So what are some ways that you can bling out a board game, or that board games have bling?

First there are fancier editions of board games, might be called collectors edition where they only make a certain number of an ultimate edition where some of the pieces have been upgraded by the company in the game. This might be something that the company puts out like a 25th Anniversary Edition of a game, but another common spot is on Kickstarter where they will have a standard or retail edition of the game where all the pieces are normal card board or whatever it might be, and then there is an ultimate or special edition that has it’s own unique cover and upgraded pieces in it, of course which costs a bunch more.

The next biggest way that people can bling out their board game is known as a custom insert. A custom insert is especially useful for a game with lots of pieces. The main reaso for this is because while you can put the pieces into little baggies, you then have to dump them out on the table and it’s all a mess, you have to know how you put them back into the baggies, and get them to lay flat enough in the box. There are companies like Broken Token and Folded Space that create inserts for these games. A great example of how this works is Gloomhaven. In that game you have monster tokens, status tokens, damage tokens, terrain, and more, to fit that all into the box is just a mess. The insert that I have is a wooden one that I had to put together. It has a spot for all the tokens, the coins, and the monsters so you can lift out trays, keep them in their trays for storage while they are on the table, and keeps them from shifting around in the box. This doesn’t make your game looks any nicer, like a lot of the upcoming ones will, but it makes it more functional to play, especially the bigger games out there, like a Gloomhaven.

Beyond that there are a lot of other ways you can bling out a game. Board Game Geek has items known as Geek Up Bits which are plastic bits to replace the cardboard tokens already in the game, it makes it shinier and nicer. And there are a lot more items like this as well from Etsy. There are companies that are creating custom meeples for games, or 3D printing minis. You can get card holders that help you organize your place space for games like Arkham Horror LCG and Marvel Champions. These can range from cheap little things that might cost $10 to bigger things like for Marvel Champions that might be over $100 plus shipping. All of these things are going to make the game pop on the table more.

Finally, and I mentioned this above, you can bling out your own game with a 3D printer. There are sites, such as thingiverse.com where you can get 3D printer files and print out blinged out pieces for your own game. I’ve seen people who have 3D printed terrain for an RPG and then used that in Gloomhaven as well, or printed out things specifically for Gloomhaven. Out of all of the areas, besides organizers for some of my bigger games, this really interests me, because it means that I can bling out games I want to have blinged out without having to track down some specific Etsy shop and spend a large chunk of money. Now, buying a 3D printer is obviously a pretty large chunk of money as well, but kind of as I’m thinking about slowing down some in buying games, or there are fewer this year that are really standing out to me, this would allow me to really bling out some games and have cool minis and things to practice my painting on. I’d also allow me to create set pieces more easily for D&D games as well, which isn’t a requirement, but once in a while for big epic moments, that’d be awesome.

So those are just some of the ways you can bling out your board game. Obviously, the question is why would you do that, some of it is for convenience, like the organizers, and some is just because you can. And to tie it into food, they say you eat with your eyes first, so the same can be pretty true with board games, if it looks better on a table, you’ll probably be more interested to try it and the experience itself might be better because it looks good.

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I don’t think my opinion of the game has changed much really. I find it a fantastic game still, so let’s get that out of the way. The staying power of the game is really good, and we’ve gotten to open two new things in a box from when we started until when we played last night. And that is okay, because you get to like your character that you are playing, and you want to get to their higher level abilities. The story is still cool and the monsters change from section to section as you find out crazy things that are happening.

Let’s talk about some things that I want to call out from what I’ve noticed in the game:

We get rules wrong once in a while. We messed up big time at one point picking the correct level for the mission. That math isn’t tricky, it just isn’t what you’d think it would be immediately. I’m sure we’ve messed up rules with how certain effects work from time to time. However, when we mess something up, we tend to mess it up for both ourselves and the monsters and when we mess up a rule, so it isn’t like we’re giving ourselves an advantage.

