 Things I Learned from Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion
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- Опубліковано 8 лип 2024
- Jamey discusses the top 10 things he learned from playing Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion.
00:00 - Introduction
02:22 - Creator’s Principles
05:10 - Collaboration and Cooperation
08:03 - Game Length and Repetition (also see: • Repeating vs Failing F... )
14:07 - Asymmetry and Discovery
18:10 - Curse Cards
23:00 - Enemy AI
25:18 - Mission Objectives
28:20 - Progression
29:55 - Scenario Book and Scaling
33:45 - Tutorial
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video editing by Joe and reviewed by Cody
Intro animation by Jeff Payne vimeo.com/jaaronpayne - Ігри
If you draw your X0 card, you don't shuffle it back until the end of the round. So for the current round you know that it has been played. Also Blessings/Curses are removed from the game once drawn.
Ah, I see! That's my misunderstanding, then, and I'm happy to hear that. :)
think you just played worng, curses are removed once drawn, just as blesses
also unless you mess up previously, you should only have the standard one x0 card in your deck, you also get plenty of ways to give yourself advantage on attacks aka draw 2 cards and take the better one
Jaws is a masterpiece for taking a sprawling and intimidating game, scaling it down, introducing it in very palatable bite-size pieces to players who would otherwise never play it, AND in a physically scaled-down version (less table space, smaller box, cheaper price) which increases its marketability/accessibility.
Case in point is that this is one of the first games I bought for solo play when I initially got into modern tabletop games last year. I also just recently taught it to my wife and friend by playing scenarios 2 and 3 and we’re going to start meeting regularly to (hopefully) play through the entire campaign. We are all very unlikely to ever touch Gloomhaven or Frosthaven, but this is perfect for letting us still engage with the Gloomhaven world and system.
I haven’t played many other “introductory” or scaled-down games like Jaws but I think many of them fail in two main ways. They don’t really introduce the game by having the players learn the rules piecemeal and playing a smaller subset of the rules before learning more. Instead, the rules are simplified and content cut out, so even if you play a hundred hours of the introductory game you still don’t know how to fully play the game it was based on. Jaws not only introduces you to Gloomhaven with tutorial scenarios, but also by the end of the tutorial you are more or less playing full Gloomhaven.
Maybe it’s easier to do the above with a campaign game, but I’ve also seen elements of successful introductions to games/expansions by having modules that can be progressively added as players get more familiar with the game, for example with Viticulture Essential and Tuscany.
I appreciate the deep dive style of this video. We enjoy having longer form conversations to get more insights.
This video caused a lot of conversation in our house. Well done. One thing I wanted to mention for your consideration is related to cooperation. You discussed how you sometimes have to make choices about pursuing personal goals versus contributing to the cooperation of the mission. However, when my husband and I play, we try to help each other obtain personal goals since the personal goals rarely interfere with each other. That way, we obtain the benefits that help us as a group. In other words, even the personal goals become a cooperative element for us, so it doesn't feel like a choice of me vs. the group at any point. I recognize that's not a design element but a player choice; however, some rulebooks include notes or strategy tips, and I can picture a tip related to this idea to encourage players to work together to achieve personal goals.
Our group play with the battle goals secret. I think the intention for this rule is to give the thematic touch of us being mercenaries forced to band together for a purpose. Does make the game more challenging but so far I've been lucky to complete every one of mine.
When you upgrade your character, you can buy perks that enhance your deck, and by that you can affect the probabilities of the null cards (which you confused with the curse cards). If you put more bonus cards, the odds of drawing a null will lower.
The thing with video games and repetition is that many offset this with save points. There's some that don't and that has its own market appeal but most games benefit from having a clearly understood gameplay loop and knowing what this is allows you to pace the save mechanism, whether the length of a level or simply saying how many places along the way allow you to establish a respawn that's further into the part of the story.
Sometimes this is entirely player driven allowing for complete flexibility but even when it's not the most common savepoint would be close to the big confrontation that closes out a level/narrative arc; so in the situation where you get 'that close' you can repeat the part you failed in rather than either repeating the entire level or feeling like you were handed a free pass which I personally wouldn't find satisfying in a combat game.
