![]() ![]() In place of dice, everything is just handled by a deck of modifiers. ![]() So what are you doing all the time? Surely the game isn’t - gasp - deterministic? A dungeon crawl, about monsters smacking heroes and vice versa, without any dice at all. See my previous frustration with dungeon crawlers, a genre that has traditionally been a little too infatuated with the notion that you can’t predict the outcome of implanting a mace into someone’s skull via crude medieval surgery. Rather, my problem is with doing nothing but roll dice all the time, without feeling like I’m doing much to alter the outcome. You don’t get to regard Greenland and Neanderthal as two of the finest games ever crafted by not reaching a place of peace with the occasional flubbed roll. In Gloomhaven’s take on combat, every little decision matters. It’s telling, for example, that the bulk of my fallen comrades have been eliminated because they were too tired to continue a fight, not because they were beaten to a pulp by skeletons and reanimated corpses. There are a few significant benefits to this, not the least of which is the fact that even skipping a turn becomes an exercise in tough decision-making. Lose too many and you won’t be able to do anything at all. But resting also means setting one of your recovered cards aside in your trash pile, effectively losing one of your options for the rest of the battle. Picking them up is as easy as resting for a turn. See, when you’re done with a pair of cards, they’re set aside in your discard. As a combat system, it’s supremely flexible, easy to get a handle on, and even pulls triple duty by simulating your character’s waning stamina. This means it’s possible to leap backwards while casting a spell, or chuck rocks before moving up close to deal proximity damage, or slink into the shadows and perform a backstab on a now-unsuspecting bandit. Not only does your chosen pair of cards indicate your initiative, they also slot together into a combination of moves and attacks. The way a Cragheart moves is not the way a Spellweaver moves, let alone the way they go about attacking, healing, beefing themselves or their allies up, or anything else.īetter yet, a single round is all about using those cards - two at a time, using the top option from one and the bottom option of another - to craft an entire dynamic action on the part of your character. Instead, each class gets their own set of cards, each of which is an entirely unique set of options. A lot of this comes down to the way it handles its combat, because in Gloomhaven there’s no such thing as a basic attack, a basic move, or a basic anything. Gloomhaven, on the other hand, has managed to not only seize my interest, but keep it captive for far longer than I anticipated. As a general rule of thumb, anything that segues neatly into a shower joke is probably something I want to do even less than take a shower. Move forward, bottleneck, swing, miss, connect, take damage, lather, rinse, repeat. The other problem is that dungeon crawls have a way of getting repetitive, of forcing me through the same actions again and again. Firstly, I never feel like I’m in control. At least then I’d have a chance of seeing the pressure rise. I can’t think of anything duller than a long evening of Warhammer Quest, for instance. One of my greatest reservations about Gloomhaven was the simple fact that I don’t like dungeon crawls. The Star of the Show Is the Combat System
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