How to Play Gloomholdin': Gloomhaven in 18 cards

all right hey everyone this is going to be a really quick um or abbreviated how to play video for gloom holden which is the 18 card table list version of gloomhaven and i say abbreviated because it's not going to be teaching you how to play it from scratch unfortunately i've tried a few times now uh to cut a video just even if you haven't played gloomhaven to teach you how to play from scratch and it turns out i'm just not very good at making how to play videos i i kept forgetting things and it just it was dragging on and i wasn't very helpful in the end so i think the right solution is i'm gonna offer this video for if you already know how to play gloomhaven or at least you've like watched a video or read through the rules of gloomhaven and and you're familiar with them at least a little bit and then i'm going to kind of start from that place and then teach you everything that's different about gloom holden or at least as much as i can remember to get to in a video i'm sure i'm going to forget a few things so we'll start there i'm going to just assume you know the terminology and stuff and the mechanics of gloomhaven so that i can actually get through this video and and get something out there that's actually a little bit helpful if you're trying to learn the in-hand game um i'm gonna have a rules document out there and it's based on the gloomhaven rulebook and then i've changed everything and added things that needed to be added for gloomholden so it's it's a really comprehensive rulebook and so you can definitely learn that way i know a lot of people including myself sometimes prefer learning from video but i think using both to kind of supplement what i forget to go through here and to have a more comprehensive look at it looking at the rulebook is probably a really good idea as well so um i've got another video out there showing you how to do the setup and we're already set up for scenario one here and i think i'll just kind of get started this is an orange scenario scenarios are either orange as indicated by the dot the color dot in the corner they're either orange or blue and what that tells you is what stuff you're going to be facing in your scenario based on the color see if i can get it to focus here i had it so this is an orange scenario which means we get to ignore that bear which has a blue dot it doesn't matter if the monsters are upside down all that matters is do they have a color dot and is the color dot your color dot so we're looking for orange color dots and we're also looking for no color dots so any special tiles obstacles treasure tiles traps monsters if they don't have a color dot they apply to both scenarios because these maps share two scenarios depending on which way you're playing so this is this map share scenario one and scenario two you'd be playing that this direction and so there had to be a way to to indicate which stuff is is your stuff and so you'd actually be playing the stuff that doesn't have the color dots like these obstacles and these two wolves which don't have color dots you'd be playing those in both scenario one and scenario two so what's important for us right now is we get to skip the blue dot stuff which is that bear and it looks like that's the only thing we need to skip we get that money token for our scenario if we were playing scenario two since that's an orange dot um they wouldn't get that one and they wouldn't be facing that wolf so i'm going to use the this is hard to do through my camera lens but um going to use the red arrows to indicate my the hex that my character is on and typically i hold this in my right hand if i need to use my right hand a lot of times i'll just stash it there and and do whatever i need to do but for this video i might end up setting it on the table just for convenience so right away we don't need that because we're not in combat in gloom holden every round is either a non-combat round or a combat round and it's really important because stuff works really differently when you're in combat versus when you're outside of combat and hopefully you get a taste for that as i play a couple of turns here with you when you're outside of combat monsters don't get a turn monsters don't actually move on the map in gloom holden but they do move quote unquote move when you are in combat so in non-combat rounds you actually just get to take your turn your turn is the only turn for the round so i would you know when i play a card i tilt them up like that so i'd play my two cards and then discard them and then that's the entire round well discard them and take the actions on the cards but when you're in combat then monsters get to take a turn so that's just the important thing to remember non-combat rounds when you're not in combat you just get to keep taking turns basically your turn is the entire round and then in combat rounds the monster gets to take a turn as well and you're only going to be fighting one monster at a time you can only be in combat with one monster at a time when you are in combat that's what the range tracker card is for this is what is called distance so it's a different sort of unit of measure it's like abstracted distance what will happen is you'll move into a tile let's say you know this tile right here adjacent to the wolf and then you'll be in combat and once you're in combat movement doesn't happen on the map anymore movement happens by increasing or decreasing distance so monsters will try to do what's advantageous to them for example if you are at distance 1 that would put the monster at a disadvantage if he was trying to do ranged attacks and so the monster would try to move out to to distance two in order to avoid disadvantage on