CW: article contains swears
Each one of these items and tokens and sheets is important. Each one of these pieces have been carefully considered by brilliant designers. Their role is clear. If I looked right now, I’m sure every token is explained somewhere in a game manual that unfortunately reads like a VCR repair guide that’s been run through Google Translate eight times. ‘Remember to put the second deck over the initial deck so the last piece from the regular meeples pool does not cross into the irregular meeples pool before the dice rolls a zero’. That’s not an actual line in the manual; I’m too lazy to dig through a board game box that’s larger than the ones I use to move furniture. Someone will get mad at me about this and, honestly, they are right.
Playing solo, I’ve been close to completing Gloomhaven for weeks/months now after a year/2 year-long hiatus. I had gotten about half-way through, but then put it down bc of everything else I had still waiting. I picked it back up a bit ago and have been methodically going through each branch of the “storyline” and unlocking what I can of it. I’ve just about unlocked every class I can, but everytime I turn around there’s something else to do, some new scenario that needs completing, I just don’t want to put it back down again bc I know it will be another year or two before I pick it back up again and by that point I’ll have forgotten how to play and I’ll be too far along to try to relearn it again. I want to at least finish out the last of the classes and the actual storyline before taking a break from it.
My biggest dislike of the system is how ridiculous some of the puzzles have been. I like the tactical puzzle and hand management aspects, but some of the secret envelopes with puzzles are just batshit insane. I took one look at one in particular, spent 10 minutes trying to figure it out, then gave up and looked online. I realized there was no way in hell I would’ve ever figured that one out on my own.