Gloomhaven Live is Back!

We had our first live session in months yesterday and while it was great to see everyone in person, the game itself did not go well! Last week was easy mode, but this week most assuredly was not. Read on to find out what befell our intrepid crew.

First, let me note I am going to talk about a specific monster and some of its abilities in this post, so if you consider that a spoiler be warned.

We decided to take on one of the side missions we had unlocked. It was a pretty small and very crowded map: 3 monster types, lots of obstacles around, and not a lot of room to maneuver. Normally fine for my character, since doing damage to large groups packed tightly together is my specialty and mobility is not. Oh we had the usual crew:

• Sun (level 5)
• Triangles (me, level 8)
• Angry Face (level 6)
• Three Spears (level 7)

I had leveled up to 8 last time so this was my first outing at the new level. I wasn’t in love with either of the 8th level card choices so I actually went back and took the other 7th level card.

So how did it go? Not well at all. I won’t spoil the scenario itself, but I will say it featured a lot of Oozes. Oozes are very annoying for several reasons:

1. They can replicate themselves. This is the worst part of dealing with them. The good news is that they take a bit of damage each time they do it; the bad news is they copy themselves and now you have more to deal with.
2. They can Loot treasure, meaning they just remove coins from the board if you don’t get them first (they can’t take actual treasure tiles fortunately). We hadn’t fought Oozes in a long time so no one at our table remembered that. I’m to the point where I don’t really care about gold for my character, but you should have heard the groaning at the table from the other three the first time the Oozes drew their Loot ability and ate up 8 or 10 coins.
3. And finally, they hit pretty dang hard, with good range.

Combining 1 and 3 makes it very difficult to deal with them. If you can just wipe them all out in one fell swoop hey great, but that’s not going to happen in this scenario. There’s sort of two basic approaches to dealing with them:

1. Let them replicate themselves until there are 10 of them (the max that can be on the board) then whittle them down as low as possible without killing them. That way they can’t replicate themselves any more. The problem with this approach is there when they attack you’re getting pincushioned with 10 attacks.
2. Take them off the board as fast as you can. The problem with this approach (in this scenario) is twofold: if you kill a weak one it’s just going to get replicated and brought back out, probably with more HP than what it had before it died, and second in this particular scenario even if you wipe them all out they will still come back until you do something else, which cannot be done very quickly.

So there’s not a great way to deal with them. The first time we played the scenario (which took like 4 hours, btw) we did pretty well but we just ran out of stamina and HP; there were so many monsters in our face at the beginning we couldn’t get going very quickly and weren’t able to get everything done in time. After a quick break we tried it again, and the second time went even worse. We actually had some pretty good draws for monster cards the first time through, and we still didn’t win. Well, the second time through we had awful draws and just got trashed before we could even get started. It was ugly. We all died very quickly without even coming close to winning.

So…we’ve decided that one can wait a while. One thing, we were playing on Hard, we will definitely bump down to Normal or maybe even Easy next time we run it (if there is a next time). For our next live session in a few weeks we’re going back to some mainline stuff to try to advance the storyline. The scenario we’ve picked looks much more doable than that one was. So yes, we won’t be playing for at least two weeks, meaning you’ll get a bit of a break from the constant Gloomhaven updates 🙂

Thanks for reading and commenting as always!