Tips, Tricks, and Hacks for Gloomhaven

[Applause] welcome back everybody this is going to be hopefully a short video but some of you have been requesting some general like tips and tricks for how to survive the behemoth that is known as gloom Haven so I'm just going to cover a few things everything from you know how you store your game to general tips on surviving within the individual scenarios here and take everything with a grain of salt stick with it what you will but these are just how over the course of two years playing this game I have discovered what works for me and my brother-in-law who primarily plays with me you know we make it work we have stuck to it we're almost finished with the main campaign and like I said it's been since I got the game in like 2018 so almost 2 years now we've been going at this but so my first point that I would like to just tell anybody especially if you're just starting out take your time this is not a game you're going to blow through in a weekend unless you have you know a 48-hour marathon that you're going to participate in this is a slog it is you know it there are a hundred some-odd scenarios you probably won't play them all but you can easily play half of them even 50 scenarios is a huge deal in any type of game like this so take your time enjoy it you know figure out that the best way to you know schedule a reoccurring group but only play once a week or once a month or something like that so that's my first thing is take your time and with that I'm gonna a compass these next two so the second thing is is to go on sinister fish's website and I'll put a link in the description below but go ahead and download this checklist in PDF format and print it off this actually is on the inside of the folder that the sinister fish reusable stickers are in come in so if you have that you could just scan it but I found it super easy to go to their website print this off it doesn't cost anything you don't have to have the reasonable stickers or paid for them to download this but essentially it's just a list of every single scenario you have here and you can check off the leftmost box when you have unlocked the location or the scenario and then you can check the rightmost box when you have completed it you also have a track for your prosperity down here so you don't have to mark up your board and you know I won't talk about those check marks down there so we'll just move this down here like this with this I wish I had figured this out at the beginning because my brother-in-law and I have taken our time it's very easy to get going and then you kind of lose track of the story especially if you go off on a side mission and then you try and come back to the main story and you're like what the heck's happened where am I even supposed to be going so what I started doing recently and again I just figured this out myself near the end I wish somebody had told me to do it at the beginning I've been highlighting the main storyline scenarios and you can see even here this one to do this scenario we need to have completed one two and three ahead of time so I know that you know we've made it all the way through one here we're halfway through another one so you know I'm basically if for some reason we were to go off and you can see there are plenty of side scenarios here that we could go off and do if we wanted to like beef up our character and you know get some additional XP or something like that before moving on or for example early on in the beginning we actually had a four player campaign and a three player campaign we've slowly dropped those players off but what we were doing while we had the you know three-player campaign especially for a decent amount of time is that if it's just my brother-in-law and I wanted to play we would actually go off and play a side mission yes we would advance faster than him but the game scales really well depending on what the different levels of your characters are so if you have a level zero character playing with level three characters and bounces out because you're taking the average of your levels to pick the monster level in the scenario level and all that stuff so highlighting up the main storyline on this sheet a using this sheet and then B highlighting up the main storylines and if you go into branching paths put a little note but mark this up I mean there's no reason why you want to keep this pretty so you know it's a piece of paper so use this to your advantage the second thing to go along with taking your time so this would be suggestion number three of mine is come up with a good storage solution if this is the first video of mine that you are watching please feel free to go back and check out some of my other gloom Haven videos I have several gloom Haven storage solution videos out there to just cover how I fit everything into the box how I transport it around but the two biggest things that I have found or I guess three are this is one of them these are my beat storage boxes that I got from Michaels they're normally hoard like hold like craft beads and things like that but these fit perfectly into the box if you want to see how they fit go check out one of my videos but and I have highlighted this in another video so I'm just gonna go over real quick this contains all of my scenery tiles everything that's going to go flat on the board and usually you set up at the beginning and then you can set this off to the side and never need it this one contains everything that you're gonna pull in and out throughout the scenario so I sit this off to the side but it makes it super easy to just pull out what you need and then clean up you just throw it back away you pop this in the box and then you're good the second thing the two out of three is get a small box like this these specific boxes I have highlighted before but these contain like enemy figures so this one in particular contains all the living bones living corpses living spirits and the cultists who will summon living bones living corpses so and I like all the AI Knox's are in one box all the demons are in one box all the verm lanes are in one box along with someone else so you know divide them up into groups of four or five the demons or even six and put them in like groups that way when you're looking at the scenario setup you just pull out the boxes you need you pull out you know what you need from in here and then you close it back up or whatever but then