Gloomhaven: JAWS OF THE LION | REVIEW | The Gold Standard of Board Game Prequels

[Music] when gloomhaven draws the line was first announced i have to say i was a bit skeptical i know now that i was wrong to be but if i'm being honest i was a little skeptical as someone who had played through the entire base game of gloomhaven already a campaign that took hundreds of hours over the course of a year and a half or two years with the same group we had also played through forgotten circles i thought what's this going to offer me as a more experienced player not that the game was made for someone like me the game was meant more as an introduction to the gloomhaven universe so what exactly is jaws the lion and where does it fit into everything well it is definitely the more introductory version into this big world of gloomhaven that so many people have heard about and yet a lot of people haven't really been able to fully enjoy so whether you're an experienced gloomhaven player like me or you're a casual player or you've never been able to try it but you've been hoping to get involved in this gloomhaven world in some way in this review i'm going to look at what this game has to offer you depending on what your situation might be so although frosthaven the what's supposed to be the biggest game in the series so far is coming out later this year and there was already forgotten circles a small expansion for the purposes of comparing games i am going to focus mostly on bass gloomhaven to jaws of the lion so what are the main differences well to start you are it's pretty much the same type of game in the sense that you have a character and you're going on an adventure you gain items along the way you're working with your teammates that sort of thing but there are some really key differences the first thing i want to highlight is that this is a fully cooperative game rather than semi-cooperative and they put that right on the front of the box so you know it this does lead to some small rule changes in the base game of gloomhaven it was semi-cooperative in the sense that you couldn't buy each other items you couldn't trade items it was like whatever gold you had you bought for your items for yourself and that was that because this is fully cooperative you can't pitch in with players you can't spend seven of yours and three gold from someone else to buy an item but you can buy items to give to other people you can trade items between scenarios if the party gains an item in the middle of a scenario you can decide as a group who gets that item regardless of who actually opened the chest so there's much more of a focus on the team aspect of the game now what about the scope of the game so base gloomhaven had i believe 95 scenarios which was just wild jaws the lion has a much more lean more focused 25 scenarios and even playing through the campaign myself which i'll note right now i've only played through this solo where you play as two characters at once i ended up playing 18 scenarios out of the 25 and that was with playing all the scenarios that were available to me it was much more linear in the sense that you know there's only a few parts in the actual arc of the scenarios where you can branch off and it says you know decide to go to this scenario or that scenario and once you pick one it might carry out an arc of two or three scenarios one way or one other way before they sort of converge back on the main path so even just in terms of replay value if you're looking to replay this campaign chances are the second time around you will have already done almost all the scenarios before you will have seen a lot of what there is to see compared to playing bass gloomhaven over again at the same time that makes it easier for newcomers right i mean you hear a lot of people say this about gloomhaven which is i wish this game had come out when i was in college or when i was a teenager or whatever and i know a lot of people feel that way because the game system is there it's it's so intriguing it's so satisfying to play but that bass gloomhaven was just such a big box and such a daunting prospect and with this sort of leaner tighter more focused campaign sure you get a bit less that exploration but it gives you the chance to actually dive in without missing any of the key gameplay you still have the same you know playing your two cards taking the top of one ability with the bottom of the next you still level up and gain new abilities almost all of that is still there where you lose some of the sort of epic scope again where there's another difference is there are no retirement goals so you're only going to play as one character or one class for the entire campaign for some people that might be a tough prospect you know for me personally one of my favorite things about bass gloomhaven was the idea that one you get to retire a character and take over a new one and obviously that doesn't you know you're not going to feel like you get bored of a character necessarily because this is a much shorter campaign but there's just a bit of a when you get into this you kind of know it's not like in gloomhaven where if you didn't like a character you could specifically try to retire them and try to get to a new character quicker in this you're kind of stuck with the character you pick um but there is a bit more of an arc over the course of your campaign in terms of you know the way your character levels up and the investment and you can't just think oh well i bought these items and i regret it but i'm going to retire them soon so who cares no your decisions do have more long-term lasting effects in this campaign and that is something that i do really appreciate and part of the reason for not retiring your class and taking over is because well unlike base gloomhaven which comes with i believe 18 classes six at the start and the rest were unlockable this game only comes with four and they're all unlocked right from the start so you can pick any character but that means there isn't as much cool stuff to unlock along the way another big key with this is because it's an introductory game it has a built-in tutorial and i have to say this from what i see is should now be considered the gold standard for board game sort of built-in board game tutorials i mean the first uh five scenarios in this scenario book which i'm going to get to in a moment if you heard me talk about scenario book the first five scenarios or so are laid out in a way where they introduce certain concepts they give you a smaller deck of cards with some text that explains what the abilities do and it really does feel like it's set up for people who have never played gloomhaven before it's not going to detract from the experience if you have played before if you're the only one in the group and you're introducing some new players it's not like your experience is going to suffer they're fairly quick scenarios but they really help sort of spoon feed you and get you into it one step at a time one of the things i really appreciate about the tutorial though and where i think they really nailed it is that you're still making progress it's not one of those practice practice games where it feels like oh it was just kind of like to get a feel for how the game works or whatnot when you finish the tutorial your character is now level two you've gained something you've progressed so it doesn't feel like this just weird unnecessary step that's just treating like you treating you like you maybe need some help getting started it is actually easing you into the game and then you're already into your campaign by the time the tutorial is over and i think that was brilliantly done and for this type of game it's key for making it so approachable for less experienced gamers who want to see what gloomhaven really has to offer and now going back to the scenario book for a second here is a major difference there is a scenario book in here where