his attack stuff like that or if if you are at um distance three and you're just can't get to distance one distance one is a melee range then you just can't do your melee attack so like if i have a melee attack and all i have is and we're at distance four and i'm trying to get into range to attack and i only have a move to action to go with it well i move to four while i'm at four so three two and i can't get into range so my attack can't land because it's a melee attack and i i'm at range too so um that's how you'll be interacting with range and movement when you're in combat as soon as you're out of combat you ignore the ranged tracker card and you go back to moving on the map so i think one of the quickest ways to do this will just be to play a couple of turns and try not to interrupt myself too much but i'll explain some things as i go so i'll just stash this here for now and i'm right there he's two hexes away from me and i kind of have my turn planned out i know what i want to do here i think i'm going to try what i'm going to try to do is use this move action or ability and then attack him and then pair it with that card to see if i can finish him off and these are prototype cards the final version of this is is going to look a little bit different but this will give you a close enough idea so i'm going to i'm going to go ahead and do that i'm going to start by moving to that's going to take me right there i'm going to use that middle red arrow to indicate that i'm on that hex right there next to or adjacent to the monster at range one and what happens when you move into range of a monster what's it's called the monster's mid range is what you're looking for the monster's mid-range is um he's a bad example because all of his ranges you can see the bottom row here is range all of his ranges are melee range the dash indicates a zero for range or a one for range which is melee range um i wonder if i have the bear here oh he's all melee too okay i'll just have to talk through it if whatever their highest range is a b or c is their max range whatever their second highest range is is there is called their mid-range uh so let's say if he was range three for column i have these columns backwards they will be different on the final i think but um for column c here he's got three range for column b let's say he's got 4 range and then melee range for a this 4 would be his max range this 3 would be his mid-range so when you're entering combat there's kind of two ways that it can happen you can be the aggressor and you can move in and attack or if you end movement on a tile that's within the mid-range of the monster of any monster they are going to start combat whether you want to start it or not but in this case we've moved into that hex right next to him and so i slid down my character hp card to reveal his information so we look like this right now and he actually gets a chance to what's called interrupt my turn so if i move into range of him and i end my movement on a hex that's within his mid-range he actually gets a chance to interrupt to see if he gets to take his turn first so suddenly we're in a combat round we started out the game in a non-combat round i move into a hex i have intent to attack him but it actually doesn't matter as long as i'm in mid-range of that monster he would have attacked me anyway so he gets a chance to interrupt my turn so we're gonna hit pause right here right between this move action that i've already taken or ability and right before this attack two ability that i want to take but i haven't had a chance to take yet because he gets the chance to interrupt and then obviously i haven't done my other card either so what you do is what i'm going to do right away is i'm going to look at his hp and get that set up and the left side has the white and the right side has the gold and those correspond to normal and elite monster so that four is for a normal monster's hp so we're gonna set him to four and i like to keep my thumb on it so i can remember which of these numbers is his current hp so we've set his hp to 4 and he gets a chance to interrupt us like i was saying and so we're going to use this behavior table and each of these the a b and c i hit my camera is what's called a behavior set and a behavior set if i can get close enough without hitting my camera here and focus a behavior set is come on let's get focused here there we go that top row has initiative the middle row has move the third row from the top is attack and the bottom row tells you range and then on that bottom edge if they're applying any conditions or if they have any bonuses that will be there too and then on the character image over here if there's any ongoing traits or bonuses they're going to be reflected over here and these these are active all the time regardless of the behavior set that you roll so let's just roll a behavior set you roll by using the monster hp card you can see there's what i call the ruler up on top with values of a b or c and then you roll onto the red line on the monster on the character hp card so i'm just gonna place it and i roll the b so he has behavior set b for the round which gives him initiative of six move of three attack of two and a range of melee and he does immobilize on me uh and he with that initiative of six definitely um interrupts me and the way that interrupting works what i forgot to do is even on non-combat rounds you should choose your leading card and the leading card tells you which is your initiative um if i had remembered i would have chosen the faster one just kind of by default so it would have been initiative 23 for me i moved in right here between these two abilities he had a chance to interrupt before i can complete my turn and