How to Play Gloomhaven With 5 Players

all right mr or mrs popular you are here because you want to learn how to play gloomhaven with five players um it's actually relatively straightforward um there's just a few points i'll go over and you know we'll start with kind of the nuts and bolts stuff because there's a few things that you need to do uh just based upon the creator of gloomhaven mr superstar isaac childress uh he has some official recommendations but there's a lot more than that to playing it with five players there's a lot of intangibles and it kind of alters you know the way you play the game and and uh spacing and all kinds of interesting stuff so first off um nuts and bolts stuff you're going to need a modifier deck another modifier deck for the fifth player there's a couple ways you can go about doing this if you're a tactile person like me like i like to have stuff in my hands i do sometimes use apps but mostly i prefer to stay with the uh tactile you know the deck and that sort of stuff i mean that's one of the reasons why i love board gaming amongst many others is that it's you know it's more tactile it's more in the the physical moment so option a is to get a print and play from boardgamegeek.com it's one of the largest board game sites in the world not sure if it's the largest but it's big so you'll have to get a regular login you've got to give them your email they won't spam you or anything like that so don't worry about that and then you can go and download the print and play from them second is that you can actually buy one um i believe they're on etsy and there's a few different places you can buy them i think the one on etsy is pretty good from reviews i've read i'm going to put a link to it in the description along with a link to some other things so um if you do get that professional one it's gonna probably look a little better unless you're some sort of professional printer i am definitely not the third option is that you can use the gloomhaven helper app the gloomhaven helper app is going to do a lot of things it's going to allow you to manage monsters and hit points and all kinds of cool stuff and you can also use it as the modifier deck for the fifth person so for all all of you who you know don't mind using the actual you know the app i think it's like 10 or 11 bucks or something then you know go ahead use that third modifier deck so next is if you do use a print and play um or even if you buy the one from etsy you're going to want to sleeve it modifier decks is something that's going to be used an absolute ton throughout gloomhaven so you should be sleeving that anyways but for this yeah you want to sleeve it so that you know one you can't see any subtle differences because you don't want to be able to see you know what card is coming up next that gives you an unfair advantage and just don't do that you cheater um okay so the official recommendation as per isaac childress is that you increase the difficulty two levels so you go into you know your player's guide or whatever you go to that chart and you know you do all your your normal level stuff where you you know you take the average level and divide by two and then you add two to that number so if you have you know level three characters it's gonna be you know level 1.5 rounded up to two plus two for that so you'd be playing it at uh four difficulty if you had all level three players um and so that will make it so that there's more elites they have more hit points more shields more effects more stuff like that it won't actually increase the amount um you're still going to use four because there's no way of actually increasing the amount unless you make up some sort of house ruling i mean board gaming house rules are are great so if you want to do something like that you know go ahead but you know the general consensus out there is that you want to run it at two difficulty levels higher and leave it the same so yeah and then also you leave the gold in the experience at the previous level so that it doesn't unbalance it because essentially you're increasing that difficulty but you don't want to increase all the rewards and everything because what you're going to do is you're going to accelerate your progress you're going to buy more items your prosperity will go up faster that sort of stuff and so by playing with five players especially if it's consistent again you must be really popular if you have five players consistently and and good for you that's really cool but if you do play it consistently you're going to accelerate all of those things okay next is going to be um time um and i wrote a really cool article on my website so check out my link below how long it actually takes to play gloomhaven and i mean some people's mileage is going to vary on this but my group is let's call it you know medium casual and it takes us a good three hours sometimes on a scenario when you have five players it's gonna take you quite a bit longer um and it's not just linear like it you know from four to five it's going to be more than from three to four um because you know it's just all these extra things that compound on each other um you know all the extra decisions and when you have five players on some of these maps it makes it a lot more difficult to just move around and do a bunch of things so plan on some extra time and you know if you do you'll you'll be okay you you know it's not something that's the end of the world but just you know it's definitely going to be longer than a normal game the next is spacing so you know bloomhaven is a really finely tuned game isaac childress i mean he built this game by himself but he didn't amaze i mean not all by himself of course but he generally designed it and did all this kind of stuff it's very well balanced um so five players does throw some