Josh Yaks about Gloomhaven after completing the entire campaign!

I was fortunate enough to get in on the original Kickstarter for gloom Haven back when it was first released and two and a half years ago after 13 plays of the game I decided to make a video about gloom Haven now it was at the very start of my youtube experience so as with any beginning videographer the whole sound and lights things were things I was still working out and so it's a little cringy to watch even though it's my second most viewed video of all time but anyways in that video I stated that gloom Haven had become a number one ranked game of all time and that I rated it 10 out of 10 so I thought it would be interesting to come back to it now that I have 61 plays of the game under my belt and have completed the entire campaign do I still think it is the best game of all time do I still rate it 10 out of 10 we'll get into that shortly but first I will mention that there will be no spoilers here even the characters I'm showing are these starting classes as you can see I found time to paint four of the six of the starting characters here eventually I'll have all the characters in the game painted up a help even the monsters you see set up here are ones that you would see in the very first scenario of the entire campaign and everything else is just a random setup to show the game so let's get into it then okay let's get the negative stuff out of the way first because there are definitely a few things that I did not love about the gloom Haven base game campaign first of all I mentioned in the original video the set-up time and the teardown time and that just never got easier each time that we would sit down to play anywhere from one to three scenarios I would have to spend about 45 minutes to an hour setting up the game and then 45 minutes to an hour cleaning it all up again when we were finished so that was definitely a deterrent to play the game even more frequently than we did there were certainly times where we talked about playing and I was just like no I don't have the energy to go through all that set up and take down in fact I sat down and did some quick calculations and as I mentioned we've played the game 61 times and with at least an hour and a half per scenario sometimes a little bit more sometimes a little bit less that equates to roughly 100 hours of play time which is astronomical there's no other game that I've ever played that much in my life but if we get two scenarios played for instance with each time that we play it also works out to close to 50 hours of setup and teardown for those hundred hours of gameplay so that's a lot of time spent just getting the game ready to play and then cleaning it up afterwards the second thing that I wasn't a fan of where the puzzles that were sort of scattered throughout the game you would occasionally find a code that you had to decipher they would give you perhaps clues to another out of game saying that you had to look up or locate and ultimately we didn't end up cracking whatever this overarching code was and from what I understand even playing through the entire base game campaign you wouldn't solve the whole mystery of this code that this is something that carries on to other expansions apparently but it ended up being a frustrating experience because at first it was pretty exciting to get a code that you had to crack and then when you did decipher it it's like okay this doesn't really tell me anything and overall we didn't really find that aspect to be very enjoyable although that's kind of a separate thing from the actual game itself as far as actual gameplay goes we didn't really like the very slow progression of everything I mean it is an enormous game with tons of scenarios but even still it would have been nice to see your characters progress a little bit more quickly to collect money a bit quicker so that you can buy more interesting things everything just happened at a pace that really didn't hold on our interest quite as much as we would have liked it to I'm going to address some workarounds that we came up with shortly here but I wanted to mention that the whole pace of the overall campaign progression was quite slow now here's one of the most disappointing things as with many board games that incorporate a narrative story element the story itself wasn't overly compelling but here's the worst part of it we were tracking our unlocked scenarios as we were going so that we always knew which scenarios we could potentially go to next when we completed a scenario and we constantly kept track of what we had available to us at some point we eventually hit a dead end where there were no more scenarios available to do and I was like how does this campaign end exactly so I actually went on BoardGameGeek dot-com and asked that very question how do you know when you've completed the campaign because we don't seem to have any more available scenarios that we can get to and what I was told was there was a specific scenario number that if you completed that scenario you have completed the campaign and that's one that we actually had finished some time prior to that so without even realizing it we had completed the campaign and it was so anticlimactic because it certainly hadn't given us a feeling that oh we've wrapped up this grand adventure and have reached a satisfying conclusion because we didn't even know it was finished at that point I went back and looked at the scenario to see if we were just dumb and had missed something pretty obvious but it certainly wasn't this big exciting conclusion to all of these many many hours we had spent working through the campaign now there were some other things that just weren't necessarily to our tastes and we found ourselves incorporating a number of rules as we went through the campaign so I'm gonna go over those now just to sort of put them out there for people who maybe like to play games in a similar fashion to how we do them not everybody likes or appreciates the thought of house rules but these are addressing issues that we had and that made our play of gloom Haven more enjoyable for our group so I think they're worth mentioning the first is that there's a huge information load as you play this game there are so many little things to track so many different stats and different things happening that we found everything we could do to make the visuals