he did successfully because he rolled a behavior set that has a faster initiative than me and so now he gets to take his entire turn before i get to finish my turn and then that's going to be the end of the round he's going to take his entire turn i get to finish my turn and then that's the end of this round and so we've suddenly gone from a non-combat round into a combat round one of the reasons it's important to remember whether you're in or outside of combat is one thing i mentioned already which is the range but another thing is you can't long rest if you're in combat but you can long risk if you're outside of combat so let's just resolve his turn the way monster ai works in gloom holden is they always have a move action and an attack action these values could be zero or they could be dashes in which case it would be move zero or attack zero make sure you remember that if the range has a dash that doesn't mean range zero that means melee range which is range one so if if move and attack have a dash that means it's zero and they don't do that action if a range has a dash that means it's actually just melee range which is range one the way the ai works is they're gonna move or attack first whichever one makes the most sense for them so it's a little bit um you just do whatever is the most beneficial to them to an extent the exception is they're never gonna attack first and then move if that moving is like somehow trying to predict what you're gonna do um so an example right away of that is let's say i have um like right now i have melee attacks coming up this monster is not smart enough to attack me first since we're already in range he's not going to be smart enough to attack me first um and then move away as far as he can in the hopes that he's just going to keep me out of range with my melee attacks he's just they're not going to act that smart they're not they're only going to move in order to either get into range to attack or they're going to move to try to avoid disadvantage if they have a ranged attack so and they're only going to move as little as they need to so say he has a ranged attack whatever ranged at my range it might be he's not going to move out to maximum range he's just going to move out to distance 2 in order to avoid that disadvantage and then one thing i don't think i mentioned yet is as soon as combat starts set the range tracker card to the current range if i had attacked him or tried to attack him before i got interrupted like at range three then we would set the distance at three and this is where you'd start out the combat at and then i think i mentioned this already but during combat we don't move on the map card we're only going to be adjusting the distance up and down so anyway we started out at range one i think he rolled b if i remember right and he's interrupting me he doesn't need to move because he's already at melee range whoops sorry about that drop that card so he's just gonna attack and he's going to attack me with two because in that column b it's attack two uh so before he gets to execute that attack we're gonna roll an attack modifier for him and we've got his hp set at four so that means the right the correct table for him is present the way that you determine which row your modifier is coming from is just what scenario level you're playing on and this works differently than um big gloomhaven i think in big gloomhaven it's like you know you have the formula where you figure out what scenario level you're playing based on everybody's character levels there's none of that going on this is just choose what difficulty you want so probably you're going to be playing the whole campaign on scenario level one and what you would do is if you're playing and it like seems too easy well maybe play on level two or try level three if you play a scenario and like you're having a hard time beating it you could the next time you play it you could play it on level zero every orientation of this card has different values so like you notice a b and c for level one is one zero zero well if he had been on a different health let's say he was on health five it would have been values negative one zero zero so i have these averaging out to what i want them to be for the monsters getting the harder the scenario level you're playing the better the combat modifiers that the monsters get and vice versa so anyway we're gonna roll for his attack modifier on his attack of two so we're just gonna roll he got a c which puts him at attack modifier zero so it's not going to do anything to it he gets to just execute his to attack so i'm going to i would normally just stash this back there so maybe i'll just do that i'm going to adjust my health because he hit me for two so eight down to six i'm at six and then he did immobilize so that condition needs a chance to do its thing and so my finishing this turn is that conditions opportunity to finish that out if i was trying to move here that immobilized would block me from moving so after this turn of mine even if it's only the second half of my turn that condition has come off of my character so it's active now i couldn't move if i wanted to but i actually i don't have any move actions left so it didn't really matter so he hit me down to six and now i get to finally finish my turn which i'm going to resolve the rest of this action for that attack 2. so i'm going to roll for my modifier which is a b and the way that character modifiers work the modifiers you'll be dealing with for you is different than monsters monsters you just use the road that corresponds to the scenario difficulty level you're playing um for your character you actually use the row that corresponds to your character level let's see if i can get it to