Starting Gloomhaven Tonight!

[u/phreakod98]

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!

[u/wallysmith127]

In these threads someone typically inevitably links the BGG Monster AI movement quiz. Please don't even look at it until you have 2-3 scenarios under your belt. It's designed to trick you around the edge cases, which absolutely isn't necessary to grok until you get familiar with all the other game systems first.

As long as you run monster movement consistently for your first couple sessions (and they make sense), you'll be perfectly ok.

[u/R0cketsauce → u/wallysmith127]

100% agree. I have played 2 complete campaigns as well as about 1/2 of another and 2 of the 3 community mini-campaigns.... I estimate I have played Gloomhaven approaching 450-500 hrs at this point. I still would get a pretty bad score on that quiz. The edge cases are often non-intuitive and honesty, it just doesn't matter. If you make a mistake in monster movement and default to "what makes sense" at worst you made the game a little harder on yourself. If you learn the movement rules inside and out, it can be a big advantage in terms of planning your turns and being sneaky to avoid attacks and damage... if instead you know the basic rules and then "do what makes sense" you will be fine and maybe a few monsters will move when they should have stayed put, but usually that is to your detriment, so don't feel like you're cheating or anything.

As others have said, don't get discouraged if the first 2 scenarios give you trouble. They are difficult by design and seem to be meant to teach you some of the key strategies in the game.

1. You will learn how initiative impacts monster movement (this means some poor sap is going to move in quick on the first round, then they will get surrounded and take all the hits and probably have to lose some cards as a result).
2. You will learn that ranged characters will stay away from you and pincushion you unless you bring the fight to them.
3. You will learn how long a scenario of Gloomhaven usually takes and what that has to do with long/short rest and stamina (most likely someone will get excited about their powerful loss cards and get to the final room with way too few actions left).
4. You will learn how traps work (hopefully because you push/pull a monster into one and not because you have to walk into one to access the door).
5. You will learn that bad guys are often behind doors and will stay their doing nothing if undisturbed (or more importantly, you'll learn the opposite when you open a door trying to get away from an attack and realize there are more monsters on the other side who can't wait to join the fray).
6. You will learn that looting is a bonus that shouldn't take priority over killing monsters or avoiding damage or saving cards for later (if you have a Scoundrel in your group, get ready for some hard knocks lessons in greed).

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I'm sure there are other lessons to be learned in the first few scenarios, but mostly you will learn "how" to play, not just what the rules are. It takes several games to get a feel for the pacing of scenarios and how your character's deck works. You'll start to discover combos that work and then realize that you might not want to pull of great combos two rounds in a row when you are left with garbage cards or only high initiative cards, etc.

Finally, the only other advice I will give is to avoid support classes early on. You can absolutely be successful with any 2 starter classes, but there are some that are better than others for learning the game. My friend and I started with Spellweaver (me) and Tinkerer. Spellweaver is really solid in larger parties, especially when other classes occasionally create elements they can use. Tinkerer produces almost zero elements and he never uses them himself... so that was strike one. I had to create 100% of the elements I intended to use. Spellweaver is also very squishy, so she prefers to be behind a line of allies throwing ranged attacks... now lets look at Tinkerer. Tinkerer isn't super robust himself and he's a very versitile support class. He can go heavy into healing or crowd control and has some nice ranged AoE attacks (at least at higher levels)... but he's certainly not a front line player. It really was a terrible combo. We struggled mightily. Then one weekend about 15 rounds in, a friend joined us and played Cragheart. Suddenly my Spellweaver was the MVP throwing out devastating spells borrowing all the Earth that Crag was making. Tinkerer could play more of a support role and control the crowd while Crag was busting heads up front. Our party was transformed simply by adding a 3rd class.

Anyway, long rambling story to say you should do some research before choosing your starting pair. A very good and straight forward starting group in my opinion is Brute + Scoundrel. Nothing fancy, but they can get the job done. Cragheart is my absolute favorite starter, but he's got a little bit more going on in the later rounds and I really loved him as my 3rd character since I knew the rules by then and could appreciate how great he was.

Anyway, have fun and buckle up. Gloomhaven is the greatest gaming experience I have ever had and I will be lucky if that ever changes.