Gloomhaven (Childres 2017) is a notable board game for many reasons. It is an ambitious design that combines elements of tactical miniature combat, resource management, legacy gameplay, and branching narrative in a unique fantasy setting. From a production perspective, it involves hundreds of cards,
sealed boxes, permanent stickers, and roughly 22 pounds of cardboard. It is only the second game published by Cephalofair Games founder Isaac Childres, whose first Kickstarter campaign for the game raised $386,104 and whose second printing earned more than ten times that amount (Childres, 2015, 2017). Gloomhaven rocketed to the top position in the overall, thematic, and strategy categories on hobbyist site Board Game Geek (BGG) where it remains as of this writing; according to BGG administrator Scott Alden, this top ranking has only changed six times since its founding in 2000 (Alden, 2017). We believe that this means it is a game that deserves to be well played. We, the authors, are a father and son pair. Paul is 42 years old, a Computer Science Professor, a lifetime gamer, and a married father of four sons. Alex is the eldest of these boys, 12 years old, a Boy Scout, and an avid reader. We have played games together for practically all of Alex’s life, starting with simple games such as The Bird Game (Wernhard, 1974) and Reiner Knizia’s Amazing Flea Circus (Knizia 2003) and leading up to some of our more complex current favorites, Mage Knight Board Game (Chvátil, 2011), Runebound (Litzsinger, 2015), and Charterstone (Stegmeier, 2017). Paul began using BGG to log all of his plays in January 2016; between January 2016 and December 2018, we logged 937 boardgame plays together. We started playing Gloomhaven in February 2018, and we have logged 63 plays since then, a count that includes all attempts at scenarios, not just the number of sessions. A note for readers who have not yet played Gloomhaven: this is a spoiler-free article. The only information shared that one would not know from reading the game’s rules is a summary of the introduction to the first scenario and a brief discussion of a specific non-unique monster’s special abilities.
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