focus here please focus uh so we're starting out on level one you can get up to level five and i can't remember what i rolled i think i rolled a b and that would put me at a zero modifier so it could have been minus one it could have been two or plus two so i get to just do the two attack on him which would bring me down to two and i think oh that would be embarrassing to get this wrong in my own rules of video but i think his retaliate gets to affect me on both of these attack actions so i believe he gets to hit me back for this one which would i would suffer the one damage so six down to five and then i'm gonna go ahead and execute that one and i'm gonna roll a modifier for that three attack i got another b except i'm on a different health now i'm on five health and so these values have changed so that's actually a plus one which would put me up to a four attack uh and that is quite a bit of overkill he's only at two health so he's down to zero health the combat the moment the monster dies is over and so this is the end of the round and it's we're out of combat now so the next round will be a non-combat round so what i'm gonna do is put my character hp card back make sure it's situated in case my map card moved around at all during combat make sure it is situated on that tile so i remember where i am i'm going to stash this so i can use my right hand and i'm going to discard i can get my camera to focus here i'm going to discard my two cards that i played the way discarding works is there's an a side and a b side of cards when you discard an a side card you flip it over and put it on the b side and so now we have two a side cards and two b side cards when you discard a b side card you slide it behind the card in front of it so let's say next round we played these two b-side cards it would actually look like this and we would have those two left and then we'd have to play those two and then both of those would flip to the b side and then we'd have to play those two and then once you play your last two b side cards then you have to you're forced to go into the short rest or a long rest if you can if you're not in combat you can do a long rest okay so this is where we're at dead monsters are considered money tokens so i could go loot this dead monster tile if i wanted um i don't really have any looting actions and i don't want to waste a turn to end my turn on that tile so i'm gonna just forgo that money token and let's move on let's go to our next turn uh looking at the board here i've got that monster left and that monster and i don't know if i do really well maybe i can loot that money token but i'm gonna try to go get him and he is one two three hexes to get into melee range but what i want to do is i want to demonstrate how elements work that would be one important thing i could do here so i'm going to do a turn that would involve that i'm going to try to use my augmented invisibility ability there so this one after the invisibility icon tells you i'm invisible for one round if i consume two dark elements i can be invisible for two valence which seems like a good idea the way element infusion works is an element is infused in the battlefield as long as it's visible they're all on the top part of the cards here and so right now of all of the active abilities we have one dark too dark and one fire there's only dark and fire in the game and so i can consume any of those um and it doesn't have to be on cards that uh you're using it can be on any card that's visible so what i'm going to do is my plan i'm going to play this card the invisibility card and then probably just another card that'll get me there i needed at least move three if i remember right so i'll play that card because i'm just not planning to heal for a while that might be silly because i kind of took a beating on that first one but those are going to be my two i'll pick my leading card as a 12 and then we'll try to carry out my turn here so i'm gonna do this action first and i'm gonna move um i think i'm gonna move past him outside of range so that for one since i know he's all melee range so his mid-range is one if i stay out of one range of him he can't try to interrupt me even if i move through tiles that are in his range as long as i end movement on a tile or a hex that's not in his within his mid-range he can't try to interrupt unless of course i attack him so i could move out to here and try to attack him with like a range attack and in that case even if his mid-range wasn't three or two this would be two even if his mid-range wasn't two he could still get to try to interrupt with the turn because i'm being an aggressor and i'm attacking him but i'm not gonna do that i'm gonna try to do the invisibility so i'm gonna move one two three four hexes all the way up to there and i'm not gonna move into the doorway even though i maybe could but i'm just going to move up to there and i'll know that he's one two hexes away from me so i'm going to use the middle red arrow here to remember i'm not attacking him so he doesn't get to interrupt because i'm not attacking him and he's not his mid-range is not enough to reach me because i'm at range 2. so anyway we're gonna do we already completed our bottom action we'll do our top action now which is the invisibility one but um i can go two rounds if i can consume too dark so i'm going to do that i'll consume this one and this one and that gets me the two rounds so i'm invisible actually for the next two rounds because he didn't try to interrupt so i get two more full turns wow i get two more full turns without him doing anything or being able to do anything towards me because he doesn't know i'm there so let's make it count here let's i know we're going to be entering