of the map balance out a little bit around especially around spacing the maps are going to be a lot tighter so you want to make sure that you put a little bit more emphasis on abilities like jump and flying and even just extra move and stuff so that you can move around and actually like get something done without being stymied all the time or having to take extra time and that's why i say take steve it's not a linear scale on how long it takes because as you add more people and more complexity it's harder to figure out what move you're going to make that's actually going to be effective so trend a little bit more towards the side of you know prioritizing move move is going to be big for everybody when you have five players the next is going to be the actual spacing so you know you're going to have to make sure you don't have a party full of melee characters and everyone's you know pushing up on each other you know hitting each other with elbows trying to get to the front and there's not enough real estate to go around um okay so all that being said yeah you want to move around you don't want melee get some range damage dealers in there and then make sure you do not have a ton of summons if if you have five players and a bunch of summons it's gonna be like you're at a rock concert or something you're not gonna be able to get anything done um there is minor spoiler alert here there is a class that has a quite a few summons that class i would not recommend playing when you have five players just don't do it just yeah pick something else or you probably won't be that happy another thing that happens is when you pump up the difficulty two levels uh monsters are going to do quite a bit more damage and then uh because you're all jammed together uh aoe attacks from bosses or elites or you know even eggs sometimes they're gonna be really deadly when you're all jammed together in a close area and so just be aware of that point make sure that you've got you know a reasonable amount of spacing that's why i say you don't want a ton of melee characters and then another point would be shields as you go up there's certain enemy types that get a lot of shields and so make sure you're prepared for that because shield can really be tough to deal with and when you're pushing it up to difficulty levels you're still going to be weaker even though there's five players and so if somebody's got shield two or three it's really tough it's going to be really tough to punch through that shield so make sure you've got some pierce or you know some big higher damage cards not something that's you know hit eight guys at two damage or three damage because it's going to be completely ineffective um so when you're playing with five players like i said before you're going to accelerate how the game proceeds right so yeah prosperity level is going to go up faster you have more gold and i won't spoil exactly how that works in case you're a new player but if you're not you'll know exactly what i'm talking about so yeah prosperity's going to go up so just make sure and keep that prosperity at the orig or keep the difficulty the gold the xp or not the difficulty the gold and the xp at the regular level difficulty goes up two levels um and then another point would be road events so road events very often correspond to a character um you know there's a little symbol on them and and if you have that character in your party you know something different happens with five players you've got more classes greater chance you're gonna be able to unlock those so my suggestion is that you rotate a person and say this person is the inactive person for the event and just rotate that through keep track of that and then you won't be unbalancing the road events um so if you have five players and you don't really want to play five players because you don't want to be all jammed up and you'd prefer to play kind of you know how isaac designed the game which is four players max and you don't want to do all these things you can have one person be the dm and what this does is it makes it really simple for the other players um so it's almost like more like playing a video game where you're just sitting there with your character and one person is handling all of the nuts and bolts so they're you know doing all the enemy movements and the targeting and the damage and the status effects and putting the gold out and moving the monsters around loading up the room stuff like that um very often there'll be a person who enjoys doing those things so that is one other option as well instead of them actually being a fifth player character the other option is you can run two maps simultaneously so get ready you better have a big table to do this because it's going to be tough but if you do you essentially just split them and you play two separate scenarios um not my favorite way of doing things you know for to me board gaming is about bringing people together and it's a bit tougher to interact when you're actually doing separate things but if you don't want it to be super crowded um you can go three into um [Music] although it's not ideal um now i also see out there a lot of people going okay can we play gloomhaven with six players no you can't don't do it i mean you can but again you're gonna you're gonna have to run two simultaneous i would not recommend having six players on one map um it just doesn't really work it's gonna be a gong show so there you have it there's how you play gloomhaven with five players please like and subscribe it really helps my channel grow i really appreciate it and thanks very much

Channel: Neural Net Games

Views: 2,831

Keywords: board games, table top games, Gloomhaven, 5 players, 5 player variant

Id: -RGgCErtkWU

Length: 12min 2sec (722 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 14 2020