Leveling up is simple and fun. There’s honestly not much more than swapping in new combat cards and getting a few more hit points. That is, however, plenty, because what you really care about is adding in those new combat cards. I went from having a few cards that did a little bit of damage and a contraption that I could toss out that could soak up damage to having a contraption that can attack, an auto turret firing arrows on my back, and a death ray. Everyone else has found new cool things as they’ve leveled up as well, and looking forward to leveling up and watching those XP climb is exciting, because you want to get to that next spot and to that next card.

We’ve also had our first character retire. Retirement is a little bit bittersweet from what I can tell, and I’ll be likely retiring my character next week. The reason for that is that you’ve grown attached to your character, you know what they can do and how you want to play them. At the same time, it is exciting, because you get to play a new character. I believe that most of the retirement conditions allow you to open up a new character box, but you also have the original characters as well that you can play. That’s one of the things we’ve gotten to open as well as the town records which has led to some interesting discoveries about the world that we’re playing in.

Another thing that I’ve enjoyed is that Gloomhaven gives you a chance to have absolutely epic moments. In the case of my character, I go through a lot of cards where I can play them once and they do something great, but then they are gone for that scenario. That means that I’m working on a pretty tight timeline for what I can do. I like the ticking clock that you have over you, but that means sometimes I don’t make it to the end of the scenario. So if I’m smart about it, I have a card or two saved for the last room, the toughest part to do something epic. In the case of last night, we were facing off against a large demon. It had 36 HP, and I had three turns left before I’d be exhausted. Instead of doing a little damage and trying to keep up with the action with lasting as long as possible, I decided to “burn” my cards so they would be used up for the scenario and ended up doing 17 damage to the demon in a single turn. So I, in a single turn, nearly did half the damage to the monster and left it greatly weakened for the rest of the players. We’ve had a number of those moments where someone has rushed in and killed half the enemies in the room in one fell swoop or thrown rocks at an enemy dealing them damage. There are a ton of cool moments that you can have in Gloomhaven.

I do want to offer a piece of advice as well. Gloomhaven is an investment to start out with, like a big investment. While it’s definitely worth the money, it’s probably worth it to invest even more into it. Now, I’m not just talking about the expansion that is being worked on, what I’m really talking about is a box insert. While my system isn’t bad and it makes set-up a whole lot faster and easier than it would be without the envelopes that I’ve used, I’m moving three boxes, the big box, a tackle box, and a shoe box full of monster envelopes out every time that we play. If it were to fit in one box neatly or even if it fit in one box with the lid slightly higher than it should be, that would be great and make it so much easier to move. Now that I’ve already sorted mine this way and spent a little bit of money on envelopes, I don’t feel like re-sorting it and spending more money, however, if you haven’t yet, I’d get an insert for the game, you’ll appreciate it. Broken token has a very nice one that I’ve heard nothing but good things about.

So clearly I’m still loving the game. I don’t see myself getting bored of it, and I’m already planning on getting the expansion when it comes out. Gloomhaven is very much worth the money investment and the time investment. If you can find a couple of other people to play it with weekly or bi-weekly, you are going to have a blast.

Overall Grade: A+
Gamer Grade: A+
Casual Grade: B

So just a tiny bit on the casual grade. B is still a very good grade, however, there is a fair amount of complexity to the game and to combat, and while I do think that my wife, who is more of a casual gamer, would be able to get it figured out after a few times, it does have a steeper learning curve and is a heavier weight game than a lot of casual games were want to jump into.

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It’s a Classy Game

By that (as you’ll know if you’ve been following along with my D&D posts recently), I mean that you get to play a character class, and eventually you unlock so many more. We have a three-player game, and we got to pick the classes we wanted just based off their names. And while there are things that correlate to some standard classes — for example, the Brute is pretty obviously a fighter of some sort — they don’t follow typical fantasy naming conventions. For example, I’m playing a Tinkerer. That doesn’t really have a connection to any Dungeons & Dragons class, and while you certainly have an idea of what that character might do, it isn’t standard for your typical fantasy game tropes. What works even better for the classes is that each of them have multiple things that feel unique about them. As you level them up, you can modify your own unique attack modifier deck, so two people playing different classes can choose to modify theirs in different ways. Beyond that, your attack deck is uniquely yours. As the Tinkerer, a lot of my actions can be used at range, and I can create/summon a construct to help soak up damage. The Scoundrel, by comparison, has a deck that allows them to go much faster and to deal out large chunks of damage, up close and personal-like.

