Gloomhaven – Forgotten Circles review

Hello! It’s been quite a while since I last posted. I’m having severe issues with WordPress’s new editor and posting pics; I can’t get them to line up the way I want, which is very frustrating. I have some Gloomhaven class guides to do but until I get the pic thing figured out they will have to wait. In the meantime, we finished up the Gloomhaven expansion, Forgotten Circles, and I thought I would give you my thoughts on it.

So you and your group have completed Gloomhaven. You must have really liked it to spend that much time completing that massive game, so you decide you’d like to play some more and you see there’s an expansion and you pick it up. “Perfect, more Gloomhaven!” you think. Well yes and no. It is more GH, but it plays a lot differently than the main game, and you may find your enthusiasm for it waning as you play, like our group and many others have.

As far as mechanics, FC plays exactly like the base game. There are a couple new wrinkles such as Regeneration and Teleportation, but they’re pretty straightforward and don’t affect gameplay too much. All the familiar rules are still in play.

Where FC really differs though, is the scenarios. Instead of giving you more of the same, the expansion really went for some different designs in terms of challenge, mechanics, and difficulty. The first thing you’ll notice is that the scenarios are significantly longer. We used to finish 3 scenarios on a Saturday playing base GH, but could only play two when playing Forgotten Circles. And that just makes it that much more painful when you lose, knowing you have to go through a really long scenario again.

And you will definitely lose some scenarios! We actually got smoked in the very first one. By the end of Gloomhaven we were used to curbstomping everything, and the increased difficulty really hit us hard. Unfortunately that increased difficulty doesn’t come in a very fun way; a lot of it is from having to jump through a lot of hoops. Things like, “you can’t kill these monsters until you go across the room and destroy this object” or “only the Diviner [more on her later] can do this task, the rest of you sit around and look useful”, or cryptic puzzles that have to be solved in the middle of a scenario. A lot of things that felt like busy work and not fun monster-slaying time.

Oh boy and speaking of busy work, in order to minimize spoilers and make each room in a scenario more mysterious, the scenario book in FC has each part of a scenario in different parts of the book. This gets to be a real pain in the butt because it means you’re constantly flipping back and forth in the scenario book. Say you start on page 7 for the first room and there are 4 doors in the room. Each of those rooms will have a different page to flip to when you open it, and possibly two different pages to flip to after that depending on what happens in that room. So you open a room, flip to a new page, then flip to another page when something happens, then flip back to the original page when you open the next door…it gets to be a lot. I appreciate the idea of not revealing everything at once, but all that flipping back and forth just wasn’t worth it. The best way to sum up the feel of this expansion is that they just didn’t respect the players’ time at all; the designers just threw in whatever experiment they felt like and didn’t consider how the players would feel about it.

I mentioned the Diviner, she’s the new character in FC and you have to have her in your party at all times. And if she exhausts you immediately lose the scenario. We meant to rotate who was playing her in our group, but one guy ended up playing her the whole time as it worked out. She’s a pretty cool character with some really unique and fun abilities. Her power level depends on which version of the game you have oddly. Between the first and second printings she got a bit of a boost, buffing some of her cards up and replacing others entirely. We were playing the first edition, so we had the weaker version of the character. But she still can get after it, particularly at higher levels. One problem with her though, is that since she is going to be in every scenario, there are times where she has to perform a certain task and no one else can do it. This gets a little boring for the player controlling her, and minimizes the strategies you can use sometimes.

I don’t want to make it sound like the whole thing was terrible; there were some cool scenarios, and we did have some fun with it overall. I won’t go into spoilers, but one particular side scenario we all agreed was the most fun we had in any scenario in either GH or FC. But overall it was a bit unsatisfying, and left us wanting more “actual” Gloomhaven. Oh and I almost forgot to mention the final boss. He was beyond ridiculous. We fought him once, got totally thrashed, and none of us had any urge to try again. We just boxed FC up and put it away. We moved onto Jaws of the Lion, which we recently finished and I will talk about soon (it went a lot better than Forgotten Circles did!)

Overall if you’re like most groups and you’re looking for “more Gloomhaven” when you finish the base game, I would say skip Forgotten Circles. If your group loves puzzles and challenge (and busy work), then FC might be for you. But I think most people would be better served moving to JotL, some of the fan-made short campaigns, or the new massive fan made expansion called Crimson Scales (we haven’t started that one yet, my copy should be arriving soon though!) while we all wait for Frosthaven.

Thanks for reading and commenting!