Gideon’s Perspective
It’s difficult to find the words to describe how I feel about Gloomhaven 2e. I played and loved the original, but I never reviewed it. I did, however, review Jaws of the Lion and Frosthaven, and the thing is, most of my praises and complaints about those games could be applied to Gloomhaven 2e verbatim, and I’m not a fan of repeating myself.
You can find a video version of this review on YouTube!
I guess I should start with this. Is Gloomhaven 2e an improvement over the original? Yes, oh my yes. It’s such an improvement that it makes the original Gloomhaven look like complete trash by comparison. Cephlaofair took the improvements from Frosthaven, as well as everything they learned about designing it, and then rebuilt Gloomhaven with it.
Furthermore, if you have played the original Gloomhaven like I have, the changes to 2e are so extensive that it really feels like you’re playing a new, if slightly familiar Haven game altogether.
Most missions have been rebalanced or redesigned altogether, the characters have been overhauled, and the campaign system has been redone. I’m not sure there’s anything left of the original that hasn’t been touched on in some way. Simply calling it a second edition doesn’t do it justice. It’s practically a new game altogether.
As usual, when I review the Haven games, I won’t spoil any of the classes beyond the starting 6, and I’ll try to keep most other spoilers to a minimum. That said, there may be a couple of smaller spoilers in the review.
| Gideon’s Bias | Gloomhaven 2e Information |
|---|---|
| Review Copy Used: No | Publisher: Cephalofair |
| Number of Plays: 30+ | Designer: Issac Childres |
| Player Counts Played: 2 | Player Count: 1-4 |
| Fan of Genre: Yes | Genre: Co-op Dungeon Crawler & Card Management |
| Fan of Weight: Yes | Weight: Heavy |
| Gaming Groups Thoughts: Loved It | Price: $200 |
Presentation
To say that Gloomhaven comes with a lot of components is akin to saying that water is wet or the sky is blue. The box is big, the box is heavy, and the box is packed full of game.
For the most part, everything is high quality, the map tiles are sturdy, and the artwork is great. A good portion of the artwork is also new compared to the original. You get a ton of map tiles, three hefty books, and an incredible amount of cards and tokens.
The miniatures representing all of the various classes, both locked and unlocked, are new. While they do look great, I do have to point out that the miniatures in the original Gloomhaven are a good deal more detailed, which is a little unfortunate.
Following in Frosthaven’s footsteps, if a class has access to summons, they now have their own standees, and I love that. Some monsters feature new artwork as well, and there’s one brand new monster. Their decks are different from the original Gloomhaven, but largely match any of the ones that had crossover with Frosthaven, with a tweak here and there.
Gloomhaven makes a solid attempt at trying to help you organize the game, but to be honest, you’re gonna have to put in some extra legwork in finding an organization system that works for you. That extra effort pays off in spades. Now that I have a system down, setting up Gloomhaven, or even its larger cousin Frosthaven, is no more difficult or time-consuming than setting up any other mid to heavyweight board game.
That said, there is a lot of legacy bloat taking up an unneeded amount of space. I’ll touch on the legacy elements later, but there are a lot of components that could be condensed down. I know this because I printed off just a couple of fan-made sheets that replace the whole thing, kit and kaboodle. The only stickers I use are for enhancements, and even then, I put those on sleeves, not the cards, so they are reusable.
The fan-made sheets I used can be found here and here.
The stickers and giant map they go on are not needed, and neither are the overly massive scenario flowcharts. Gloomhaven is not a cheap game, and it’s a shame that because elections have consequences, it’s even more expensive than the original.
A lot of this legacy bloat could have been whittled down and possibly made the game a tad bit cheaper. Or at least take up less space.
However, I can’t deny that you get an insane amount of gameplay and stuff for the price, steep as it may be.
What I Like About Gloomhaven 2e
It’s a Better Gloomhaven
The Haven games are some of the greatest games I’ve played, and Gloomhaven 2e is no different. The combat is still deep and tactical, the card-based system is excellent, and the game features an awesome progression system for both characters and the campaign itself. However, I want to jump into some specifics regarding Gloomhaven 2e.
Firstly, across the board, the ruleset has been refined to match Frosthaven. In addition to making the rules more coherent and balanced, it also greatly expands the compatibility between the two.
Next, the characters in Gloomhaven 2e have been reworked. To be blunt, the original Gloomhaven has broken characters on both sides of the spectrum. It had characters that were very underpowered, and ones that broke the game so badly that missions became trivial.