Wow, this is an amazing analysis to listen to. Thank you for this content, Jamey.
JotL is fantastic, easily is my top 3. Something you didn’t mention, and probably because it won’t apply to you, but if you enjoyed Jaws enough to want to play original Gloomhaven afterwards, as we plan to do, the characters from Jaws are compatible with the main game. That is amazing.
We are clearing out some side missions, and then are tackling the back half of the main campaign of Jaws. Been playing for 4 months now, looking forward to what comes next!
After having played both Gloomhaven and Jaws of the Lion with people who had never played before, I would NEVER introduce new players to the Gloomhaven world by teaching them how to play Gloomhaven. I would always start with Jaws of the Lion.
I see several comments about the curse cards, but I think you meant the regular "miss" card from the base deck (or whatever it's called!), because that one stays in the deck (curse cards don't). But regardless the effect is the same: frustration! I tend to play advantage items when I'm about to do a powerful or critical attack, just to make sure that card does not ruin it, especially if the deck is getting thin, but it has happened several times that I was out of advantage items and drawing that nasty card made us lose the game for sure, and it never feels good to lose because of bad luck.
You're right on the money with this 9:35. That's why the Steam version completely replaced the tabletop Gloomhaven. It handles the enemy AI, card shuffling, elements and removes set up/tear down. We can play 3 missions in the time it would take to play 1.
Great video, Jamey! I am a die-hard Gloomhaven fan. I've only got two side scenarios left in Gloomhaven proper, I've finished JOTL, and I'm a healthy amount into Forgotten Circles. I love the mechanics of the game. I love the variety of enemies and rooms, though the frequency of the "kill all enemies" goal does grate on you after a while. JOTL definitely made it harder to return to the world of regular Gloomhaven, since it did such a great job streamlining things. The tutorial was a delight to play--just masterfully designed.
My fiance and I are playing through the campaign of My City right now, and I just love how it basically is a long tutorial. The new mechanics are introduced in such a gradual way to not overwhelm or scare off anyone. Really nice. Also, I gotta shout out the Quick Start cards and guides for Wingspan. I'm actually going to use them again today to introduce my family to Wingspan. I've used the guides 3 other times (at least) for groups, and they're a hit every time!
Thanks as always for your thoughtful discussions and decisions!
Thanks for sharing! I'm glad you enjoyed the swift-start guides. I mentioned both them and JotL in my video about tutorials last week too. :)
There is an official variant (at least in Gloomhaven) where Curse cards and the null card are changed to a -2, but it also change the x2 or bless cards to +2 to balance it out.
It's something that you might want to consider playing with 😉
I like that! Though I do like the x2. :)
@@jameystegmaier It's your game, you can always play it the way you want after all. Isaac won't be coming after you for bending the rules. At least, I don't think so lol
Very good points. Thanks Jamey.
My girlfriend and I have played about 20 hours of Jaws of the Lion, and we’re on Scenario 10.
We’ve been fortunate enough to only lose 1 scenario so far, and have won 4 or 5 scenarios with 1 or 2 turns left.
The skin-of-your-teeth victories are the reason we love Gloomhaven. We feel a real sense of accomplishment and pride. But man… I worry one day we’ll lose a 2-3 hour game on the last turn then Gloomhaven will go sit on the shelf for a year for “bad behavior.”
With regard to the MISS card… it feels far less punishing once you’ve had an opportunity to buff your modifier deck.
Some characters, like Hatchet, are eventually able to remove all negative modifiers from their deck EXCEPT for the MISS card. Hatchet becomes an extremely proficient killer, and much of the game’s tension fades away as a result. At that time, the MISS card is a humble reminder that even the most carefully laid plans fall apart.
I've played 20 hours with my wife and we've just got to scenario 6. We lost to scenario 4 a total of 3 times before we finally did it. Struggled with the Hatchet, Voidwarden combination for that one.
I like this formula better than a top-10. Thanks for sharing this.
