Gloomhaven is a tactical dungeon-crawler with a branching storyline. Players control heroes on unique quests, making decisions that shape the world and their characters’ fates. Gloomhaven is a game with a persistent and changing world that is ideally played over many game sessions.
After a scenario, players will make decisions about what to do next. Which will determine how the story continues, kind of like a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book. Playing through a scenario is a co-operative affair where players will fight against automated monsters using an innovative card system to determine the order of play and what a player does on their turn.
Characters and monsters move about on hex tiles representing dungeons and cellars. Players simultaneously choose two cards to play each turn. Each of which has a top and a bottom half, and choose the top half of a card and the bottom of the other. This allows their characters to take actions such as moving, healing and attacking monsters.
Randomisation is not provided by dice, as is usually the case with such Games. However, it is handled by a deck of cards, called the “attack modifier deck”. As the campaign progresses, characters can increase in power, gaining new abilities and improving the cards in their attack modifier decks.
