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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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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