Gloomhaven is a cooperative board game for 1 to 4 players designed by Isaac Childres and published by Cephalofair Games in 2017. It is a campaign-based dungeon crawl game with a branching narrative campaign with ninety-five unique playable scenarios, seventeen playable classes, and more than 1,500 cards in a box which weighs almost 10 kg.
Gameplay
It is a fantasy-themed, campaign-based tactical skirmish game, in which players try to triumph in combat-based scenarios which scale in difficulty depending on the number of players. The game is cooperative and campaign driven, with 1 to 4 players working their way through a branching story consisting of almost 100 scenarios. The campaign develops in a legacy format, with stickers that are placed on the board and cards and sealed envelopes that are opened when certain criteria are met. While it has drawn comparisons to role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons and other dungeon-crawl board games, Gloomhaven uses game mechanics similar to modern eurogames. Characters and monsters move about on hex tiles representing dungeons and cellars. Players simultaneously choose two cards to play each turn, each of which has a top and a bottom half, and choose the top half of one card and the bottom of the other to allow their characters to make actions such as moving, healing and attacking monsters. Randomization, usually provided by dice, is handled by a deck of cards.
Release and reception
Gloomhaven has received extremely positive reviews, culminating in it reaching the spot as the top rated board game on leading website BoardGameGeek in 2017 and keeping that spot for much of 2018 and 2019. It also won six Golden Geek awards from the site, including for the best overall game of 2017. The game was originally sold via a 2015 Kickstarter campaign which raised $386,104 from 4,904 backers. and after strong early reviews, a second Kickstarter campaign was launched on April 4th and delivered in November which raised about $4 million from over 40,000 backers. The game was released shortly thereafter to retail for a suggested price of $140. The game has received extremely positive reviews. Gaming website Geek & Sundry described Gloomhaven as "a masterful design" and suggested "it belongs in a museum". Matt Thrower called it one of the best fantasy board games available, while noting that "Gloomhaven was the critical hit of the year." Board Games Land has described the game as "truly a masterpiece" The game has been rated the board game of all time by BoardGameGeek, which also gave it six Golden Geek awards in 2017 for best game of the year, best strategy game, best cooperative game, most innovative game, best solo game, and best thematic game. The game has received over 20 awards and nominations, including:
Gloomhaven was selected by both a jury and fans as the Origins Game Fair Best Board Game of 2018. As of early August 2018, the game had sold about 120,000 copies.
Expansions
Gloomhaven: Forgotten Circles is the game's first expansion, released in Q2 2019, and includes a new character class, the Aesther Diviner, and 20 new scenarios, primarily focused on that class. It also includes new items and monsters. Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion is a smaller, standalone version of the game which released in July 2020, initially as a Target exclusive. Designed to appeal to more casual gaming fans, the story in this version is set before the events of the original Gloomhaven, and has players investigate a series of disappearances in the city. Frosthaven is a standalone sequel, sold initially via a Kickstarter campaign which launched March 31, 2020. The campaign raised almost $13 million, making it the highest ever funded campaign for a game on the platform, from over 83,000 backers. The game is set in a small northern outpost that mercenaries are struggling to protect.
Digital edition
along with Flaming Fowl Studios, has released a digital edition of Gloomhaven for Microsoft Windows. The initial release on July 17, 2019 was offered as an early access model, featuring a subset of the characters, and a single-player Adventure mode that uses procedural generation like a roguelike to create encounters. Asmodee and Flaming Fowl plan to add support for all seventeen characters and the full set of 95 missions from the core board game by the time of the game's final release, along with support for multiplayer.