Gloomhaven 2e addresses all of this, bringing most characters to a similar power level with different strengths and weaknesses, at least for the ones I’ve played. I haven’t played all of them (yet), but I’m mighty impressed with the ones my partner and I have played so far. All the characters also feature masteries like in Frosthaven, and I love that.
It also makes these characters more fun, with more varied options. In fact, I specifically sought out characters that I didn’t like in the original and ended up loving them this time around.
Most of the missions have been redone to varying degrees. While I did recognize some, most felt like brand new missions to me. The difficulty curve has been refined as well. You no longer face a strangely difficult mission right from the jump, but later missions spike appropriately.
Items and their progression have largely been redone, and for the better, there are a lot more battle goals and personal quests that have been better streamlined so that they are reasonable to do without getting trapped during certain points of the campaign.
The campaign itself has also been overhauled. I don’t personally care about the storyline itself, but I do care about the general sense of how it flows. For example, I don’t care for reading flowery text and dialogue, but the gist of what I’m doing matters to me. So the new reputation system sings with me quite well.
There are three factions in Gloomhaven 2e. The Shields, The Sect, and The Merchants Guild. Missions you complete and decisions you make in events affect your reputation with these factions. This matters for a few reasons. First of all, it affects the direction of the campaign, locking out some missions while opening others. This gives an already replayable game even more replay value and adds some weight to your decisions.
Your reputation with these factions also affects some of the items you can buy. Some items are only available to you if your reputation with a given faction is high enough.
The reputation system doesn’t make the storyline any more coherent. But it does give a solid and visible campaign structure to follow and make weighty decisions about, and I like that a lot. After all, board games are all about making meaningful decisions in the first place.
Next, there is a new unlockable way to increase the difficulty. I was absolutely beaming when I discovered it…because well. I had already homebrewed something exceptionally close to it in the original Gloomhaven and Frosthaven. Anyway, I won’t spoil it, but it’s an excellent way of increasing the difficulty without increasing the scenario level, and it works great.
Finally, we have the puzzle book…and I still hate the puzzle book. When I sit down to play Gloomhaven, I’m looking for some excellent dungeon crawling and decision making, not deciphering a cryptic puzzle. I will say, however, this puzzle book is better than past iterations, and it’s not linked to finishing the campaign. It is, however, linked to something pretty important.
Gloomhaven 2e is more Haven, which is great on its own. But as a remake, or a remaster. It really does improve on the original in massive ways to the extent that it feels like a pretty fresh game to me, and that is very impressive.
Gloomhaven is Perfect for Me
The Haven games work really well for my situation. I live with my gaming partner, and that means when a game works well at a player count of 2, we can play as much as we want. All the Haven games play well at 2, and playing these games often is the best way to play them. Gloomhaven 2e is no different.
This is a controversial opinion I hold, but as much as I love the Haven games, I’d never recommend any of them to anyone who was hoping to play a single mission once a week with their gaming group. The game…just doesn’t work when you do that.
Progression moves at a snail’s pace, the mission structure and story, if you care about it, become incoherent, and things are just straight up going to be forgotten. Something you learn about 1 week, may not come up again for MONTHS at that speed. Even playing every day, it took my partner and me an entire week to unlock a new character.
Let me put it this way. When the game was being designed. Do you think playtesters played that way? Do you think that the playtesters played one session a week and called it quits before the next one? Of course not, the game would never see the light of day if they did.
While on paper, the designers might know people will play that way and will assume it works fine. Take it from me, who has taken several attempts at game design. What sounds good on paper never survives contact with reality, ever.
That may seem like I’m framing this as a negative thing. But I’m not. I’m of the opinion that folks need to play their games more anyway, as opposed to several thousand dollars of boxes collecting dust on a shelf that are only disturbed when a new one is added beside them. What I’m saying is, playing Gloomhaven 2e, or any haven game, often, is very, very rewarding.
If I tried to play any of my favorite games multiple times a day, every day. I’d grow fatigued, but the Haven games only get better the more you play them. The more you explore, the more you discover, the more you progress, and the more your own skill and understanding grow, the better the game gets.
I don’t mean just a single campaign either. I guarantee once I’ve taken Gloomhaven to completion, I’ll be ready to start again. The same missions with different character combinations or builds will still feel fresh. The excellent design of the monsters’ initiative decks will see to that.
While I’d say most games deserve to be played frequently. The Haven Games, including Gloomhaven 2e, simply play better when played frequently. The depth they hold can only be peeled back through repeated plays, and that works really well for me. I explore them like I do video games. I don’t put them down after a single session and forget about them for weeks, or potentially even months. I wade into that sandbox and play.
