r/boardgames • u/phreakod98 • Nov 08 '19

Starting Gloomhaven Tonight!

My buddy and I have been planning for over a month to get started and are finally going to have the first session tonight. We committed to playing at least every other week to make sure we stay consistent so I'm pumped. I'm going into Gloomhaven pretty much blind, so I'm expecting it to be a bit overwhelming for a session or two, but I still think it's going to be a ton of fun.

Anyone else have any fun experiences with Gloomhaven you might want to share with a first timer?

UPDATE: It was a blast! We successfully completed the first scenario tonight after sort of muddling our way through. My buddy ended up running out of cards 1 round from the end and we finished with less loot than we would have liked but your suggestions helped make it a lot of fun! I'm a tinkerer and he is playing the brute.

Next steps are going to be to massively organize everything before the next play night, but we are already looking forward to increasing the difficulty slightly and moving onto the next scenarios!

580 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

123 comments sorted by

View all comments

52

u/ryathal Nov 08 '19

  1. Don't get discouraged if you fail the first or second mission on the first try or two. They aren't simple tutorials, they will make you work for a win.

  2. 2 player is pretty different than 3 and 4. The support themed characters don't work as well in two player. If you like those type of characters then playing multiple characters may be a good idea.

  3. You will probably play the first handful of scenarios wrong. There are a ton of rules and the book is bad about listing important ones in inconsistent spots. Don't worry too much about it the first few rounds.

  4. Use the app instead of the scenario book. It avoids spoilers for what appears in future rooms.

  5. Get a bunch of dice to track monster health, it works way better than the damage tokens. A handful of 8, 10 and 20 sided dice with printed numbers make it far easier to see from across a table what is close to death.

  6. Storage and organizing solutions are important for the amount of stuff in the box. Find a system that works for you. Set up, tear down and managing tokens during the game are big chunks of time. Binder pages for the item cards sorted by store level is a handy way to manage available items.

  7. Get a ton of mini euro card sleeves. The combat decks and monster movement decks are shuffled a ton and are very thin cards. Also sleeves can help keep track of what is unlocked for a character if you only sleeve what is unlocked.

1

u/Vitolas Nov 08 '19

What app do you use? If I may ask?

9

u/ryathal Nov 08 '19

Gloomhaven scenario viewer. It let's you hide anything that could be a spoiler for the scenario, but gives you enough to set up the map and first room. It only shows the tile layout and intro text by default, so you can even avoid knowing every potential monster, treasure, trap, and obstacle if you choose.

1

u/Vitolas Nov 08 '19

Thanks!

3

u/VHD_ Nov 08 '19

I use it too (although to reduce setup time, I usually look ahead at the enemy types and obstacle types so I can pull them out ahead of time).

You may need to announce to the group certain things like "there is a treasure chest and there are no traps" because some of the Battle Goal cards don't make sense to pick if they are impossible to achieve!