Expanding on Legacy and Campaign games, I have wanted to play Gloomhaven for years now. I have the original game and the ‘tutorial’ stand-alone Jaws of the Lion. I started playing Jaws of the Lion with Simon and Rabbit. The campaign died off a bit and I don’t think we will be returning to it, unfortunately.
That doesn’t mean I can’t play Gloomhaven though. I jumped onto the digital implementation in Early Access, and it’s been sitting in my Steam library ever since. Not only has the full original campaign been implemented, but Jaws of the Lion is DLC coming out soon. I can play all Gloomhaven with zero setups and tear down, whenever I want.
In preparation for this, I played all of the tutorials included in the digital Gloomhaven.
I haven’t put any of these in my ‘plays’ as they are small learning scenarios. This has been a good way to come to grips with the digital implementation, and try and find how everything works together. And on the whole, it works well.
Having played the first few scenarios of Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, the digital tutorials feel a little light. Not in content or information passed on. The tutorials are specific scenarios with ‘get out of this’ objectives. It works for teaching you the game but doesn’t make me excited to play. Not on their own, anyway.
I have preordered the Jaws of the Lion DLC releasing in two weeks. The idea is to play through the ‘teaching’ scenarios that form the Jaws of the Lion campaign digitally. This might seem backwards from what the designers intended, but hey – it’s how I will play.
There is the danger I am going into Gloomhaven Digital with unreasonable expectations. When I first played in Early Access, you needed to know how to play Gloomhaven already. There weren’t any tutorials or the like attached, just random encounters. I have watched Gloomhaven evolve from these days. I still have a feeling that the digital implementation is for people that already know the game.
Let’s see how that goes in three weeks.