In fact, gone are map tiles entirely, replaced by a campaign book that sets up briskly by flipping to the proper page and putting a few obstacle and treasure tokens in their proper places. Don’t get me wrong, there are still plenty of monsters to slay and maps to explore. Like a few of Gloomhaven’s other ideas, this was sometimes cumbersome-one of my friends had a retirement goal he never seemed capable of meeting-but it put the game’s dedication to variety front and center.īy contrast, Jaws of the Lion is necessarily pared down. It’s a slight spoiler to say precisely how many classes were in the original game, so suffice it to say there were more, with a retirement system that let players swap out their character for someone else mid-campaign. Rather than playing the ranged warrior trope straight, he has tricks and spells of his own, all of which mark him as a capable fighter in multiple respects.Īnd it’s a good thing I liked playing as him, because Jaws of the Lion only provides four heroes. He also has a supply drop, which is akin to throwing a healing crate into an opponent’s head so it can rebound to heal a friend.
He has a favored blade that can be stuck into a large monster for bonus damage and then cause even more bonus damage every turn until the monster dies and the Hatchet reclaims his favorite. Over time, the Hatchet grows even more interesting. Oh, and you should be fine playing the same character for a very long time. Ideally one that happens to be patient enough for the game’s particularities, like choosing when to rest and who will breach that next door. It’s also a tutorial for how Jaws of the Lion ought to be played. The flipside is that this isn’t only a tutorial for the game’s rules.
After answering hundreds of rules questions on the BoardGameGeek forums, Childres understands which concepts are second nature and which require reinforcement. Where the first scenario functions almost like punching those dummies that fall over only to pop back up into your face, by the sixth scenario you’ll have a solid handle on nearly everything you’ll need to know to play Gloomhaven. New cards and concepts trickle out with each fight, adding options without swamping you.
GLOOMHAVEN CLASSES RANKED HOW TO
First, you learn how to pair cards to move and attack, then how to navigate your environment, manage the decks that regulate enemy actions, charge up elements to boost your moves, and finally how to square off against a miniboss. AdvertisementĮach of these concepts is taught over the course of the first few scenarios. Here, the focus is squarely on the good stuff: the game’s novel card system rather than, say, the fact that you lose hit points until you fall over. The original Gloomhaven didn’t exactly throw its players into whitewater rapids, but “deep end” wouldn’t be an overstatement. Jaws of the Lion is one of a few modern board games to try a tutorial. No, I don’t know why my king is in love with his biological sister.
A good tutorial walks a tightrope between talking down to us like we’ve been living in a cave for the past fifteen years and assuming we hold a PhD in Interpreting Game Design Intentions.
The problem is twofold: either the game belabors the stuff we already know, like how to look around and click to shoot, or it fails to really dissect all the little subsystems that make the game purr.
GLOOMHAVEN CLASSES RANKED MANUAL
I’m speaking mostly of video games, where tutorials have been a staple ever since we collectively decided we weren’t going to read the manual anymore.
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