This tutorial is fantastic, along with the ease of the map book. I agree that the time increase hurts for us too. My son was soooooooo excited for this last summer (7.5 years old at the time). My mother-in-law even started the campaign with us. They loved it after the first two scenarios. By the third, it got a little complicated for my MIL, but for my son it was the length. He actually understood the strategy with his Red Guard at times better than me helping him, but he couldn't take the game length once we got to scenario 4. Really enjoy the game, the leveling up, but still just a little long. Hoping to eventually pick it back up.
That’s really impressive for your son.
Thanks for the video, Jamey. So far we've played 7 scenarios and loss 1. We chose to fail forward and punish ourselves by not taking the experience or loot we gained in that scenario but still took the end scenario rewards. At 4 players, it's been about 2 hour per session and we have no desire to repeat a scenario at that length.
I've seen your video on failing forward and it was an eye opener for me. Our average time for gloomhaven is long, 3+ hours.
We don't fail often, but we did the last time we played. I suggested that since we got so close to winning we should just consider that we won, because I had no interest in repeating the same scenario. I was happy to not get the victory bonuses, I just don't want to repeat it.
The party decided they'd prefer to win legitimately :(
We've played through the whole campaign of Gloomhaven and JotL. Most scenarios take us 2-3 hours at 4 players. It sucks when we lose a scenario, but that luckily doesn't happen very often at all. I'd say fewer than ten times total.
Curse cards are removed from the deck when revealed (they don't get shuffled in), but I presume you meant the "miss" card that each deck starts with, which does get shuffled back in (as opposed to the "curse" cards that are sometimes added as a result of getting hit by enemy abilities). These are actually a feature of Gloomhaven that I've really come to appreciate recently when playing another co-op game, Marvel Champions, which I find often lacks tension due to turns being entirely deterministic -- the complete lack of any sort of RNG means that you can sit down, stare at your hand of cards for several minutes, and math out an optimal turn before you start to play cards.
While that deterministic style of play can be a fun "puzzle" experience for solo players, it makes for a much less engaging cooperative experience. In Gloomhaven, the fact that you can never be 100% certain that an attack is going to hit for lethal means you have to improvise a lot more, which often means saving your best cards or relying on teammates as a contingency, and taking more calculated gambles -- yes, I could take a turn to grab that coin, but it means less margin for error on future turns -- can I afford that?
I find it interesting to note that Marvel Champions has actually released hero packs which address the "problem" of turns being "too deterministic," with heroes like Scarlet Witch. (She has a mechanic of revealing cards to get a random effect -- with the possibility that you might not get one of the effects you want.) And players *love* playing with heroes like Scarlet Witch -- probably for the same reason that they love rolling dice in DnD, or drawing modifier cards in Gloomhaven. Yes, sometimes you roll a critical failure, or draw a miss, but that's an inherent part of the tension that is part of the game's design. It's very seldom a "Okay, I missed so we failed the mission and have to start over" -- much more often a, "Okay, I missed and we have to deal with an unexpected challenge -- shall we put our heads together and try to scheme a way out of this new predicament?" (And if the margins I'm skating on are so razor thin that a single bad roll is enough to lose me the mission, that failure feels kind of "earned" -- for me,part of the fun of games like these is that they let you employ a "risky" or "greedy" play strategy with no margin for bad rolls, but sometimes you get punished for it.)
It has been quite awhile since I have played, but I thought curse cards are removed after you draw (the standard nil card is shuffled back in though). I might be wrong though or it may be scenario dependent. It definitely feels bad to draw a miss regardless!
Both blessings and curses are discarded after played
It's a brilliant game design for sure, I'm always in awe at how often we end up finishing a scenario and we're down to our very last cards, it feels very satisfying! Given that cards are a timer in this game (which is very innovative), it was critical that each scenario length be right on the money, including how many monsters there are relative to number of characters and what experience levels are in play, so kudos to Isaac...
