If you think this is impressive, I recommend watching the recent video from the Brothers Murph where they play through every single scenario in base Gloomhaven in a week. I loved the game so much than when Jaws of the Lion rolled out, I tore through the whole thing solo in just a few days. I love these guys, and I'd love to spend a year playing Frosthaven with them, though I know it will never happen, if only because I no longer live in Chicago. Louis was the one who knew the rules backwards and forward (you really need a person like this in your campaign), knew where everything was kept, and was a bit impatient with my sloppiness. There was Nathan, the sweet and friendly guy who would nonetheless be reduced to rage when the game screwed him. There was Wolfram, the young genius, who always arrived late, wouldn't play a card until the rest of us had been ready for five minutes and we're screaming at him, but always made the deep and thoughtful play.

We got to know everything about how we played games. I played the entire campaign live with three other people, once a week for about a year, and that experience transcends almost any other board game experience I've ever had. Gloomhaven is probably my favorite modern board game. If you'd rather listen than read, you can hear this Gloomhaven digital review on the latest episode of the Two Wood for a Wheat podcast: That experience raised the priority of getting some kind of jump capability for my character.I'm a bit drained from the holidays, so today it's going to be a quick game review instead of a broader topic. But I have also found myself having to walk into a trap that I had no way to bypass, and this was a damage and stun trap, which cost me the rest of my turn and the next one. In Gloomhaven I generally regard traps as an asset, a way to damage enemies with the bonus of bypassing any shield. It is like an inflexible GM who tells you that if you aren't a thief with a disarm traps skill, you can't disarm the trap, period. In Gloomhaven, the rules tell you how it can be disarmed. In a RPG, you might ask for descriptions of the trap and try to figure out some creative way to disarm it without getting hurt.

In order to achieve your goal, you are willing to fight more enemies trying to kill you, but you aren't willing to get hurt by a trap? Somebody (probably the Brute) says, 'It doesn't look that bad, I think I can take it' and walks into the trap. If you didn't have any way to jump over it or disarm it (pushing an enemy into it is a way to disarm it, but attacking it is not), you still had a way to deal with it. Excited for scenarios to be more challenging and rewarding with real traps!įrom a role-playing perspective your choice was to give up on your goal and go home as failures, or deal with a trap somehow. Were we wrong to allow it? Do we have to just suck it up and take the damage if there's no other way through?Įdit: Thanks all for the help - we messed up, but at least we learned. I later searched for rules regarding destroying traps and obstacles and couldn't find much. They ended up grabbing the chest just before our brute cleaned up and ended the scenario. We again 'house-ruled it' and said the table had 3HP. They produced a move 4 bottom card and an attack top card and declared that they would destroy the table before moving. The only way they could get there would be to move 4 through the table. In the third room on the last round our mindthief wanted to go for the chest before the scenario ended. Our spellweaver 'killed' one quickly and we pushed on into the final room. We agreed on a quick house rule - traps have 2HP. We didn't want to interrupt our flow mid-action to check rules or FAQs (there are already a ton to learn and we were doing well so far). After a brief discussion, we felt that it would be hard to justify our guys willingly walking into them in-character. Playing as the mindthief, brute, and spellweaver, we didn't have any cards to defuse or remove the traps. My group just finished Scenario 1! (Go us!!!) When we killed the last enemy in the second room, we hadn't triggered either of the traps blocking the door yet.

Gloomhaven traps