Soothsinger

The Soothsinger is an interesting character, I picked my original retirement objective because of the symbol that was for the soothsinger. It is musical notes, so in most other systems it probably would be considered a bard. In Dungeons and Dragons, a bard is a capable fighter because of their spells, and while I likely could make the Soothsinger into a capable fighter by my card selection, it really shines as a support character.

The main focus of the Soothsinger is a mechanic known as “songs”. These are cards that you put in play and leave in play until you switch the song you are playing. It’s a bonus for your allies most often, though can be a negative to the enemies depending on how you want to play it. I’m only a level four character so I haven’t unlocked the most powerful songs, but there are a lot of interesting cards. Normally I’ve found that I don’t switch the song that I’m playing all that often, because depending on the creatures, certain cards are better than others. For example, in the last combat, we were dealing with a fair amount of poison. Normally I have a card that adds additional damage to an attack out, but because players were getting poisoned each round, I instead I used a song that allowed them to heal 1 point at the start of each round and would remove the poison for them. This kept the damage down because otherwise we might have had characters get exhausted in the scenario. There are other songs that wound opponents when they are attacked, give extra speed or range, and give opponents disadvantage. There are songs that can be swapped in any time really that will help out your allies, and you don’t need to be in the middle of the fray.

Another big thing about the Soothsinger is that they are very fast. They would probably rival the Scoundrel in terms of speed, and that is key. While our Soothsinger and Scoundrel never were in the party together, having the Soothsinger go so quickly means that I can adjust the battlefield for the other players. I have cards that strengthen allies, stun all enemies in a certain range, or even cards that allow my allies to either move or attack. This going out of order allowed us to complete a task one turn earlier than we would be able to otherwise. While that might not have changed the outcome of the scenario, it was very useful. I also hand out a lot of blessings for my allies and curses for my enemies. This means that my allies can deal out a whole lot more damage. And the biggest help I’ve found in these support cards that I can play has been a card that allows me to strengthen my allies. The combination of blessings and strengthen, which gives you advantage, means that you are basically always modifying your damage higher.

Now, having flipped through the cards, it is possible to play a much more aggressive Soothsinger than I am. You’d still use songs, as they give you XP at the start of each round, but you could have a limited number of them and instead focus on your own attacks. There are a number of area affect attack cards that I could slot into my deck without losing much speed, but I would drop a lot of my support ability. However, playing support isn’t for everyone, and it might be that it won’t be for me the whole time I play the Soothsinger. The songs are always going to be a strong component in your deck, but adding in that damage and attacking ability could be fun as well. However, the Soothsinger has low health and not that many cards, so being more in the fray is dangerous. Right now, I think I have two attack cards that do damage in a way different the normal damage you can do no a card. One allows me to do basically a normal attack but then curse the monster and bless an adjacent ally. And I don’t remember what the other one does exactly, because in three scenarios, I’ve used it once. It does a base 1 damage, but I believe that it stuns as well.

The Soothsinger is a very fun character to play. I feel like it is not extremely complex, however. Once you have figured out the right song for a scenario, that song is generally the one that you’re always playing, so you’re trying to piece together cards other wise since the top half of your cards aren’t useful anymore. This, I guess, does add some challenge to the character, though it isn’t all that complex. You just need to figure out the balance of support cards and songs so that you always have something available to do.

Complexity: Low
Combat: Low
Support: High

Would you want to play a character that is support heavy? When you play other games, have you played a bard of cleric that is focused only on aiding others?

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Now, I didn’t play this one, but it was played in our games and was our first mercenary to retire. The Scoundrel is a rogue type of character that moves fast, hits for a good amount of damage and can get extra damage if the conditions are right.

The Scoundrel, like the Tinkerer (and I didn’t mention this in the Tinkerer review), had a lower number of hit points than some of the other characters. Where as the Tinkerer has 12 cards to play around with, the Scoundrel had considerably less with nine cards. This gives it a different feel in a game where your cards are generally what determine if you make it to the end of a scenario or not. Whereas the Tinkerer would end up with a lot of it’s cards in the trash, the Scoundrel’s cards didn’t give out as many experience points, and didn’t get trashed all that often. Those that did get trashed, our player never really had those in his deck with the exception cards that he could use without the card ending up in the trash.

One of the other differences that I saw was that the Scoundrel also had the disadvantage of being in the mix always. So with fewer cards and less health than some, they had to do other things to stay alive. As they got to higher levels, they started to get cards that would let them go invisible, but adding gear quickly was key for the Scoundrel. There other advantage was the amount of damage that they could do, and the speed that they could go at. The other two characters had basically a similar speed, but the Scoundrel had several single digit cards that generally allowed them to go ahead of the bad guys. Two things came form this, they were able to potentially kill a threat that would do damage to them, or it would allow them to hit the person they were next to and then run away.