I know that concept is incredibly inconvenient for some, maybe even downright impossible for others. But let me tell you, if you can do it, that hefty price tag melts away because it’s the best dollar-to-hour entertainment ratio you will ever see.
What I Dislike About Gloomhaven 2e
The Legacy Crap is Still Here
I’ve never been in favor of the legacy elements in the Haven games, and with Gloomhaven 2e I’m still not. To be clear, I’m in favor of the campaign and progression, it’s the permanent marring that the game does to itself to try and make itself a one-and-done experience that I hate. Gloomhaven 2e and the other Haven games are some of the worst possible experiences I could think of to tack such a stupid thing onto.
If you played Gloomhaven 2e straight, used the stickers, chose to play it through once, and never again. You would be left with a 200$ decoration at best, at worst, garbage for a landfill. Which is one of the things board games are explicitly great at not being. On top of that, you will have experienced maybe 30% to 40% of what the game has to offer, probably less.
Look, Gloomhaven 2e has so much depth, content, and replay value that I could drop all other content. I could write and make videos about just Gloomhaven, and I wouldn’t run out of things to write about it for years. The game is big enough to have a content creator solely dedicate themselves to it. Any attempt to make it a throwaway game feels downright incredulous.
The most frustrating thing is that there is nothing in it that requires being a legacy element to work. The massive map and stickers are easily replaced with a pencil and a couple of sheets of paper that fans have already made. Heck, Cephlaofair even sells reusable stickers themselves, because they know there’s a market for them in the first place.
It’s not about spitting on the designers’ vision, because they offer you a way to bypass it themselves, assuming you are cool with throwing down even more money after buying their $200 game.
Cephalofair even sells Mercenary packs now with new classes. Who do you think is buying those? People who have just started playing for the first time, who already have 18 characters they haven’t played yet? Highly unlikely.
The legacy elements are an ugly stain on the game, and I’ll die on this hill.
I Still Don’t Care About The Scripted Story
I don’t care about the story in board games, or rather, I don’t care about prewritten ones. The best stories a game can tell are the ones told organically through its mechanics. The mission structure, reputation systems, and event cards all tell an organic story of a ragtag mercenary’s adventures in Gloomhaven.
Having to read a ton of prewritten flowery writing, storylines, environmental details, and character dialogue only gets in the way. First of all, the story does not mesh with a band of mercenaries that retire and rotate out with brand new faces.
If you meet a character, the next time you speak to that character, they may speak to you like your old friends when your new characters have never seen them before. It’s inconsistent. Furthermore, the mission structure isn’t linear. Unless you intentionally try to follow individual threads to their completion. You’re never going to remember the details. A character might give you a quest, but it could be several sessions before you end up taking on that mission. And if you actually do play weekly, good luck with that.
While I like reading the events, reading the mission intros, mission endings, and other flowery bits that love to insert themselves in the dead middle of your gameplay is tiresome. Furthermore, it’s all written like a novel. It forces someone at the table to try to be a skilled narrator who can at least give a little voice acting to different characters and descriptions.
It’s not that I want it gone. I want it cut down. Tell me what I need to do, and let the gameplay tell the story. Demons took over a temple, cool, I’m on it. I don’t need detailed dialogue from a character telling me about it, I don’t need to know about the intricate stone work as I approach it, or how I got a thorn in my right butt cheek as I moved through the brush.
I know not everyone feels this way, but for me, scripted stories are best told through books and movies. I think organic storytelling is where board games and video games truly shine, and that anything else is just a roadblock to it.
Verdict
Gloomhaven 2e is an excellent game for two reasons. The first is because the Haven games are excellent, and it is a Haven game. However, the second reason is that Gloomhaven 2e took the very flawed existence of the original and improved on it greatly. It made the bad parts good and the good parts even better. It’s incredibly impressive just how much it feels like a new game altogether.
The legacy elements are still an ugly stain, but they can be bypassed with some effort, and I do have a handful of component criticisms. But I ultimately haven’t been able to stop playing the game since I picked it up.
I can’t deny that the original Gloomhaven was also great, but it was also rough work, a spiked and venomous caterpillar finding its place in the world. It paved the way for Jaws of the Lion, and Frosthaven, which helped forge its cocoon and evolve into the beautiful butterfly that is Gloomhaven 2e.
It’s no simple cash grab or a recycling of old content for fresh money. It’s a remimaging, an artistic revision that allowed a team to apply the skills and experience they gained over the years to bring out the full potential of the initial catalyst that first ignited the flames of the Haven Games into the world.
I’m giving it my Golden Shield award.