combat here so i'm going to move that card down and i don't need to roll for his behavior set because like i said i'm invisible and he doesn't realize i'm there so i'm just going to be tracking his health here he's going to start at four because he's a normal monster um one thing i don't think i mentioned is on the map cards the borders of the monsters tell you whether they're normal or elite this guy has a gold border so he's elite and i know normally in big gloom haven and i have it white here as well it's it's white is the color of a normal monster but when i was doing the graphic design of the maps i tried white and it just didn't look quite as good and so i went with a red border so red borders on monsters are normal monsters yellow borders are elite monsters so this guy is a normal monster with health 4 and i'm just going to see if i can defeat him in like a turn or two uh what i forgot to do is set the distance at two so the starting distance for the combat is distance two since i'm too range away from him at the start uh and i'm gonna look to my ranged attacks here i'm gonna go with the higher attack of three maybe i can roll a good modifier and uh and get him that way hmm yeah that probably wasn't very smart but that's fine i'm gonna then do this one oh maybe this will work because then i have advantage because this gives me advantage so we'll roll for my modifier that's a c i'm level one that's bad news because that's a negative one oh but i'm had advantage so i get to roll again yay oops hit my camera again that's a b that is wonderful so i have a plus one modifier which thankfully is enough to defeat him that takes my three to a four he had four health that takes him down to zero hp and i'm gonna return that to its position i'm gonna return this to one just for storage and then i'm gonna put that there so i can discard my two cards so all of these are b side cards i'm going to slide this behind and i'm going to slide that behind so these are the only two cards i have left so i have to use these two on my last turn before resting and now i'm deciding do i want to do a long rest before i move in or do i want to just go and try to have this be my first attack against him and i don't want a long rest because this is a good card and if i roll a really good modifier who knows maybe i'll just get lucky and i'll get him in the first round so i'm gonna play these two and move in so i'm gonna use this for the default bottom action of move two so i'll move through the door one two to be adjacent to the wolf the elite wolf and if you remember since i'm in range of him now and i'm attacking so if i'm attacking he gets to try to interrupt no matter if he's in range and if i would be not attacking like if i'd be healing or doing invisibility or something and i was within his mid-range he still could try to interrupt so either one of those conditions allows him to try to interrupt i actually meet both of those conditions so he's going to try to interrupt me after i've completed this action which i have so we're going to move that down and we're going to roll for his behavior a and he's elite so we're going to use the gold side and so he has initiative 26 which i should have picked a leading card here beforehand i would have picked that but it doesn't matter because both of those are better than his 26 so now i get to complete my turn but before the round is over he gets to do that a column behavior set on me so we'll set his health to six right there and i get to finish my turn i'm gonna do the three melee attack if it would kill him i get to do two additional so this is a really nice situational card here for this situation we'll see how it goes i'm i'm sure i'm not going to roll a modifier well maybe good enough to to get him so i'll roll that's a c and that's negative one shucks i think if i had rolled a b i would have got him so that's down to two what was potentially like five or six if i had rolled better is now down to a two uh so i do two on him which is down to four and he has that retaliate bonus so he's going to hit me and i'm going down to three so that's kind of scary and now he gets to do his turn which is move five he doesn't need to move because we're at range one and then attack two oh this is getting pretty dicey here so oh he gets to roll for his modifier he is did i not update his health i did he started at six and now he's at four um he gets to roll on an attack two and he rolled a c which for level one is thankfully zero so he does his two attack and now i'm at hp1 and that's the last of my ability cards i have to discard these two b-side cards so what i'm going to do is stash these back up here just so it's easier to do this and i have to i can't long rest so i have to lose a random card so i'm just going to pull these cards out i'm going to shuffle the order i promise i'm not looking and i'm going to take a random card which is home brew and that's going to end up going in the back so i'm going to store that in my finger here and the rest of them go in the way back phantom out and then now this is my new back card so i'm gonna use that to support the other cards in the back okay so now it's almost like i lost two cards because i lost the a side and the b side of that one so i have three cards to start and we'll get back to where we were and this is a fresh round uh in a combat round so we're starting here so that means we're starting the round so i'm gonna pick my two cards he was at four i'm at one i lost my healing card so that's not even an option so i need to really try to make sure he gets killed this turn and so that means i should probably improve my odds of going first by playing this card man i don't really like that i think that's what i need to