A couple of well known reviewers:
It's a persistent world about an adventuring party. It is not a tabletop RPG, but it is the board game equivalent of a computer RPG. It plays 1-4 players, and each player will play multiple characters over the course of a campaign (characters retire, and you can even swap between available characters).
The game is expensive, my friends and I paid $200, and I bought a prebuilt storage system for another $80. But we're dividing that cost 4 ways, and the game will take us roughly 150-200 hours of playing to complete (the total played time will reduce with fewer players). The campaign has a plot, along with random minor encounters (short text with an A/B choice), but you can also play randomly generated scenarios. There are also fans who are making their own scenarios.
The game is "big". It requires a decent sized table, but not prohibitively big in this regard. Rather, the box is very big, and weighs 20 pounds. There are tons of components (well... 20 pounds of components). It isn't that daunting though, and you don't use the majority of pieces every scenario. A lot of them do still get used. It does mean though that you MUST invest time/money in some sort of storage solution. Components do not fit well in the box just jumbled in, and a disorganized mess will dramatically increase your set up time. There are a lot of ideas/methods on how to organize it though. If you buy the game, LOOK THESE UP BEFORE YOU OPEN IT, and prepare to spend about 1-2 hours unboxing the game.
It is cooperative, but it limits the amount of information you give each other, which is nice, because you are working together, but you have to make decisions with incomplete information. I don't know exactly what you can/will do, and you don't know exactly what I can/will do. Also, certain things are a little competitive potentially, like grabbing loot. We also can't share resources like money or items. Every player gets secret goals too, which some times means that they do things that are unhelpful to the other players, which means you are constantly balancing doing what is good for you and what is good for the group. It makes the game feel much more lively than a normal cooperative like Pandemic.
The game plays really well. Even without the potential of unlocking new stuff, a scenario is fun to play, and goes fairly smoothly. The enemy automation is pretty simple once you get the hang of it, which takes maybe 10-15 minutes. Playing your character is really fun, and each class is really different. As characters level up you have meaningful choices based on the composition of the party you're playing with. There is a bit of administrative management of bits going on, and with 4 players, more things are happening, so that management has to happen faster and more often.
So, it takes roughly 75-80 scenarios to finish a campaign (but you can play more), and a scenario takes 30 min/player (so far for us it's closer to 45 min/player). If you play one scenario a week, it'll take you a year and a half to finish the campaign! If you play two scenarios a month, that's a 3 year campaign!
If you've heard hype about this game, it's not hype. It's just an amazing game (assuming you like this kind of game).
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My main issue with this type of game is the fact you put permanent stickers on the board and rip up cards ect.. So you can only play each scenario once. Plus you are spending over 100 bucks on a game you willingly mark up the board and destroy components. Rather spend that type of money on a game that will last.
My main issue with this type of game is the fact you put permanent stickers on the board and rip up cards ect.. So you can only play each scenario once. Plus you are spending over 100 bucks on a game you willingly mark up the board and destroy components. Rather spend that type of money on a game that will last.
It depends how long the game will last. PANDEMIC LEGACY I think takes 15 complete games to get through before you exhaust the Legacy story, which is quite a lot of games for a board game.
The counter-argument for that, of course, is that that game and RISK LEGACY are both relatively cheap compared to GLOOMHAVEN and SEAFALL (the other big Legacy game that came out last year), so paying £40 for 15 great games is great value, but £200 (which is what GLOOMHAVEN is going for) for a game you can't bust out and play twenty years from now is a much bigger ask.
My main issue with this type of game is the fact you put permanent stickers on the board and rip up cards ect.. So you can only play each scenario once. Plus you are spending over 100 bucks on a game you willingly mark up the board and destroy components. Rather spend that type of money on a game that will last.
1) we don't rip up cards.
2) they sell recharge packs, so anywhere you have to mark up the board, there's a sticker that can cover it up, and new replacement stickers for everything you've used.
3) this game takes OVER 150 HOURS TO PLAY. How many individual boardgames have you actually spent over 150 hours playing? Also, do the math.
Lets compare to say... going to a movie.
Movie: 2 hours of entertainment.
Cost: ticket $8 (though that's extraordinarly cheap these days)
That's $4/hour per person that attends
Gloomhaven: 150+ hours of entertainment
Cost: $200 (you can get it cheaper, but lets overcharge here), but wait... unlike a movie ticket, we can split this money between 4 people, so it's actually $50 each.
Cost per hour per person: $0.33.