A cool thing about the Scoundrel was how their damage would increase depending on the situation. There was at least one card that damage would go up for the Scoundrel if the enemy was next to an ally, so it would go from a base 3 damage to a base 5 damage. Then, if the enemy was next to none of it’s allies next to it, it would be an additional 2 damage added to the attack, so the base damage would be 7. Now, it sucked if the base damage was 7 and you got the damage cancelled, but because of how you can build the Scoundrel’s modifier deck, there was almost no chance of that happening or chance of pulling a negative card. While the Scoundrel was in place, I definitely left the Tinkerer more as a healing option versus the damage option it became later, because the Scoundrel was so good at fast damage.

We didn’t end up seeing some of the higher levels for the Scoundrel as they were the first character we had to get retired. I would assume that those cards would have continued to enforce the trend of acting fast and doing extra damage in various situations. I should also point out that the Scoundrel, as compared to some of the other characters we’ve opened, does not have a ton of area attacks or ranged attacks. It’s an  up close and personal fighter who deals their damage that way.

I think one of the things that can be the most fun with the Scoundrel is the speed. If I were to go and play the Scoundrel, that would be why. You get to set the battlefield, you get to hit for a lot of damage and determine who attacks who, because you go before everyone else. The more straight forward nature, seemingly, of the Scoundrel would also make it strong for a player who might not be ready to tackle a character with more moving parts. It’s also a good one for a person who plays more video games than they do board games and might need more time to learn a character. They are going to understand what a Scoundrel is doing if they’ve played rogue characters before.

Complexity: Low
Combat: High
Support: Low

Have you had a chance to play the Scoundrel, if so how did you like it? Do you generally like to play rogue type characters?

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The Tinkerer

This was my first character in the game. When you start the game, you have six core classes that you can choose from, but you don’t know much detail about them other than their class name. To me the Tinkerer sounded interesting because a mechanically inclined character was different than your the normal fantasy tropes that you see. It wasn’t the paladin/cleric, it wasn’t a basic fighter or a rogue, it was something different.

I figured there was a chance that the Tinkerer would be more of a support character, giving aid to allies, but it turned out to be a character that you could play a lot of different ways. The tinkerer did have a lot of gadgets that they could play around with and had a ton of fun things, especially as you leveled up higher and unlocked more cards. Early on the character was based a lot around healing and being able to protect your allies with your cards, however, that meant that you were in the thick of things. One of the coolest things that you could do was create a contraption that had it’s own turn and you could send it around to soak up damage. It made the character fairly tactical and you generally went pretty slowly.

As you got to higher levels, you unlocked more cards and faster cards. These cards also allowed for a lot more damage. They were generally one hit damage cards and then the card was gone, but when you hit, you hit hard. You also could get contraptions that would deal damage for you instead of just soaking up damage, so that made it fun to do damage just with my contraption. However, it was still mainly to soak up damage.

I mentioned it briefly in the previous paragraph, but the Tinkerer uses up a lot of cards. In Gloomhaven when you use a card it either goes to the discard pile where you most likely will get it back, or the card gets trashed. The Tinkerer has a large hand limit, 12 cards, because so many of their cards get trashed when played. When I say a lot of them, I mean most of them. I think in my end deck of 12 cards, I ended at level six, I had maybe one card that didn’t have a way to trash the card on it. That might seem less than ideal, but generally I was able to hang on until the end of the mission. Along with these cards getting trashed, they also gave you experience points, so as compared to the other characters, I was always able to level up faster which meant I got to some of the less healing focused cards faster.

For me, the Tinkerer was about the epic moments as I played him later on. It helped that my mission for retirement was about being an epic mercenary that people would remember. At higher levels, because I was using cards and putting them in the trash so often, I had to make sure that every shot counted. To give you and idea, there was one mission where we had a big boss that we needed to defeat. The boss had 36 HP, 12 per every adventurer, and I was down to my last four cards. I could have drawn out my part of the scenario by just doing basic movement and basic attacks because I didn’t have many cards left. It would be better to be alive at the end, right? Nope, not really, so instead of maybe helping a little bit against the final boss, I went for it. I trashed to cards, but one of them dealt a base damage of six, and the other dealt a base damage of five. Then I gave myself advantage, flipping two cards instead of one and taking the higher, and I ended up doing 17 points of damage in a single turn. Turns out that was smart, since I became exhausted after the next turn using up my final two cards, but that damage was enough to help the other players be able to defeat the boss.

Those are the type of epic moments that you can have with the Tinkerer. Now, I built him specifically that way. It’s also possible, if it’s your playing style to hang back and not do much of anything to engage in combat. I liked the character as a powerful character that could have it’s moments in combat and that it was still the healer even later in the game when I wasn’t focused on it. I would say that for the starting three characters that we’ve seen in our game thus far, the Tinkerer and another one that I’ll be writing about soon were the most diverse in how you could play them and had some of the cooler mechanics or if not cooler mechanics, the more diversity in playing and different interactions than just straight combat.

Complexity: Medium
Combat: Medium
Support: High

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