I love the game and wanted to take this opportunity to give a few criticism that are hopefully constructive for future games (for Isaac or yourself Jamie for adventure games), here we go:
1) For a game that often feels like a strategic and tactical combat simulation, there can be some frustrating lack of realism, I'll give a few examples:
- my character can throw a special hatchet, and it needs to recover the hatchet on the spot where it landed so it can be used again, great! But sometimes my partner ends on that spot and cannot loot it and throw it back to me... In action movies you often see characters throwing weapons or ammo at each other, that's cooperative, it feels "natural", so it inevitably feels frustrating in the game when it's not possible... It's a missed opportunity to make the game more satisfying, more realistic, more cooperative...
- in some battles, rooms end up littered with dead corpses, but somehow those corpses magically "disappear" (like in many video games), so they are never tripping hazards, and they never slow down anyone, that doesn't feel right. Perhaps there should be a system in place indicating that if there's a dead corpses on the floor (indicated by a coin), it should take an extra move to go through it, until some character stops there (or next to it with the proper loot card) and loots the coin/moves the body out of the way... Some monsters are bigger than others (rats are small and perhaps dead rats don't take a lot of space for example), so perhaps this should just be a special attribute for some monsters.
- I really wish there was a way to not see other rooms until we open doors, something that was easier to do with the regular Gloomhaven but not easy still (one player would always see the full map). Perhaps the game could come with a way to cover/uncover certain areas? On one hand it's nice to see the big picture (whole map) to strategize, but it hurts the realistic aspect of the game.
2) Complexity: it's nice to have a great tutorial, but I've gone through about 70% of the game now, and I can't even begin to describe how many times we had rules "hesitations" throughout the game... In many cases, we got it downright wrong, and only figured it out later after checking forums on BGG! The game is more complex than it seems. I found that in many cases, I was looking for a specific set of instructions that was not necessarily in the glossary booklet, and I had to look through all the scenarios of the tutorial to find where it was explained. I think that having stickers to add to the rulebook as the game progresses (like Pandemic Legacy does) would have been helpful perhaps to introduce new elements. We also found it very difficult to remember what to do between scenarios, to a point where we ended up printing an "end of scenario" quick sheet on BGG...
3) There's too much to do when your turn begins or ends, and we often forgot them and wished there was a clever way to remind us... For example, we often forgot to get damage when we had a damage token (which is very small and hard to spot), or we often forgot to move the "infused" elements at the end of our turns (very finicky aspect of the game in our opinions). Once again, I think the game would really benefit from having a mechanism to streamline all of this (please not an app), even a simple player aid... I think players easily forget because they have their noses in their cards or the map, their brains are highly focused on what optimal cards to play or the optimal angle/distance for an attack, that all these administrative tasks are washed out. I like what Praga Kaput Regni did with the cubes in indentations that prevent wheels from turning, little reminders like that go a long way.
4) game length: some games lasted way over 4 hours for us (2 players), which was fine for us (we even lost and had to redo a few!), but admittedly it's tough for many players, so perhaps the designer should include an "estimated game length" so players who prefer short games or are in a mood for a shorter game can pick the appropriate scenarios. The game branches out and give multiple scenario options, so it would be easy to always offer at least two scenario options (one long, one short), or maybe even a medium option. It's weird because we always have the same of cards in our hands when we start, so you would think all games should last the same amount of time, but due to complexity it's not the case.
I don't mind redoing scenarios if I had fun but admittedly not everyone likes restarting. Videogames have this concept of "checkpoint" that I think is crucially missing here... It's fine to say the game is like a video game and forces you to restart if you fail, but all modern video games have checkpoints, so it's a step backward here.
5) This has been mentioned before and Isaac is taking it into consideration for Frosthaven, but the scenario is not the greatest in Gloomhaven JOTL... The event cards in particular at the end of the scenarios are always a lackluster, they are very binary (it often felt like a coin flip: "get money if you were lucky!").
To be clear, I am not looking at a "novel" quality, I don't like to spend my time reading when I play, but I'm looking for something more meaningfull, with real repercussions in the story, and real surprises/branches.
6) I found that as the game progressed, I was less and less interested in looting... I had a lot of money but few interesting items to buy, and I was happy with the items I had. Maybe the game could introduce an element of bribery so we could use the money for something else than buying items? Or maybe some monsters could drop something else than coins? You can tell the designer was trying to make looting more attractive by adding those "be the player who collected the most money" goals, but we often get different goals so looting becomes pointless...