more clear helps to reduce that information load so let me zoom in again on this little kind of random setup I did to talk about some of the visual things we did to make things easier for us so the most striking thing you can see here is all this 3d plastic furniture that some friends got me for Christmas and that really enhanced the visual experience of the game but beyond that it really helped to show you where the obstacles are the characters normally can't pass through even prior to receiving all of these as a gift I had made some simple foam stands just by gluing layers of foam together in order to raise the obstacles above the ground to make it visually easy to tell what were obstacles on the map that we couldn't just simply walk through so that was a simple thing I had crafted to make the visual experience a bit easier and also collected some little rocks from our garden and clean them up to use instead of the little rock tokens and prior to owning these plastic doors I also had some little standees that were door tokens to show when there was a closed or open door here another thing I did was replace the giant standee bases that came with the game with much smaller ones using clear ones for basic enemies and yellow ones for elite enemies and speaking of enemies probably the most important thing we did was I got a whole bucket of red d12 to mark the life of each of the monster characters so rather than putting hit tokens on the character when we damage them we would start with the initial setup every one of the enemy characters would start with their full life total indicated on the diet and then as they took hits we would count them down on the die until they were eliminated and that made it much easier to tell at a glance which of the enemies was damaged which were close to dying which had a lot of health remaining and then finally on the map we used these little plastic coin tokens that I had originally gotten from a game called Manila and spray-painted to add a more metallic shine to them but these also added to the overall visual ease of play of the game so what did we change about the actual gameplay well most of the tweaks we ended up doing we're geared towards making the game a little bit easier to play and towards progressing things a little bit more quickly in terms of allowing us to upgrade our characters and advance ourselves through the whole adventure a little bit more easily now one thing we unanimously hate doing is grinding and generally having to repeat scenarios especially in a game that comes with 95 unique scenarios in the scenario book the idea of having to replay scenarios over and over again and especially in a game where each scenario takes a good hour and a half to play through and require so much effort to set up we just weren't keen on the idea of doing a lot of do-overs so we started out to campaign playing on easy mode and we just ended up sticking with it we played on easy mode throughout the entire thing and we found that still provided us with enough of a challenge to make the experience enjoyable so in the 61 plays that we had of the game we managed to complete 53 of the scenarios meaning that we had to repeat 8 of them a second time and end up having to play any scenario three times so with eight repeats over fifty-three unique scenarios we thought that was a pretty decent level for us like I said as people who just really are not into the whole grinding thing we also made the whole economy of the game much easier one thing we started to implement was when we killed an elite monster they would drop two coins rather than one so in that manner there was just a little bit more money to be picked up throughout the scenario and then at the end of a victorious scenario when we were awarding our payouts we would give a number of gold equivalent to two levels above our current level in that manner our coins that we picked up throughout the scenario were a little bit more valuable than the otherwise would have been and allowed us to collect money more quickly in sticking with the money one thing we really didn't like was how much it costed to do upgrades on your cards it just seemed crazy that you could pay 75 or 100 gold for a single upgrade on a card so what we ended up doing was taking the whole upgrade thing and essentially chopping all the prices in half and even then we still found we weren't spending a lot of money on upgrades as opposed to purchasing new equipment which we didn't adjust the price of so even at half price some of these upgrades cost a lot of gold and yet it's one of the cooler things you can do for your character in the game is to do specific upgrades on specific cards that your character uses so we made that just a little bit more easy and approachable we sort of took the opposite approach with regarding a character's level eventually when the city's prosperity level got really high and it came time to retire a character and bring a new one into play we found that we didn't want to start a character on level seven and not get to enjoy the experience of starting with sort of a low-ranking character and building them up and customizing them over time so we would generally start our characters maybe around level four ish in order to get to spend more time with our characters and build them up over time now one thing we did that's really going to annoyed the anti house rulers because it impacts a couple of characters in a big way while most of the other characters it doesn't affect and that is we made summons controllable by the player whose character summoned them so rather than following sort of AI rules of how summons are supposed to act we simply allowed the player who brought them into play to control them as if there were another character now this increased control obviously allows you to get through scenarios a little bit more easily but we found that was more fun than just letting our summons kind of run in a brainless manner and really all these changes are geared towards us specifically having more fun with the game which is kind of the whole point isn't it now even if you change nothing about the physical components of the game or the rules there's one thing I did that I would highly recommend you do as well and that is to track your scenarios so as you play the game keep track of your completed scenarios keep track of every scenario you've unlocked or