When I was a kid, I played a board game called HeroQuest a lot. This was a collaboration between Games Workshop and Milton Bradley, intended to transform the dungeon-crawling RPG experience into a board game. Eventually, I ended up having to get rid of my copy of that game in a move, but I always wanted that experience back, either as a board game or video game. I missed out on the Descent board game when that came out, and that never really got a PC or console version. However, Gloomhaven did get a console and PC port. So, I thought, this is what I’ve been looking for. It wasn’t.

By way of explanation, Gloomhaven is a board game where you control a small group of adventurers as you go on quests for wealth and glory in a gritty swords and sorcery setting. You control your character through a deck of cards, and movement and attacks are controlled by playing cards.

This leads to the problem. When you take damage, you either lose hit points or can discard a card or two to avoid the hit point loss. Once you use all your cards, you recycle the cards you used minus the ones you discard, plus an additional discard based on whether it was a short rest (card is discarded at random) or a long rest (you choose the card and you’re last in initiative order). This means that movement and attacking are finite resources for the level – once you run out of cards, the run is over and you lose. You return to the city, keeping what gold you’ve obtained, but losing any experience.

Gameplay still of Gloomhaven

It makes playing each dungeon an exercise in figuring out the optimal card plays for each scenario, with little room to put your own spin on a character. It’s a frustrating experience, and honestly isn’t what I was looking for in this kind of game. I was hoping for a kind of fantasy XCOM – like a little bit of Warhammer Fantasy meets Space Hulk, but with adventurers in a dungeon. That’s what the conversation around the game presented itself as being, but that’s also what it’s not.

So, I’m still out looking for that game, and maybe I’ll find it eventually. But not today.

The PC version of Gloomhaven is available through the Humble Store (affiliate link).

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