#oneaday Day 339: Into the Gloom

Good evening everyone! Hope you've had a pleasant Saturday. I've been out all day so I haven't had a chance to record a PATRONS ONLY! vlog as yet, nor have I had time to do a wallpaper for $5+ Patrons. Those are jobs for tomorrow, though, so please look out for them!

What have I been up to today? Well, I've been visiting some local friends that I don't get nearly enough opportunities to hang out with these days, largely owing to two of them having children and our group collectively being quite disorganised with regard to this sort of thing. We usually manage to get together for at least a couple of our birthdays each year, though, and with two of the birthdays in question falling quite close to one another this time of year, now's the time!

Most of our day was spent playing Gloomhaven. I don't love this game, but I had a lot more fun with it than I usually do today by playing a different character class. I do find it quite exhausting to play, though; individual scenarios run quite long, and it also takes quite a long time to resolve individual rounds, but the mechanics themselves are neat, there's a lot of variety and the "legacy"-esque components are cool.

For the unfamiliar, Gloomhaven is a tabletop strategy game vaguely akin to classic dungeon crawlers such as Games Workshop's HeroQuest series and, perhaps more closer comparison, Descent: Journeys in the Dark. Players collectively choose from an initially limited selection of character classes and build a deck with which they can move and take actions throughout each scenario. The game can be played as one-shot scenarios, but the system is really built for a large, evolving campaign somewhat inspired by tabletop roleplaying.

The campaign is the thing I have mixed feelings about, and I can't quite make up my mind if it's the actual campaign itself that is inelegant, or if it's just the fact that we don't get together to play very often. Either way, I don't feel a lot of attachment to the characters I play, I don't care about the unfolding story and everything just seems a bit arbitrary, particularly as, taking the rules as written, there's nothing stopping you getting into a perilous, deadly cliffhanger at the end of a scenario and then just popping back to town to buy some new equipment before you resolve it in the next.

Within the scenarios, the game has some neat systems. Rather than using dice or flat stats, the deck you build consists of cards with "top" and "bottom" abilities. Each turn, you pick two cards, and can use the top of one and the bottom of another. Generally speaking, top abilities are attacks or other active abilities, while bottom abilities (heehee) are movement-related — though there are exceptions to both. There's also an initiative value on each card; when everyone reveals the actions that they are going to take, they also pick one of the two initiative values, then everyone goes in order — including the monsters that have inevitably appeared as part of the scenario.

There's no "dungeon master" or "evil wizard" player required for Gloomhaven; the monsters work using some rudimentary, fixed rules combined with a deck of cards for each type of creature that defines specific behaviours. This allows some variety in how they act as well as some unique abilities for different types of foes, which is neat; there are some really creative, thematically appropriate abilities in there, too, such as tentacly Lovecraftian "deep terrors" being unable to move, but having a huge range on their attacks, or crazed cultists occasionally exploding when you defeat them.

As I say above, the thing I find exhausting about Gloomhaven is that each round of play takes quite a long time, particularly if there are a lot of monsters. If you're playing with a large group of player characters, it can take quite a long time to do anything, and the general pace of play is quite slow anyway — the fact that you need to expend cards to simply move, even through empty rooms, means things can drag on a little bit. On the micro level, this means it can be a while before you get to do anything on any given turn, and on the macro level it means even just one scenario can take several hours to resolve.

It's a game I want to like very much as in theory it should be exactly my sort of thing. But the whole thing just feels a little too clunky for me, causing my mind to wander a bit while playing. Interestingly, there is a digital version in the works; it's currently in Early Access on Steam, so I wonder how much this might resolve the issues I have with the tabletop game. Although then we run into the issue I typically have with board game adaptations on computer — I often end up asking myself why I wouldn't just play something that had been specificially designed as a CRPG.

Ah well. We had a good day, and we got in some time with Mario Tennis Aces and Super Smash Bros at the end of the evening, too, so that was neat. Banjo and Kazooie are super fun!

Anyway. Bit of gaming now before bed, then, as I say, PATRONS ONLY! and wallpaper to follow tomorrow. Have a pleasant rest of your Saturday!