revealed and which ones you currently have access to because of the party awards or whatever other things that give you access to the scenarios and which ones are currently locked to you so in that way you'll always know like a glance which scenarios you can get to which scenarios maybe you'll be able to get to in the future if you achieve certain goals and which ones you've completed already because I don't know how anybody could keep track of that if they were just checking off in the book as they complete scenarios it really helped us to hold on to a picture of where we were and where we were ultimately trying to get to I suppose so those are the little things that made our plays of the game a little bit more enjoyable now let me talk about what I loved about gloom Haven just before I get to that I want to take a really quick second to ask for your help I have the link for my patreon in the description below this video and I would really appreciate it if you would take a minute and check out the patreon and if you're able to consider spending maybe a couple bucks a month supporting me and the work I do in this channel and I also want to give a huge thank you to my one patreon supporter at this point Joanna it really means a lot that somebody would actually support my endeavors in that manner and if you can't or don't want to I'm glad that you can enjoy my stuff for free too there are so many things to love about this game but first and foremost there's the gameplay itself the at its heart simple card play to ActiveE your character on the board yet there's just so much depth in that little card based system that makes each and every play of the game such an interesting and unique puzzle and speaking of uniqueness on a surface you could just say well the goal of most scenarios is just to kill all monsters so how does that feel different time and time again over the course of 61 place but the fact that there are such a huge amount of different monster types and the way each monster type feels so unique and different even if all you're doing is killing monsters depending on which type of monsters you're facing that given scenario or which combination of monsters you're facing it makes for a different puzzle each time not only that but one of the most exciting parts of the game is the fact that each of these little characters you play feels so different when you start a new character and retire an old one you do miss the old character but on the other hand it's exciting to dive into your new character and say how can I get the best out of this character because it's going to feel very different from the one I just finished playing it's a new whole set of variables to explore and yet it's amazing how when you play with a couple of friends and put them together they just mesh so well together and that gets me to the final point which is the cooperative nature of the game it feels like such a true cooperative game because each character has their own very unique strengths and weaknesses and you're playing with imperfect information you're never quite sure exactly what your opponent is going to do and when they're gonna do it so in combination with all the little variables of the monsters and the board you're playing on in your scenario goals you really have to work well together to get through it and accomplish your tasks so between the extremely clever mechanisms in gameplay the Hugh huge vastness of the game that adds so many unique variables and makes each play of it feels so different and the fact that it all comes together in this amazing cooperative experience really has all works together to keep gloom Haven as my number one game of all time and despite his little quirks and annoyances I still rate at 10 out of 10 now you may be thinking well you've just got over some things you don't like how can you give it a perfect rating and the answer is because it's my rating and I can give whatever I like for the rating and for me it really is a game that deserves that perfect score but here's the really heartbreaking thing in my original gloom Haven video I talked about the ways in which gloom Haven was helping me to overcome certain struggles I was having with PTSD and now I find myself in the most horrible position of having lost my wife and along with her the one friend that we were playing through gloom Haven with so with those two loved ones being out of my life now we only actually completed one scenario of the expansion forgotten circles and we won't be getting back to that together again so if I do continue through the Forgotten circles campaign it's gonna have to be a solo experience it's just gonna be awfully hard to do that after having experienced the entire thing up to this point with those two people plus if I wanted you all that setup and teardown for just myself I don't know about that it's the three of us we're still playing through it together it would be a no-brainer to go in on the current Kickstarter for the I think it's frost Haven that they're doing next there'll be an easy decision to kick start that but since I'm on my own with it for now I'll just stick with the Forgotten circles campaign and see if I end up trying it out solo or not so now all my memories of the game are very bittersweet but I just really appreciate gloom Haven for being the true masterpiece that it really is the preceding video has been brought to you free of charge by me Josh the only thing I ask in return is that you could do one of the following give me a thumb-up push the subscribe button or share the link to this video with somebody who you think would enjoy it Cheers and that I as I mentioned we played the as I mentioned I'm gonna address some workarounds that we keep [Music] [Music] the story itself wasn't overly camp the dead didn't to weed more we found that was and we found that still provided off and it came time to retire a character and a brain so fun and speaking of the uniqueness there's is the fact that each of your little individual

Channel: Josh Yaks

Views: 26,182

Rating: 4.8239279 out of 5

Keywords: Josh Yaks, Gloomhaven, Gloomhaven Forgotten Circles, Frosthaven, board games, board game review, best board game, Isaac Childress, Cephalofair Games, Kickstarter, epic board game, campaign game, dungeon crawler

Id: lC3nYVt4tDo

Length: 20min 33sec (1233 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 06 2020