this again sets off to the side all right the third thing that I found really helpful in my storage solution is these I believe this is a 4x6 photo storage box again I have detailed this out in some of my previous videos but these contain all of the player character hero stuff so this contains you know my pencil to keep track of things and my player board and my modifier deck and my you know my action deck and my little tokens and everything else these are so easy to store stuff in even the miniature will fit in here and also I can give you a show you here that my miniature fits in there he's not gonna roll around he's not getting squished or anything like that even the Inox brute fit in his when we were playing with him I'll pull this guy out to use in his example in a minute but these photo storage boxes are a lifesaver because when I'm setting up and my brother-in-law comes over I just hand him his and he takes care of all of his setup so all right so that kind of covers storage solution so we've covered take your time we've covered use the sinister fish tracking sheet we've covered use a good storage solution the rest of these are kind of while you're playing these are hacks that we have figured out just make our lives so much easier one is to use dice to track the enemy life hit points those little red tokens I love Isaac to death and everything about this game is amazing but putting little cardboard cheats stacking them up on here just is cumbersome it doesn't work you know for example this frost demon if he's at eight these are eight sided dice in particular you know and then you just count it down you can use six-sided dice we use those for a while we found that eight sided die worked better because so many you know even for like eight nine health we're having to use double things so for these say for like 14 we will do something like this it's very easy to read recently my brother-in-law been playing over you know Skype and video chat and things like that since it's social distancing and he can still read these easily with the board being only viewed via a webcam so get you some dice whatever you prefer whatever you might have on hand to track your enemy HP so that was number four number five is if you're gonna sleeve anything in this game sleeve your mini American sized cards so these are your modifier decks and the enemy action cards you shuffle these so much that it's ridiculous your modifier deck their modifier deck their action cards get shuffled constantly not only will this save your cards but it makes it super easy to shuffle when you have your larger modifier deck like this you know you can just take half the deck and then you just kind of squish them together and that's probably the best shuffling you're gonna get without actually doing a bridge shuffle so sleeve your mini american cards but with that i did not go through and sleeve every single card when I first got the Box I just had about four packs of sleeves set aside and every time we introduced a new monster to the game I sleeved that monster deck when every time we upgrade I have sleeves set aside and we pull out the cards we want from our upgrade box and we sleeve those right down in there so don't feel like you have to sleeve everything in this entire game right off the bat it's not necessary I know that's how some people do it and that's fine but you know take again going back to number one take your time it's not a race all right so I believe that was number five let's see here number six is I don't really have anything visually to show for it I guess I could put this out there but what I suggest you do when you are nearing retirement or when you have retired your character and you're returning back to gloom Haven to retire and pick a new character go ahead and sell off your stuff because you don't take anything with you to the new character you'll get some XP when additional XP based on the prosperity level of the city and things like that but there's no reason why you shouldn't just sell everything back to the market because you're gonna give it up anyways take that money and spend them on upgrades for your cards we have yet to do it because we've been so excited about you know the new characters we unlock usually when we we retire a character but you know both my brother-in-law had the Inox Brut and I had the spell Weaver we both loved those starting characters personally he loves the slash and bash you know character of the brute I loved the Geist blast cannon aspect of the spell Weaver and so there's a very good chance we may go back and bring these guys back out of retirement or you know start a new one but in that case those upgrades according to the rules will still be on the card you're not going to take those upgrades away so go ahead and spend your money on beefing up those cards and your deck and if you ever do come back to somebody you really love then you you know have upgraded cards so that's just a little tip that you know we found we started doing a little hack alright I believe that was six let's move on to seven I guess the rest of these at this point are all going to be kind of while you're playing the game you know just general tips for beginners especially beginners to dungeon crawlers number one is don't be afraid ooh eh don't be afraid to bypass coins and treasure chests you don't have to open every treasure chest on every level some of them only contain like five coins some of them contain traps some of them do contain really awesome items that we're glad we you know got you also can always go back into any scenario any dungeon and Ori run it if you really wanted the treasure chest but the other thing is don't be afraid to don't feel like you have to clear every room before moving on there are certain enemies who either just they don't move period you know like the ancient artillery essentially our cannons they have no movement and so if you can just get through them get past them there's no reason to go kill them other enemies like the the living corpse here I haven't Belov and I also have the cultist who these guys will both a lot of times injure themselves in what they're doing that the living corpse here will move like one or two at a time so if you can get around him he will honestly kill himself just chasing after you so look at those characters who have if you see that they're hurting themselves on a regular basis and they're slow just run past them honestly