Where possible I’ll try to describe the game fairly generally to cover all modes, but I’ll also say now that I have played Founders of Gloomhaven three or four times solo and it’s fast and fun, albeit perhaps a bit easy.
![gloomhaven board game gloomhaven board game](https://boardgamesbase.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/board-games-like-gloomhaven-1024x1024.jpg)
Most of the pictures you’ll see in this review were taken whilst playing solo, where the most fundamental change is that the player can build all resources or else the game wouldn’t work. There are slight changes to the basic setup in either two player mode (where each player control three resources and a neutral player controls the remainder) and in solo mode. The reason that I’m mentioning this at length is because resource control is such a fundamental principle in Founders of Gloomhaven that it bears specific mention. In addition to the base resource associated with each race, the players also draft a second resource and add a specifically sized card to their player mat. The humans, for example, control population, whilst the Vermlings control wood. When setting up Founders of Gloomhaven, the players have a choice of nine different races, each of which controls one of the various resources that will be needed to build the city. Whilst Founders of Gloomhaven is set in Isaac Childres’ Gloomhaven world, it’s a very different kind of game to the original Gloomhaven, which is well regarded as one of the best dungeon crawlers out there, thanks to a whole raft of reasons that might one day make for a detailed review in their own right.
![gloomhaven board game gloomhaven board game](https://lasopaga450.weebly.com/uploads/1/2/7/6/127699269/218415577.jpg)
As the buildings and networks become more sophisticated, there’s a satisfying cascade of points that’s also kind of a pain to partition if three or more people are involved.Founders of Gloomhaven is a city building game in which the players act as the founding settlers of the titular city of Gloomhaven. You score if you build a better building with two resources, but if you paid someone to use their resource, they get a few points themselves.
![gloomhaven board game gloomhaven board game](https://images.boardgamei.com/l-m/gloomhaven-board-game.jpg)
Players score by supplying the named locations-one of which appears on the board using a voting/bidding mechanic each turn-with certain resources. Then there’s a worker placement aspect (think Lords of Waterdeep), on which more later.Įach player starts by controlling one or two of the eight basic commodities used to build the landmarks of Gloomhaven, such as the famous “Archers’ Garrison,” the renowned “West Gatehouse,” or the picturesque “Brown Door.” The basic commodities are combined with others to make better ones, which are used to make better ones yet. Each card also has a primary action and a less powerful follow-on action that everyone else can take (think Puerto Rico or San Juan). It’s a design also seen in Concordia, a modern euro classic. Players have an identical deck of basic action cards (which they supplement with a cast of characters), all of which can be played only once until the card that lets them pick up their discard pile. Mechanically, it’s an interesting mish-mash of other influences.
![gloomhaven board game gloomhaven board game](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/srko6DeTMkw/maxresdefault.jpg)
The city that emerges is satisfying, but it’s totally peripheral to the complex game of resource-intensive dominoes that you’re actually playing. Along the way, a city is constructed, but that largely affects play due to adjacency rules, as buildings can’t be next to one another. It’s designed to take two hours or less-that is, only slightly longer than it takes to set up and tear down the first game.įounders looks like a city-building game, but in reality it’s a game of logistics, of linking buildings that generate basic resources so as to get another type of building or resource and then later get a third type. It’s been designed as a fast-moving, euro-style game in which representatives of the various races compete to, well, found the city of Gloomhaven in an orgy of competitive town planning. It features an imaginative high fantasy setting that consciously eschews the usual elf/dwarf/orc racial menagerie.įounders of Gloomhaven, on the other hand, which made half a million dollars on Kickstarter last summer, could not be further from the baroque, sprawling weirdness of its illustrious ancestor. It’s also physically huge, coming in a box with the dimensions of the average London studio apartment and brimming with so much content that most players won’t see a fraction of it. Gloomhaven proper is a colossal package, offering hundreds of hours of dungeon crawling across a persistent campaign that changes the world as players grow.