Gloomhaven – Jaws of the Lion review

Howdy! I mentioned in the last entry that I would talk about Jaws of the Lion, the prequel to the “big box” version of Gloomhaven, so here we go!

JoTL is a “small box” version of the base game. It comes in a normal-sized box, and as a nice bonus everything can actually fit back in the box when you’re done. It’s a smaller game because it’s been streamlined, with a number of mechanics from the big game removed. Specifically, Jaws doesn’t have:

• Retirement/Personal Quests – Jaws comes with 4 characters and you play through the whole campaign with whoever you pick at the beginning. There’s about 25 scenarios, so we didn’t even get anyone to level 8 by the time we finished the campaign.
• Enhancing cards – There are no rules for enhancement in Jaws, but the cards do have enhancement dots in case you want to play the characters in another GH game.
• Prosperity/City Events – The city of Gloomhaven is of course still there, but you don’t track its Prosperity like you do in the base game. New items are unlocked through completing scenarios.
• Rolling modifiers/Summons – Neither of those are in Jaws, but if you bring in a base GH character that has them you just use the Gloomhaven rules.

That may sound like a lot is missing, but honestly the stuff that has been removed is the stuff that was the least important in the base game (I mean, I love summons, but they are tricky and not always effective). All the removed items were a little clunky in GH to begin with, and I never thought to myself while we were playing “Oh man, I sure miss [removed item]”. The smaller, more streamlined version works great.

Another difference is that instead of map tiles scenarios are played directly on the unfolded scenario book. That means way less setup (the obstacles, hindering terrain, etc. are all printed right on the map) and smaller scenarios. Consequently Jaws characters don’t have very many large move actions, and there’s not a ton of AOE either, since with the confined quarters a large AOE could be really devastating. In general the power levels are a tiny bit lower than base GH, but not significantly so.

Because the designers “know” you’ll playing the 4 characters in the box (that’s not necessarily true, we actually played 3 of the Jaws character and one from base GH) scenarios are made with the capabilities of those characters in mind, which is nice. It means there’s lots of opportunities for each character to shine in their specific role. 3 of the characters have similar counterparts in GH; the Hatchet character plays a lot like the Angry Face character from GH, Demolitionist is similar to Cragheart, and Red Guard is a bit like the Sun character. I played the one really unique character, the Voidwarden. She was a lot of fun, I’ll write her up at some point.

Overall Jaws of the Lion is a lot of fun and I can recommend it to anyone who enjoyed the big box game. As far as play order, I think you can start with the big box then play this, or the other way around, either is fine. Might be a little easier to start with Jaws since it has fewer rules to learn, but most people jumped right into the big box (since it was the first one released) so that shouldn’t be a problem.

Thanks for reading and commenting, let me know if you have any questions about the game!