There’s hand management, strategy, and each dungeon along the way offers a puzzle. That being said, this is not a stereotypical dice-chucking dungeon crawl where you simply run through and kill as many bad guys as you can. Then new characters are unlocked with new abilities which allows players a variety of gameplay throughout the campaign. Each character starts the campaign with a goal and once they achieve that goal, that character retires. Players form an adventuring party that work together to overcome a variety of dungeons, defeat monsters, slay the big bads and get loot. The game takes place in the city of Gloomhaven and its surrounding lands. Gloomhaven is a Legacy cooperative adventure/ dungeon crawler/ tactical card combat with some Euro flair thrown in. Over 15k gamers have rated the game a perfect ‘10.’ But does the game live up to expectations? The game has a rating of 8.8 (out of 10) on BGG with 39,366 ratings as of the printing of this article.

That’s a lot of people owning a lot of Gloomhaven. Gloomhaven’s first kickstarter in 2015 raised over $386,000 and the kickstarter for the second printing raised nearly $4 million! The upcoming sequel to Gloomhaven, riding on the coattails of Gloomhaven’s popularity, Frosthaven broke records for crowdfunding and raised close to $13 million! To date, over 200,000 copies of Gloomhaven have been sold. Gloomhaven knocked Matt Leacock and Rob Daviau’s Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 out of the top spot and has been holding steady since. In December of 2017, Designer Issac Childres took the #1 spot for board games on the world’s #1 board game site, (BGG), with his massive “Euro-inspired tactical combat” game, Gloomhaven. Playing Time: 60-120 minutes (I’ve also seen 30 minute/ player)

Gloomhaven game