One issue with these story games is while they excel in immersion they lag in replayability. I thought Gloomhaven looked interesting but after looking at the number of cards and setup I waited for Jaws of the Lion which was much more streamlined. After watching gameplay I realized I would struggle to get into the original game due to the setup time and length. It was brilliant to get away from tiles to scenario books. Tiles don't make sense unless they are used in a way something like the D&D Adventure system where they build a dynamic environment. If they are only ever used to build a static scenario then a scenario book just makes sense and is much more streamlined. To be honest I think the modifier cards could really be replaced with two or three different die where instead of reshuffle a particular modifier option has you switch which die you are using which has different options. This would achieve the same kind of randomness with the knowledge that options have been lost due to a shift in which die is used. It also cuts down on the number of cards one has to deal with.
re:~10:30
If one player is taking longer than others during a simultaneous phase, that can't be improved by switching to a turn-based system. There's no problem here that's unique to simultaneous play, so I don't think it's a special consideration for the designer. In fact, as you point out elsewhere, simultaneous play naturally reduces downtime. If anything, players causing others to wait while considering a move is a special problem of turn-based games.
I was thinking the same thing.
I absolutely agree with you regarding the repetition of failed missions (& I understand your "failing forward" video better for it). We have been working our way through the tutorial; however we have not been able to get past scenario 4 -- and it's not even close. We've played 3 or 4 times but it feels so defeating that we have currently shelved it for the time being. The other part of that is the player elimination. In one of those failed plays we had a character die in the first turn. Then, over an hour later of just two of us playing, we finally met the initial objective only to have the secondary objective (kill the rest) and still couldn't win. That was actually the time we got the furthest -- when one of the three players was cut out of basically the entire game. We've done the suggestions to make it easier and still fail without even making it past the initial objective.
We're a little at a loss -- we want to continue to play; but if we can't move forward it seems purposeless.
Did you ever go back? I failed scenario 4 playing it solo, and I went into UA-cam to find a play through of the scenario, and realized I was playing a couple of things wrong. Once I corrected those, I won the scenario fairly easily. I just went back and played it with my husband (his first time playing it), and we also beat it fairly easily (not like we won without trying, but we had some extra cards and time to loot a bit before finishing off the last enemy).
@@daniellebackus819 We didn't, at least not yet. Partially because it's also not really our style of game. Also, so many games to play, so little time... There's always the chance we'll come back to it, but we have so many others to get to/through.
@@oddaudio6646 have you played sleeping gods? I’m in love with that game. I really like Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion (I love tactical RPG video games), but Sleeping Gods kinda changed my world.
I agree with many of your points. And as a solo player, game length of 4-5 hrs is totally out of line, so I probably will not play past the 7th scenario where I'm at now, and I'm definitely not replaying a chapter if I was close to winning.
I have not played Jaws of the Lion, but your thoughts on an introduction to the mechanics has me thinking through this for my favorite games that are hard to teach. StoryTime Chess does this for Chess, but Story Time Scythe might be in order etc.
Great video, I also support Isaac in his attempts to make a better game by thinking about our preconceived notions of character race and and class. Boardgameco had an equally well thought out video discussing female characters in The Witcher. Conversely I unsubbed from KoA after his 'Safehaven' rant against Isaac and his unwillingness to even attempt to understand why Isaac was looking at his games in a new light.
Completely agree re the whining by KoA and many commenters on the Frosthaven KS page. They complain like the scenarios and story were ruined - though they have 0 actual info about the text before and after any edits. And for all we know the additional edits could improve the atmosphere/quality. The only thing we know for sure is that there won't be obvious stereotypes - and I'm not really missing those. There's no reason why the characters, story and scenarios can't be great.
8. Game length
We average about 2 hours for a mission. We generally get a group together on a weekend afternoon and play 3 scenarios with lunch and/or dinner in between. One way to save a ton of time is to use the fan-made Gloomhaven helper app. This runs all the monsters and keeps track of wounds, initiatives and elements. This means the players play with cards as usual but the enemies don't need any cards or wound tracking on the table. It saves so much time and is designed so well it should be an official product.