Also, you should try keeping a tally of how often you actually play your longer board games. Unless you play in a group that only ever plays one game, and they play it many times a year, odds are you've never played one more than 20 times. My favorite game of all time, Hansa Teutanica, I've only played like 20-25 times. I pull it out every chance I get, but that's still only 2-3 times per year, maybe 4.
Oh, and to be clear, you don't mark up anything for a scenario. The scenarios are tactical fights, and are COMPLETELY REPLAYABLE. In addition, there is a random scenario generator (using cards in the box). There's an expansion scheduled for December, with another 15 scenarios. Also, there are community members who are writing short adventure paths, like 10-12 scenarios that tell a story.
The bulk of the game is actually tied up in a game that has nothing that is ruined or changed by playing the legacy version. All of the legacy stuff is the campaign, which takes place outside of scenarios. The campaign primarily serves as a pacing method for when you add new player options to the game.
It turns out that my group has been playing at double the difficulty recommended (we did the math wrong for determining encounter level). We've failed about 6-7 scenarios (we've completed roughly 12 if memory serves). The game is set up in my friends basement, and we left it set up since we failed the last scenario and will just replay the same one.
As far as I'm aware, usually you can just put anything "destroyed" in an envelope labeled "destroyed" in any legacy game.
You could also just make an overlay for the map, put the stickers on that and get the same effect. One of the weird things is that you don't really even use the large map board for anything, other than tracking what scenarios you've unlocked.
I'd say it's actually kind of satisfying to just write on the board, in the book, or wherever. It makes it feel like the game is YOURS, instead of just being your copy, it feels more like YOUR game.
Lastly, the Broken Token organizer is nice, but probably a bit overpriced ($80). You could do something similar for a lot cheaper, but their organizer works well and it ALMOST fights with the box, having like a 1/2 inch gap from closing completely (the box is probably 14 inches tall, so it closes 13.5 inches, but just not quite all the way). The pièce de résistance of the organizer is the monster tuck boxes IMO. I've seen far cheaper options (someone just used CD paper sleeves), but the monster tuck boxes are really nice and do a great job of organizing the game, AND having it labeled and easy to use.
It's a scratch off to reveal a choice right?
In Gloomhaven, you also can't unflip a card over and read the other side of it. Once you've flipped it over and read it, you know what's there.
Scratching off the film covering information doesn't damage the game to an unusable state, it reveals information to you. The actual "damage" is to your state of knowing what was underneath the scratch-off, not the scratch-off.
It's the "knowing" that is more the problem for me, which is why I doubt I'll play the main campaign of Gloomhaven a second time. Most of the joy of the campaign is in the finding out of things that happen, but you can't experience that twice. The choices of the campaign just aren't that meaningful in my experience (so far).
*****
Separate from above...
A good analogy for this game is the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. Gloomhaven is everything I want from PACG, that PACG doesn't deliver.
Scratching off the film covering information doesn't damage the game to an unusable state, it reveals information to you. The actual "damage" is to your state of knowing what was underneath the scratch-off, not the scratch-off.My point was simply that unlike simply not tearing up the cards that you are supposed to and setting them aside in an envelope, you can't play Pandemic Legacy without making permanent changes to components. In Gloomhaven you can use those temp stickers on the board and cards, you can choose not to destroy cards, etc. In Pandemic Legacy, there is no way to avoid scratching off the silver coating on some cards - the game is really not playable without defacing at least some components.
You can turn over a used copy of Gloomhaven to someone else in a form basically no different than how it came new, if you really want to. You cannot do that with Pandemic Legacy.
If you're buying a used legacy game, you are deciding that you are willing to play through other people's alterations in order to pay a reduced cost.
The card isn't destroyed. It just had a film removed that kept certain information hidden. The silver scratch-off is not required to actually play the game. It isn't a game component. Any method of concealing the information will serve equally as well as the scratch-off.
Lets compare to say... going to a movie.
You must be a thrill at parties. You contribute so much to every discussion.
Frankly, I wonder how many board games will actually get played 20 years after they come out these days. When all people had was Catan and Puerto Rico, maybe, but I doubt I'll be playing many (if any) of the hundreds of board games I have twenty years from now. I'll be playing different, newer games (or dead, I suppose, as I will be approaching 70).
I dunno, I still occasionally break out ESCAPE FROM ATLANTIS (which my parents bought for me 30 years ago), HERO QUEST and SPACE CRUSADE. Me and my friends still play AXIS & ALLIES on a semi-regular basis after 20 years.