Please NOTE that every picture is provided by the publisher and can be changed and may look diffrent in the final game.
Hi everyone,
my name is <PERSON> and I’d like to give you a closer look into the Gloomhaven - the design process and some parts of the game play.
I will not go deep into the game play. You can read almost everything in the lessons:
http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1414550/gloomhaven-lesson-1-...
http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1418730/gloomhaven-lesson-2-...
http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1422480/gloomhaven-lesson-3-...
http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1426594/gloomhaven-lesson-4-...
Or watch the runthrough from Rahdo:
http://boardgamegeek.com/video/77394/gloomhaven/rahdo-runs-t...
You can skip all parts if you don’t like the whole text or you don’t care ( I also wrote a summary at the end of this review) . Some people like to know more about my other games or the time during the devolopment, some don’t. It´s up to you.
If you have any questions, just let me know and I’ll try to answer it as well as I can.
Who I am and what I like.
I am 30 and have different play groups. With my wife I love to play co-ops, because she hates to play other games with me only *evil*. With my friends I play everything from deep games like Nations, Dungeon Petz, Earth Reborn and Runewars to easy games like Exploding Kittens, Valley of the Pharaoh, TTR or Dominion.
I for myself, love deckbuilders like Sentinels of the M., Dominion, Core Worlds, Shadowrun Cossfire, PAGS and so on and I also prefer dungeon crawler like Descent 2ed (which I don’t like!) and Galaxy Defender (which is really great & you can find my name in the manual . My main game is Android Netrunner. As you can see, I am gamer like you but a bit more focused on card-driven games.
What I think about the design process?
I think <PERSON> is a really great designer, or is it too early to say that after 2 games? I don’t know. I just think Forge War is a wonderful, smart WP game with some smaller other elements, and Gloomhaven (spoil) is a hyper-blast in my opinion (spoil out).
The way he designed Gloomhaven is awesome, and if you did’t, you should definitly read the blog and the separate parts of Gloomhaven and the choices he made and why. I’ve never seen something like this before. 470
http://www.cephalofair.com/gloomhaven
And if you go back in the news you will find many, many small articles about several choices and problems which came up during the development.
<PERSON> is really focused on the community. he replies frequently and really helps you out if you have a critical question about e.g. some design parts.
Why he made the choices and why he didn’t followed another path. That’s pretty awesome, because you understand the way he designed it that way. (He really got my votes on every design/game part).
We had also several Skype discussiosn, because sometimes it’s easier to talk about it for 10 minutes than have 20 emails.
Sure, that’s the ground rules of getting good playtester-designer results, but I also had other experiences.
My most important point is, in my opinion, that he really wants to give EVERY backer a chance to play the game before they back it. Wouldn’t that save you a lot of money? For me, it would save me some. I think that is the way every KS Campaign should be. Usually you see the rules and some reviews, or from time to time a game play or walkthrough video...but all a lot of peaple really need is a short demo version of the game. You can check out on Forge War, and you can now check out Gloomhaven. It´s not perfect and I think it shouldn’t be perfect because he is no PC game designer - he is a board game designer. Awesome and this alone deserve credits.
Finally - The Game! - The Core
Gloomhaven is a dungeon crawler game in a very strong fantasy setting. 504