you basically open up the page it tells you which monsters you need and the map tiles or the map itself is right there you can see exactly where the map is sometimes you need a supplemental scenario book where you add on another page to the end to expand the map but you have the map in front of you sometimes you know it can reveal it can spoil something like you look over to see an enemy on the page and you accidentally see what the reward was for that scenario where you see you know some upcoming surprise that you're not supposed to have read yet so sometimes it might hamper your experience in a slight way because of that but honestly for me personally i would take that any day over having that longer setup and all these extra map hexes to put together so i think the scenario book is a fantastic addition i bought jaws the line knowing i was going to be sort of locked down over the holidays and i played through this entire thing solo as the demolitionist and hatchet over the course of a few weeks and i have to say i think it works extremely well as a solo game so i'm going to talk about how it plays differently solo versus two to four players so the first key thing is that you're playing two characters instead of one so for your own decisions rather than just looking at one character's cards and deciding what cards you're gonna play you have to then set those aside and look at your other character's cards and decide so there is more to consider your turns are going to take longer your own individual turns will take longer than if you were playing in a group but you also have more control over what's happening personally i really like that i liked the idea of having a little bit more control over what was going on but because of that i increased the difficulty level in order to make up for it because if i was going to be able to plan to do an exact amount of damage to an enemy then i want that enemy to have more health to offset it so if you find that playing solo might be a little easy you can just up the difficulty to offset that so what this means when playing solo is that each scenario on its own will probably take a bit longer because you don't have someone else thinking at the same time as you you pick that one action and then you're looking for the other so i did find playing solo some of the scenarios could take upwards of you know two two and a half hours um especially if you're sitting there really plotting out your moves but at the same time you can go at your own pace when playing solo and you don't feel like you're slowing anything down the original gloomhaven did an excellent job of bringing you into this world and making it feel like its own little universe with its own set of rules and systems and magic and whatnot and these unique characters you learned about the you know the inox and the quattros and all this in the base game of gloomhaven though i found the story or the narrative arc itself was a little lacking for me personally and i have to say even though jaws the line is a step up in pretty much every regard of you know world building storytelling and all that it still does fall a little bit short for me again in that whole sort of story arc sense i loved going through the city events after every scenario and you're reading these little descriptions these little events that happen and you're trying to piece together you know they were they're really challenging and a lot of them i ended up getting the negative results out of and they were frustrating but at the same time they were really rewarding when you made the right choice on one of those city events and it really made you feel like you had you know an active role to play in this in this universe i just kept looking for these little things like these city events and these little nuggets that made me sort of again feel more immersed in the world even even the cards for the characters themselves have little sort of inside jokes to something they're you know one of their weapons they're holding or whatnot you've got the descriptions of all the characters on the back of their individual player boards again everything pulls you into this world it's really well fleshed out but the story sort of narrative over the long term could have been a little better for my liking which also leads to sort of another disappointment of mine which was the final boss and again this was another issue i had with bass gloomhaven was by the end of the campaign i felt like the final boss i mean you you invest how much time into a game like this i mean this one's a lot less obviously but basically even in this you invest a ton of time into this long campaign and the boss wasn't anything for either game and i'm going to focus on jaw's legs this one we're talking about but it wasn't anything that really stood out to me as memorable both in terms of the challenge or you know how interesting it was to fight against so when you invest in so much into such a an epic game you do sort of want maybe a bit of a better payoff it didn't overall maybe hurt my feelings of the game in terms of how i remember it but yeah that is something worth pointing out so just back on the topic of replayability for a second like i said when you're done this campaign there's going to be very few mysteries left unless you didn't play with a couple of the characters in the box chances are you've seen a lot of the character cards you've seen a lot of the items you've played most of the scenarios so there might not be a whole lot of mystery left but if you're still part of the gloomhaven universe you're going to be playing other games whether it be the base game or you're going to be playing frosthaven you can carry over these characters and all these items and things over into other gloomhaven games so if you're you know if you wanted to dabble in this universe and you think this is a good starting point and you might be making the jump after this to gloomhaven or frosthaven the value is going to carry over even more long-term overall the good far outweighs the bad here and i have very little reason to complain i mean sure the campaign ended with a bit of a whimper for me and maybe i was looking for a little more story and maybe it wasn't quite as exciting as the original bass gloomhaven and you know going back to what i started with at the beginning maybe dungeon crawlers aren't even designed really for me but even so i still played through this solo the entire campaign by myself over the course of about three weeks i could have stopped at any point and even though this game this type of game usually isn't for me and i'm not actively seeking out dungeon crawlers this game was just so good that i had to play it through all the way to the end so even though i likely probably wouldn't play through the campaign of draws the lion a second time myself that's probably in large part because i've already played so much gloomhaven over the past few years and i have to say that after having played that i did not expect to enjoy this this much it's a fantastic game and the whole gloomhaven universe is just something iconic in our board game industry that not everyone has been fortunate enough to be able to experience so if this is your starting point or if you've enjoyed gloomhaven games in the past and you're not sure if there's enough here well put those fears to rest because they've absolutely knocked her to the park with jaws the lion uh perfect introduction to this game in our hobby and i think you owe it to yourself to try this out so thanks for watching see you around

Channel: All You Can Board

Views: 8,762

Keywords: jaws of the lion, gloomhaven jaws of the lion, gloomhaven, gloomhaven jaws, gloomhaven expansion, frosthaven, gloomhaven 2, jaws of the lion review, gloomhaven review, hatchet, demolitionist, board games, review

Id: jhGwRpAQuUw

Length: 13min 10sec (790 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 19 2021