do and i think i'm going to play it for the no i was gonna play it for the default attack action but with his retaliate oh shucks this is embarrassing because i don't remember the rule i can't remember if the retaliate kills me or if we skip the retaliate if it would have killed me i feel like i remember reading something about that uh so since i'm not sure i'll be more mean to myself and i'll say that if i'd if i did play the action and it would kill me because i'm only at health one i'm gonna say the retaliate would kill me so we'll just play it that way and then i'll look up the rule after this um i'm going to play this card because i want to try for that faster initiative [Music] yeah because that would beat his 19 it wouldn't beat his six but it would beat his 19 and this card wouldn't beat his 19. so i'm going to give myself two-thirds odds at beating him this is kind of for all the marbles here so i'm going to play these two cards i'm gonna my plan is to play this top one as a default attack action no that would be silly because that would kill me then so i'm going to play that for the invisibility i can't augment it because i don't have any dark in the battlefield and then i'm going to play that action that's my plan and now i roll for his behavior set which is c which is initiative 19. wow it's a good thing that i went with that card because i would have lost otherwise so i get to go first thankfully i'm gonna do the um invisible action here which makes me invisible on his next turn and then so that's that's good this might actually work out and then i get to do the attack three action well no it might not work out because he still gets to hit he still gets a retaliate so we'll see how this goes so i'm doing the attack reaction i need this to go really well i actually need to roll a b uh so we'll see i roll the c that's bad so i hit him for two which brings him down to two health and he retaliates which um like i said i can't remember the rule uh so when in doubt i'm just gonna put the rule against myself and i'm gonna say that that retaliate one goes ahead and kills me so that was close one more turn or one more hp and i think i would have had him because i was invisible but anyway that is i guess i did a full playthrough there and what i would do next is i would find the range tracker card and on the back of it is your oops spoilers i guess uh this is my current playthrough on the back of it is where you're going to keep track of things you'll mark off these levels as you level up as you upgrade cards like i showed you before you rotate them to the level two every time you upgrade your character level you get to upgrade one card you'll mark them off here any achievements i'm gonna hide those not that you won't see them the moment you see the card but any achievement any achievements you get uh you keep track of them there you make your notes here on your gold and your items i would use a pencil so you can erase and then your scenarios this would probably be good to go over really quick since i completed level one scenario here's the key for what you do you fill in the box when you unlock it you fill in the star you fill in the square when you complete it and if you place an arrow that blocks another scenario go fill in the circle of the scenario that it blocks and the scenario book tells you which scenario is blocked if you play that scenario so right now pretend all these markings aren't here i would have unlocked scenario one with like the introduction text in the scenario book so i would have filled in that star and then now i have um filled in i would fill in the square for scenario one to show that i completed it and then the scenario book also tells you which new locations or which new scenarios you unlock and completing scenario one unlocks scenario two so i would fill in the star for scenario two and then i would go play scenario two and every three scenarios you complete you level up your character um so it doesn't it's not like number three scenario number six scenario number nine it's because you'll end up skipping some of these it's every or and you'll place some of them out of order depending on how you want to play them so every three squares that you see out here every three completed scenarios you get to level up leveling up looks like choosing one of your ability cards to upgrade and that means rotating it 180 degrees and now you now get to play with the level two half of the card by the time you're done in your level five um because if when you're level one you have all level one cards and then when you're level two you have one level two card when you're level three you'll have level two cards and so on so by the time you get to level five all of your cards will be upgraded also every time you level up your maximum hp goes up and that is that information is found here so we started out on level one with a maximum hp of eight when we get to level two i must have passed it when we get to level two our maximum hp will be nine and then we'll also get to play on the higher on the better uh attack modifier table rows so when i'm level one i'm using this row when i'm level two i'm using that row and so on okay i'm sure i missed a bunch of stuff but i have rambled long enough and hopefully that gives you a start again i uh please check out the rule book online i don't have it up yet but it will be up soon please check out the rule book it's a comprehensive guide for the rules and so anything i missed will be in there thanks for watching

Channel: Joe Klipfel

Views: 10,784

Rating: 4.8830409 out of 5

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Id: IszASMpW9Ig

Length: 43min 6sec (2586 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 02 2021