gloomhaven

We’ve started something new: the board game RPG Gloomhaven. Our squad:

• newbie the Inox Brute (our big strong baraka lancer. we’re living the dream)
• numbers the Savvas Cragheart (basically Titan) (also a ranged carry??)
• Dante the Vermling Mindthief
• HGR the Orchid Spellweaver
• Achaius the Quatryl Tinkerer

Friday night was the campaign opener. The game is set up for four players, not five, so I sat out the initial session. On Saturday, numbers and newbie figured out how to add a fifth player and increase the game difficulty accordingly, so they dealt me in for the second scenario.

The second scenario takes place in a hexagonal chamber where you fight the BOSS (a bandit chieftain). Things went badly. The boss kept summoning skeleton warriors, and while we were occupied fighting those, the archers in the back were destroying us. Also, there were four smaller closed chambers branching off the main room. Every few turns the boss would teleport leap to a closed door and open it, revealing a squad of living corpses.

HGR died because he’s squishy. newbie died because he’s tanky and did too much tanking. We had a heroic last stand where numbers barricaded the two of us into an internal chamber (while Dante ran up to stab the boss in the face and missed his 7 HP attack, and then got swarmed by the living dead). As the undead were blasting through our final defenses, HGR consulted the rulebook and realized we missed a ton of stuff. Notably:

• Summons are not supposed to move on the turn they’re summoned. (This was a big deal because the first summoned skeleton ran forward immediately and caught us in a chokepoint, preventing us from attacking the archers.)
• A “miss” is actually a 0 damage modifier, so non-damage effects (such as status) still go through (my poison bolt that “missed” the boss still should have poisoned him).
• Most importantly: We were supposed to get starting gold and begin the campaign in town, where we could buy equipment! (imagine having equipment when fighting the boss) There are town events and road events! We missed all this because we just jumped straight into the first battle OOPS

Since we wiped and missed out on a bunch of stuff earlier, we decided to call a mulligan on the whole campaign and start fresh. That meant I got to join the campaign from the beginning. Also in town there was a pie-eating contest and numbers was like “I refuse to accept a world where we don’t eat as much pie as possible” so we powered through and won the contest and got reputation. yeahhh

Scenario 2 Take 2 was a close fight (HGR died due to disastrously bad RNG, and the rest of us were one or two turns from exhausting) but we largely kept things under control. HGR would probably like me to point out that when he died, newbie the Inox Brute was long resting in the literal corner of the room, leaving HGR as our front line. Also, our Vermling Mindthief ditched and ran so he could pick up the chest in a side room. (Though I actually support this one—it’s gold for the team, and we likely wouldn’t have gotten it otherwise.)