The Boardgames Thread / Board games

Gloomhaven

Not my no. 1 game but in this genre it's going to be top of most lists.

It's expensive but you'll get about 70x 2-4 hour gaming sessions out of the box easily.

each character has deck which drive all their actions, as you play this gets upgraded and you become more powerful, you then unlock new characters with their own decks as you progress and retire the old ones so there's it keeps things pretty interesting.

scenarios are light on narrative but each one is very unique and tells a story as you move through to the objective.

ai is mostly just monster movement and spawning, this has its quirks but adds to the puzzle of how to manage your own limited actions against their next moves. no victory points in this one.

To solo you just control 2 (or more) characters. hand management is easy enough and the game is slightly easier with open information between the 2 characters (you can adjust difficulty if you want to offset it).

Pros:
lots of stuff in the box, will keep you going for a long time.
it's fun to play
has an unofficial companion app which reduces the bookkeeping and table clutter a great deal
branching stories mean there's replayability though will involve some repetition

Cons:

• Price. You get your money's worth but it's the biggest barrier to entry
  
• Organisation. once you've punched everything, storage is a nightmare. I would say an organiser is a necessity, you can make your own from plano boxes or buy one.
  
• Setup/teardown. an organizer helps but it's just a lot of stuff to sift through to set up and pack away. if you can leave in situ and setup/teardown at your leisure it's much less troublesome
  
• size. you need a decent amount of table space to play as it's quite a sprawling setup. the app helps massively with this though.
  
  

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