Gloomhaven Review (Jumpin Iron Ike)
Gloomhaven takes the things I love about TRPGs—character-creation and personal expression, satisfying power progression, and (ideally) a world and plot with a mixture of brights and darks in tone—and removes or makes all of those things much worse. Then, the things that are famously less good about TRPGs, like complex, esoteric, and over-bearing rules and a glacial round-by-round pace, and it makes those things much worse.
Obviously this isn't a TRPG, though, so totally my bad for hoping for a dungeon-crawler that provided *some* level of the above positives. But the real problem is that the game isn't very much fun. I gave it a real shot with an experienced guide and an open mind, and wish I had my 7 hours back.
The core exhaustion system is deep and strategic, but highly punishing when you make mistakes (or even just make moves that aren't optimal). Turns takes forever if you want to do things "right," as you negotiate turn orders and next steps with your party. The action-by-action random modifier rolling prevents the "solved" gameplay the designers are clearly trying to avoid, but it adds a lot of unwelcome variance that is generally ignored when it goes well and feels terrible when it goes bad. There are clearly optimal moves to make at most times, to the point where one friend I was playing with gave me hell for deviating a couple of hexes to pick up some gold, rather than heading straight for the closed door we needed to open (and worse, he was right. My slight deviation put me in non-optimal spot to use my esoteric and highly restrictive abilities in the following rounds).
So the core gameplay is full of punishment by design.
The world is dark and depressing and really doesn't like you. Nearly every interaction in the between-combat scenes results in a negative outcome, so you come to dread doing things that should be fun especially as you're on your way to a dungeon and really need to be in tip-top shape to do well. Fight the wolves? Take a bunch of damage. Hide from the wolves? Get poisoned.
But all of the above *could* be worth pushing through if the rewards for all the pain feel worthwhile, but in Gloomhaven the rewards are tiny and infrequent. You're heavily discouraged from picking up treasure or gold in dungeons, for example, as the gold lying around is rarely worth the effort, the infrequent treasure chests are regularly trapped, and collecting either burns your most important resource, the cards the keep you from becoming exhausted in dungeons that seem to be tuned so you can *just* barely complete them if you're playing correctly.
Hilariously, treasure you *do* collect in dungeons gets added to the merchant's stall, but you don't get it and then you still need to buy it from the man, which is complete nonsense in any logical sense but likely a necessity for the designers to maintain the oppressive feel of the game.
And that's a fact across all of the systems in the game—there's little world-building here to enjoy outside of some excellent voice-acting and solid (or better writing), but even though what's here is pretty great, that lore is all just set dressing to justify the complex card-based round-by-round meta the game is built around. The result is that you have to bend your mind around the reasoning for merchants who steal your goods and gold left lying on the floor and a mad rush to get the doors open in the dungeon to ensure you don't get so tired in the dungeon that you just die. Gloomhaven is a resource-management puzzle, not a dungeon-crawler, despite the aesthetics and the dungeons you crawl through.
And finally, levelling up feels bad. After five hours of punishment I reached level 2 with my identity-less character and earned a single HP and the option to add a single card to the possible cards in my deck. Oof.
And a quick note on stability; we had two players on Steam and one on EGS, and we regularly DCed and had to reload. During our entire first session our host disconnected every single turn, and we learned he was on a slightly different version, but we had to dig between sessions to uncover the issue.
So! If you're looking for a punishing, slow, and rules-heavy strategic board game skinned like a fantasy dungeon crawler, you'll probably have a great time (like so many people have had for years playing this board game). There is a ton of depth here and I see a glimmer of the fun you could have with creating the optimal deck/play style etc.
But if you're looking for any of the things that feel *good* in a TRPG, you won't find them here.