Scythe

Probably the most shocking on the list is Stonemaiers game Scythe. This is one of the most popular board games out there, and I actually never played my copy, so why did I get rid of it. The answer is because I’ll probably never play my copy. I have friends who have it and who know how to play it. So I’m going to be much more apt to play their copy with them teaching me. And because it is a bigger euro game, with amazing artwork I’ll give it that, I don’t have as much of a group to play it with as with some other games. So because this is a bigger game, more to know about and teach, I am getting rid of it, freeing up space in my shelf, and hopefully once I can game in person again, I’ll get a chance to play it with the person who has basically everything for the game and some of the bling for it as well.

Pandemic: On the Brink

I like Pandemic, in fact there are three different versions of Pandemic in my top 100, and 4 different versions of Pandemic on my shelf, so why am I getting rid of this expansion to the base game? If I want to have a fun gaming experience with a more advanced version of Pandemic, I will probably take someone through Pandemic Legacy Season 1. I’ve played it twice, and I’d happily play it again as a game master type of roll, because the game is still challenging. If I want to just teach someone the game, adding in stuff from On The Brink is going to add to the complexity of the game, so I won’t put it in. That means that it would have to be a very rare and special situation where I wouldn’t be taking someone through Pandemic Legacy Season 1, and I wouldn’t be teaching someone the base game to need On The Brink. It just was too rare a scenario for me to ever be likely to play it.

Stuffed Fables

When this game cam out, I was really really excited for it. It was a game about stuffed animals who were going on adventures and fighting off the scary animals under the bed while their human, a little girl was asleep, the figures are adorable in the game, book maps are adorable and really everything about it is great component wise, so why am I selling it? There’s one main reason, the theme of this game is for kids, and for younger kids, but with four adults playing it, there were rules questions and things we weren’t sure on. I could eventually take my kid through that game, but by the time he would be able to grasp the strategy and the complexities of the game, I have a whole lot of other games that we can play as well. This isn’t kind of an in between game between kids games and games for adults, it’s just that way in theme. And I think that the theme definitely targets a younger audience than the mechanics do. So as much as I wanted to keep this one on the shelf, there are just too many other good games out there that I’ll be able to play with my toddler eventually to keep one with sometimes confusing rules around.

Which one shocks you the most, probably me getting rid of Scythe. I really want to play that game, and the campaign expansion box, Rise of Fenris looks amazing, but I just know getting my copy to my table wasn’t likely to happen.

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I knew, going into Gloomhaven that it was a beast of a game but I was up for that. I thought that I’d enjoy it from the get go because of how the combat worked, how the scenarios worked, and how there was story to the game, and it’s been almost two years of playing almost every other Tuesday, plus some long Saturdays knocking out a bunch of scenarios, but it was worth it.

If you’re been following my Top 100 Games, you would know that I had Gloomhaven as my #1 game. And there are a lot of reasons for it, the story aspect, the unique combat, and the giant epic nature of it all really speak to me and have helped me figure out that I like games like that a lot. Also the bit of a legacy aspect to the game is a ton of fun as well. Is it a perfect game, I don’t think so, but it’s the closest that I’ve found.

Let’s talk about it a little bit more in detail, because I think there are two primary things that hold people back, besides the size of the game, and that’s, do the characters feel different, and do the scenarios feel different?

Do the Characters Feel Different?
I think that this is a clear yes for me. We unlocked every character in the base game and we’ve played all but two of them (plus there’s a new one in the expansion), and the characters have felt different. Some of them were great at healing, some of them would boost others attacks, some of them would go fast and do bits of damage, but always been in and out. Others would go in there and tank and even others would do massive amounts of damage, but were a bit of a glass cannon. There were ones that slung spells, and some that played riffs. Each of the characters felt unique and basically all of them felt like you can tailor them a little bit to how you wanted to play. And while I always wanted to find a tank, I didn’t feel like I was missing anything by pretty often playing a support type of character in the game, because how the supported was different for each character. And yes, we all probably had our favorites coming out of the game, but I don’t think any of us hated a character that we played or even disliked a character because they felt weaker or anything like that.

Do the Scenarios Feel Different?
Now, while the characters feel different, I think that this is one of the areas that Gloomhaven isn’t perfect. It’s not much of knock, but there are a lot of scenarios where the win situation is just kill everything, so that part of the scenario feels the same. And we also happened to hit the run in, grab this thing, and run back out a number of times in a row. But, while the end goal most have been similar fairly often, the story leading in was always interesting and helped the scenarios feel different, but more so than that, the monsters made scenarios feel different. A black imp is very different than a drake which is very different than a skeleton archer in what they do. So you had to play now you played each scenario differently and that’s often where you got most of your differences. Plus, then, you have the unique characters. There were some scenarios that we had to wait until we had a better team to come and deal with it, but that was part of the fun of the game that made scenarios feel unique, there were some characters that were just better in different types of scenarios, and generally, even if they weren’t ideal, you still had a chance to figure it out.

Overall, I don’t really have complaints about Gloomhaven. Maybe that some of the scenarios or more of them anyways, could have been goal oriented, but combat is easier to explain and make as a goal than something that’s trickier, and there was good variety in combat anyways. While I don’t think that Gloomhaven is going to be the game for everyone, I think that a lot of people will enjoy it. The combat is a bit more tactical than your standard Ameritrash game and there is more story than Euro games. And while it is big, the game, once you’re into it, isn’t that difficult, it might just take a couple of scenarios to teach someone who doesn’t do dungeon crawl games all the time.

Overall Grade: A+
Gamer Grade: A+
Casual Grade: C+

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