Secrets, Secrets

Gloomhaven is a game that has a number of secrets in it. Another thing that makes your character feel unique is that they have their own secrets. There are two areas that you have a secret, generally, the first being your character’s reason for adventuring. I’m not going to spoil any of those, but when you create your character, you draw two secret objectives and pick one. This really informs some of your decision-making in terms of what you might do in combat or how you might deal with a road encounter or city encounter. That is another way each character has a unique feel, and it’s also the timer for how long you’re going to play your character. Once they complete that secret objective, they retire when you go back to town, and you get to play another character and probably unlock yet another one. That way, you feel like your initial decision isn’t as tough, because it doesn’t lock you into being that single character for the whole game. It also means that as you grow attached to and familiar with your character, it’ll be sad when they retire. You also get a secret in each scenario. These are things you want to do (or don’t want to do) in combat that, if you can go the whole scenario without doing them, you get a reward for it, which is building toward upgrading your character. It might be that you want to collect as much loot as possible, which won’t help your party, but don’t worry — eventually someone else will have that card and look like the bad guy.

How Many is Too Many?

One thing I did want to address that is a bit of a negative is how the game scales with player count. The box says that a scenario probably can take 30 minutes per player in the game. So with 3 players, it should be about an hour and a half, and I think that’s pretty accurate. I’m also not sure that I’d want to try it with four players. Four players seems like it would be a bit longer per scenario, but there is a bigger reason, as well, which is that combat would become too random with four players. When you have four players, the person who is last in initiative order wouldn’t be able to plan anything. When you have three, the last person to go still has to change up their plans, but you don’t have to all the time. I think two players would be quite strategic and way less random, so I currently really like the three-player count, as it does make it not a completely strategic game. I do think that a lot of people might find that frustrating, but you can negate that, if you do find it frustrating, with a lower player count.

All the Things

This is a positive and a negative — or maybe it’s just something to be aware of. This game has all the pieces in the world, possibly literally. There are thousands of cards and thousands of cardboard pieces. And the box is huge! These things allows the game to be really diverse and feel epic, but at the same time, it’s a lot of moving/sorting/housekeeping. The design makes it pretty smooth, but without figuring out a way to organize everything, it would be a complete cluster. I’ve used envelopes to sort monsters out, large manila envelopes to sort the terrain, and a jewelry/bead case to sort even more of the tokens. And I’m hoping I’ve sorted the cards well enough, but I can’t sort them as finely as I’d like. There are certainly inserts that you could consider getting, but the cheapest I’ve found, after shipping, is $70. So if you’ve already spent $140 on the game (I got it through Kickstarter for $100), that takes the cost of the game over $200. Now, it is a game that can get you 100 hours or so of gameplay without really repeating anything or starting it over again, so if you have three players and you spend $200 on it, that’s not much per person per hour, but it is still a big investment, and I wish that it came with a way to sort it better. But for everything you’re getting and with the way it’s packed, I understand why not.

This isn’t my final review of the game; just my opening thoughts on it. Gloomhaven is a really fun game, and I don’t think it’s exceedingly hard to learn. However, there is a good amount to know and look up as you play. After playing it last night, we were already talking about finding a Saturday when we can play for hours instead of just getting through one scenario. This game, if you have a group, is worth the money for it — even if you’re a solo gamer, there are options for that that would probably be worth it. Just save up for it, and probably save up for an organizer to go with it.

Initial Grade: A+
Gamer Grade: A+
Casual Grade: B+ (I do think it would be probably too intimidating for a lot of casual gamers, but it isn’t too hard to wrap your head around)

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