6. Curses
Every character has one x2 and one miss card which are permanent and the only two cards which cause you to reshuffle your deck. Other copies added (bless and curse) are discarded after drawing. It is extremely rare to draw many curse cards unless you are facing a ton of enemies that add curses to your deck, which again would be extremely rare.
4. Objectives
There are lots of scenarios that do not require killing all enemies, but since a large part of the game is based around tactical combat, most of the early missions keep things simple.
I feel like you've also missed the aspect were it is also replicating table top/PC rpg design. Sometimes you swing and miss the monster. I'm with you on the shorter scenario lengths and fail forwards though. (And in some respects gain money and XP helps with this.) -- Given the revamping happening for Frosthaven, it would be nice if Gloomhaven got rebalanced via the "new edition" treatment. There seems to be some significant power creep when you compare the two. There are also issues where some scenarios are really only achievable using particular combinations of characters/classes and/or at particular levels of (high) power.
So with the curse cards, 2 things.
1. Either you are playing slightly incorrectly or you are describing it differently then I would. Curse cards are specifically the cards that enemies add to your deck. The base “miss” card is not considered a curse card. Once a curse card is drawn, it is returned to the box for later use but your base one does stay in when drawn and is reshuffled only at the end of a round. So if you do multiple attacks in one turn, you will not have a dead turn.
2. As an official variant in the rulebook of Gloomhaven (possibly not JotL rulebook but I thought it was) you can make the miss a -2 and the x2 a +2. It is called the less random variant or something to that effect.
Great video, Jamey!
Based on some of the other comments, we played this incorrectly. :) I like that official variant, though!
@@jameystegmaier yeah the miss can be sad especially when you have this massive attack on a loss card! But ya know, the luck swings are okay with me. The extremely nice x2 at the perfect moment is worth the miss moments. But that variant is definitely there for a reason. I assume lots of playtesters had the same feeling you did.
Curse cards ARE indeed removed when they get drawn. The way you play it ruins the game and is wrong, so it's nice that the game will be even better next time you play :)
Another huge improvement for our groups is to use the app. While I normally don't love board game apps, in this case it really does make it faster and more streamlined. And it keeps track of whatever you want it to, as much or little as you need. It even tracks special tutorial rules.
what are those apps please?
The lack of "failing forward" is the biggest flaw to enjoying an extended campaign of Gloomhaven, IMHO. We implemented a system where we decrease the levels of the monsters by 1 each time we are forced to repeat a scenario, until 0. On average, we were able to alway win on second play (due to both the lower difficulty level, full knowledge of the scenario, and lessons learned/puzzle solving). But I this Isaac should have had an official system for this. I get that "puzzle-y" scenarios can actually be really fun to repeat to get that satisfaction of "solving" it, but I think very few groups will want to play the same scenario for the third time. On second play of scenario, you can also start the mission with all monsters already revealed, and maybe even a "virtual" minor stamina potion for all players they can use at any time.
one game with great 'fail-forward' mechanic is arkham horror the card game :) (though there are still a few scenarios that can just end a campaign)
Definitely! I mention a few others in this video: ua-cam.com/video/9OIFw2WPGik/v-deo.html
#10 I feel similarly about you and your games. Gloomhaven is my favorite game despite some euro themes. I didn't care to play Scythe even though I kept winning, the components and art were quality so I can still recommend some of your games and videos based on what people are looking for
#6 in Gloomhaven the Curse and Bless cards are pulled from your modifier deck when drawn but the base x2 and miss cards do have you reshuffle it leads to classes that throw multiple target curses really strong since the enemy may have a short deck and you could pollute it with Curses. A lot of people complained about advantage and rolling modifiers, which could give you +1 rolling and miss with advantage.
For failing a scenario, you don’t really replay the same thing, because now you know what to expect and you can prepare. So in a way it is failing forward, because you do the same scenario but with an advantage (i.e. you’ve progressed your knowledge). For the killing, one thing I like in Imperial Assault is they say you are defeating the enemy, not killing them. That always feels a lot better to me.