it's not like you get xp for killing characters I guess some cards technically you give you xp for giving damage or killing that character but in the most part you don't get any benefit or bonus from clearing the board completely it's not like a video game then there are characters like the cultists who I just mentioned a minute ago but these guys summons stuff go after them first it is a pain in the butt when you have a cultist sitting in the back of the room we just had a scenario like this where this you know as part of the setup the you know the board went way further down off-camera here and I've taken it apart but the cultists was sitting way back up this huge like two piece room and we couldn't really get to him very easily and he's just spawning living bones spawning living bones which just in the end we did have to take care of because those are pretty mobile and vicious creatures but if you have the ability to get rid of a summoning enemy first focus your attention on them because it is a super pain in the butt if they keep spawning more and more enemies on the board so those are just two quick tips on enemies you face another one is and I got rid of all of my there's some living bones got rid of all my floor type tiles but say this is a doorway right here don't be afraid to step on the door open the door and then more than likely it'll have to be on your next turn but you know on your next turn back up and basically you know probably if you had a breach set them by the door and if you had a range person like my guy is you'd set them off to the side but create a choke point there is no reason that says you open the door and you have to go in once this door is open these guys are all going to start coming through the door but they're gonna get to the point especially guys like this who only can do melee damage if their adjacent to you they're gonna get held up and you just pick them off one at a time and you just focus on the guy in the front and you just let them choke up right here this guy's gonna stop because he's next to the brute you know usually the Brutes got shield and toughness and things like that but you know don't be afraid to create choke points and use single doorways to your advantage so I'm looking down at my list here that was eight I thought I could maybe get to ten but I feel like I've covered most everything there is to cover I guess number nine is is going to be don't be afraid to house rule certain things I know that there are some people watching this video who are gasping right now and are you know telling me I'm a disgrace to the board gaming hobby but honestly this is your game do with it what you want you know as long as you're having fun at the end of the day that's all Isaac cares about that you're enjoying the game he honestly doesn't care that you follow every rule to a tee because once you've paid for it it's your game for example my brother-in-law and I when we upgrade a character we just take both those starts we don't pick one and then put the other one back in the box and then maybe pick it down the road we just go ahead and we take those two cars we feel like we earned it we stick to our hand limits during the games but you know it's exciting to be able to look at both of those cards and it just feels like a bummer if you play by the rules and say oh I've got to pick one of these there's some people to do that and play that way and there's some people who are very laser focused on you know picking which one they want and how to play and and this and that and that's fine go for more power to you but me personally I don't like to take it that seriously I'm just here to enjoy my time here and beat up on some monsters and minions and figure out what's wrong with blue maven and so the last thing that we kind of house rule on a general basis our summons I actually had a character trying to keep his spoiler free here but who had a lot of summons and that was her main attack was summoning character she didn't she wasn't really powerful herself and so I had all these summons on the board and we finally determined yes we play by the rule that you summon a character it does not activate that turn but then from there there's like all these rules about how the summons acts like an AI and it goes towards the closest enemy with the highest initiative and it just stays attacking to that enemy well personally I always felt like these summons were like personal companions of mine like wolf companions or eagle companions that would land on your shoulder they would not necessarily just aimlessly go off and just attack things like a robot they would listen to you you know just thinking back of all the great companions in fantasy history they've all been just as smart as the heroes and listened to the heroes and you know thinking especially back to I think surename was one of you yeah from the desert series The Legend of Drizzt series which is very much reminds me who me even very much reminds me of that in a way some of these dungeon crawlers and I always think of Guinevere whenever I summon something want a beer Anders it would they would collaborate and they would go after the enemy that they felt like was the prime target so something like that you know go ahead and control your summons however you wish you know don't break the game and cheat but you know saying that your summons has to follow this robotic AI movement and attack pattern and things like that it is just silly to me so those are just two house rules that my brother and I brother-in-law and I use on a regular basis and I don't feel like it breaks the game I don't feel like I'm cheating I sleep fine at night and I have a lot of fun playing the so at the end of the day that is it I'm gonna stop there because this video has gone on much longer than I had planned but again thank you for watching if you enjoyed this video please consider giving it a thumbs up if you have enjoyed this video and you want to see more like it please consider subscribing to the channel hit that Bell notification if you want to be notified every time I drop a video I try and do several a week at a pretty consistent basis so again thanks for watching and have a wonderful night you

Channel: The Meeple Marathon

Views: 26,660

Keywords: Gloomhaven, tips, tricks, hacks, Cephalofair Games, Overview, How to play

Id: IgLjskKp4R4

Length: 21min 50sec (1310 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 01 2020