Börenpark, was just boring.
No real competition for tiles, no real race to the finish.
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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I can't say I was disappointed, because I liked it at first, but Gloomhaven really became a drag after a year or so of playing. I feel like you really need to be invested in the lore and story to get anything out of it after a while, otherwise it's basically glorified, over-complicated chess. It doesn't help that 90% of scenarios have the same winning condition: "kill all monsters". I feel like there could have been a lot more depth to the actual gameplay, and not just the fluff in-between. What's more, each scenario takes 2-3 hours at best, and to make any real progress you need to set aside at least 6 hours per session, which is crazy. It's basically a job at that point.
Also, in the later stages, when you have a level 3-4 party with unlocked classes, encounters become exhausting, because you need to keep track of a million modifiers and buffs/debuffs, sometimes cancelling out eachother twice. And it's not a Gloomhaven session if you don't keep going back to the BGG forums for rule clarifications. It's a mess of a game, really.
After seeing what the scenarios with different win conditions looked like I am GLAD most were just "kill all monsters".
As for session length we always played just a single scenario (unless we lost the first super quick). It took us a good year maybe one and a half to play through the campaign. IMO the problem is less the session length and just how much of a time hog this game is in general. We're talking 150+ hours dedicated to a single game.
Yeah, I see your point. My group could only meet up once every so often due to differing work schedules and adulthood responsibilities, which I guess contributed heavily to the slow progress and the fact that we wanted to cram as much progress as possible into a single session. We were going on 2 years when I dropped out, and had made it halfway or two thirds into the campaign. The sad thing is that we could've exhausted several other games by that time instead of barely finishing the one.
Despite my rant, I'm not trying to put people off Gloomhaven entirely. It might be the best thing ever for some people. Just know what to expect when getting into it.
I can't blame you. It literally took us pretty much weekly sessions for over a year to reach the final scenario. That's a daunting comittment. I actually low key burned out on the game a few times during that period. But it always pulled me back in again.
Not utterly disappointed, but certainly underwhelmed by Wingspan to begin with. Oceania + removing ravens fixed a lot - mostly around difficulty playing birds, overpowered birds, boring endgame egg-laying.
Had a similar thing with Viticulture, it just felt unfinished. Tuscany fixed that too. Turns out I'm a sucker for expansions.
@dpunked Ooof, most disappointed I've been with a game has to be Cosmic Encounter; it's primarily rooted in two things.
- I had a terrible first play. I won (no ties even), but it felt vapid and arbitrary.
- The inability to select a target (and thus negotiate accordingly) sort of removed where I was hoping the game would be. Instead it was "oh, I'm targeting Jerry cause the game told me to"
Someone else in the group brought it, so it's not like I was out any skin. The game I did purchase, played a lot of to confirm some suspicions, and then traded away was Terra Mystica:
- It has a declining critical nature of decisions as the game progresses (the three most important decisions you'll make in the game are during setup).
- I found the faction dictated my strategy at an almost claustrophobic level (in particular, digging costs). This came across as a game about "here is what you need to do, can you do it better." Ora & Labora gives you a ton of options each turn and some of those are legitimate but it depends on your goal. TM says "here is your goal and strategy, can you actually do it" which I was less interested in.
I played maybe 7 or 8 games in person and double digits online but haven't played in years...