Yes please, someone make a complex tactical game with the same level of character building, world building, and asymmetry that doesn't involve walking around killing everything!!! I'd like to design my own too but that'll take awhile and would love to see more on the market like this that I can buy and enjoy. I love Flashpoint Fire Rescue but it's really light.
P.S. Great breakdown and analysis of your personal experience and thoughts on JotL.
Basically a Pikmin tabletop game, which would be amazing
Jamey, now I can't help but want a map/scenario book for Scythe! Imagine scenarios/campaigns with factions expanding into 1920+ western Europe, Africa, and Asia!
(Yeah, yeah, I know you're done with original Scythe, but I can dream.... And it would be so inexpensive to produce!)
Check out BoardGameGeek and the Scythe FB group--there are lots of options created by fans that are worth trying. :)
I would have to double check the specifics but I do believe that the original Gloomhaven rules offer a variant where you play the miss card as just another -2.
...and the 2x card as +2. Or some choose to have both the nil and 2x be +0.
Curse cards are removed, if I recall correctly.
The curse cards get added and removed, but you always have one nil card in the modifier deck.
I agree with you.
I would add that I do not like design of city events. At least for me a introduction text does not help to make a good decision. It seems to me that the result is random (I saw about 13 events so far)
Maybe there are different scenario objectives but in the end you need to kill all minions. You can not punch just a boss and ignore the others.
The city events seemed to just exist to add or subtract random difficulty to the game as opposed to a story element.
Oh also, I definitely prefer the tiles. I like the book as an option but tiles are cooler and more tactile for me than a book. I’m probably in the minority on that though.
I'm on the fence about the fail forward. I do think the design of the game and character classes means that if you don't fail and repeat some scenarios (i.e. take extra time moving through the campaign), you won't get to level up and collect more coins and see the best the character classes have to offer. And yet failing is definitely still frustrating! I frequently suggest that if we fail, we replay the scenario at a lower level so that we minimize the chance of ending up "stuck" for multiple go-rounds.
Overall we had a good time with jotl, we like rpgs. The big downside for me was the story.
Yes the story is soooo lackluster :(
My wife and I had almost the exact same experience: we're through the five tutorial scenarios, we failed Scenario 4, I'm playing as the Demolitionist.
After failing Scenario 4 the first time, we found ourselves making certain "tweaks" as we got closer to the end of the second try just to make sure we won. We kind of approached it from a "we're here to have fun, and it's not fun to keep replaying the scenario, so if we get close we'll consider that winning." (We only did this once or twice, but we still won on the very last card.)
On the boss level we actually took pictures of our hand state and board state before entering the boss room just so we wouldn't have to replay the whole scenario. This is where something like an app to capture that state would be helpful for not needing a full reset.
Overall, we enjoyed our plays but I'm not sure how much more we'll play. It's frankly just really stressful, even if the game design is brilliant, and like you said the game is so long.
Gnarly Carley? She's awesome.
I gave up on Gloomhaven when I experienced that levelling your character punishes you by making scenarios harder. We stopped looking forward to levelling and that's got to be a fault
You can definitely choose to play with the enemies at a lower level in order to keep having fun. There’s nothing wrong with playing a game on “easy” mode, especially if it’s someone’s first campaign!
That being said, I felt the same thing when I failed a scenario playing solo for the 2nd time. I put the game away for a couple of days to watch some videos to learn better strategy. But if that happens again in the future, I’m going to automatically drop the scenario by a level each time I lose it.
"The number one thing I learned from JOTL is... they have the same politics as me." Yawn
Yeah lets remove what make the race unique. Because its racist??
Wrong. The number one thing was the tutorial. You were so sleepy you didn't even make a correct statement.
@@kelvindoang1228 They didn't remove what makes races unique. They just changed the term. Feel free to stay triggered, though.
@@jaypob the one who got triggered by term are you. if you are not offended easily there are no need to change it.
@@jaypob and yes its the number one that he learnd from the video donkey.
I personally hated Gloomhaven, simply because it was unbalanced for me. I can appreciate it, but I did not enjoy it.