Trashdome: Gloomhaven v. Silver Tower

This is the best commentary on Gloomhaven that I've read so far:

If there's one thing I can say about Gloomhaven, it's that this game is ambitious... very ambitious. It's probably the most ambitious dungeon crawl adventure game I've ever played... and I'm not saying that as an accomplishment.

Gloomhaven is like combining D&D with filling out your income tax returns, except you have to use cardboard disks to do all your calculating instead of a calculator. This game combines elements from different genres into a Frankenstein's Monster of dungeon crawl action. I've never been more bored playing a game than during our introduction to Gloomhaven.

The only fun we had during the intro scenario were the few moments of levity we extracted out of the shared misery of painstakingly referencing and re-referencing the rules for the overly complicated combat mechanics over the course of two masochistic hours. We spent more time saying "what the hell does this card do?" and trying to keep track of who had what initiative than we did resolving anything that actually progressed the game to a conclusion.

This is the Star Wars prequels of adventure games. You're force-fed a vision of what an adventure is supposed to be like with none of the fun of an adventure. Your decision tree revolves around poorly designed cards that often resulted in our players just moving two spaces and punching a guy because that was often better than the abilities printed on the card... or maybe they didn't, I really don't know what the rest of my group was doing most of the time because I was so bored after spending an hour killing six Bandits that I checked out. I honestly don't know how this dumpster fire of a game got published and I sure can't fathom how it climbed so high on this website.

This is what happens when a game doesn't go through a traditional design process; conceptually this game is fantastic, in practice it's every idea one man ever had thrown into a single box and fused into something resembling a game. "No" is not a dirty word and this game would have been a lot better if someone had learned to say it at any point in the design process.

As a game store retailer, I feel obligated to call all of the customers I sold this game to and apologize for taking their money. Source: Comments, Gloomhaven, by GoingMadlem, BGG (April, 2017).

I am painfully ambivalent about Gloomhaven, but that's mostly because of the relentless hyperbolic reactions it has gotten. If I distance myself from my own crochety attitude, it does sound like something I'd like to try, though not something I'd like to buy and store.

Still, I went to the trouble to paint my whole set of Silver Tower. It's probably a lot less innovative, but still my vote is Silver Tower.

I predict that Glumhaven will be another sad shelf toad for most owners by 2019.

Shellhead wrote: I predict that Glumhaven will be another sad shelf toad for most owners by 2019.

That's probably true, but if you got 30-50 plays out of it by then who cares?

I predict Goomhaven was a shelf toad for most buyers in 2017.

Mad Dog wrote: I predict Goomhaven was a shelf toad for most buyers in 2017.

It has nearly 40,000 plays logged on BGG. This is a game that was impossible to find after it shipped to the first Kickstarter backers in early 2017 and just recently trickled out to the second wave.

It already has 649 plays logged 3 and a half days into the month.

These numbers back up my personal experience and how many people I know that have played dozens of sessions of it locally.

I don't even really want to defend it this hard but the curmudgeonly attitude of this place gets to me sometimes.

Silver Tower by the way has 1059 plays logged over 2 years and just 2 plays logged this month. I know that's not a complete representation, but it's comical (and I like Silver Tower quite a bit!). I'd put money down that the average copy of Gloomhaven sees more plays than the average copy of Silver Tower. Too bad we can't verify this somehow.

charlest wrote: I don't even really want to defend it this hard but the curmudgeonly attitude of this place gets to me sometimes.

you think these guys are curmudgeons? Try the wargames forum at TOS. They tarred and feathered a guy for calling U Boot a cross over wargame that might draw in new blood

charlest wrote: I don't even really want to defend it this hard but the curmudgeonly attitude of this place gets to me sometimes.

Sorry that I was trash-talking about a game you love in Trashdome. I will try to be less curmudgeonly in the future.

I've been thinking about my own skeptical reaction to Gloomhaven lately, and how deeply unfair it is to the game itself. It falls into a lot of trends I don't like. For example, I don't have much patience for extended campaigns or legacy elements. I'm tired of enormous warchests of components that take up huge amounts of space. Combat in general is something that I prefer with a lot of random elements. I don't know how much all of these things apply to Gloomhaven, but I'm left with the impression that it's a culmination of stuff I don't like.

There's also the atmosphere around this game. I am immediately suspicious when anyone proclaims any game to be the new best ever, but that has been what has happened with Gloomhaven. Tom Vasel, the BGG Top 100, stuff like that. I have had a hard time finding more measured responses outside of the fans around here, and that is really exhausting. This seems to happen so often anymore that it's pointless to get excited about something. The fact that it has taken BGG by storm also makes me really suspicious, whether that's justified or not.

The genre thing is also working against the game. My tastes for dungeon crawls and adventure games has been diminishing lately in favor of D&D, and so when this big game comes along that (to my eye) a bunch of Euro players are calling D&D-like, my hackles immediately get up. It also does remind me from a distance of Mage Knight, a game that eventually became way more trouble than I wanted to deal with.

None of these have much to do with Gloomhaven itself, which I remain mostly ignorant on aside from the broad strokes. We all bring all sorts of baggage to a game, and this is one of those situations where there's a ton of baggage before I ever get there. In this particular case, it's a game that is probably outside of what is easy for me to play. There's a decent chance that unless I make the effort to buy it myself, I probably won't mess with it. It's like this perfect storm of unfair criticism. Maybe that's what other people here are experiencing, but in the blackest part of my soul I kind of want the game to just go away, because it's becoming this ice-berg in the hobby that it's hard to get away from. I'm not proud of that feeling, but I'm just being transparent here.

Mad Dog wrote:

charlest wrote: I don't even really want to defend it this hard but the curmudgeonly attitude of this place gets to me sometimes.

Sorry that I was trash-talking about a game you love in Trashdome. I will try to be less curmudgeonly in the future.

Fair point. But you could at least trash talk with some gumption and class. We need standards.

charlest wrote:

Mad Dog wrote:

charlest wrote: I don't even really want to defend it this hard but the curmudgeonly attitude of this place gets to me sometimes.

Sorry that I was trash-talking about a game you love in Trashdome. I will try to be less curmudgeonly in the future.

Fair point. But you could at least trash talk with some gumption and class. We need standards.

You forgot the important point here.

THIS IS TRASHDOME!

charlest wrote:

Mad Dog wrote:

charlest wrote: I don't even really want to defend it this hard but the curmudgeonly attitude of this place gets to me sometimes.

Sorry that I was trash-talking about a game you love in Trashdome. I will try to be less curmudgeonly in the future.

Fair point. But you could at least trash talk with some gumption and class. We need standards.

We have the first casualty in Trashdome as Charlie is dragged out .... bewildered before there was a chance to bloody him.

I can't fairly vote as I have never seen either of the two main combatants let alone played them ... doesn't mean I can't stick a sly knife in the back of one of them under one of the many Trashdome unwritten laws.

I have played Mage Knight about a dozen times and, frustrating as it is, I quite like playing it - although I have just bought Star Trek; Frontiers for the purpose of replacing it - but I do think the PvP has just been tacked on to keep a piece of the market happy as there is no way it really works for the defender unless you have been super lucky to draw combat cards the same time as the attacker (it's bloody hard enough to draw enough combat cards once a round!) so you can't really call it PvP, maybe PvFish-in-a-barrell.

On a tangent my question is which would you keep out of Silvertower and Star Wars: Rebellion - I had a trade offer of Silvertower for my Rebellion but one of the guys who I would be playing it with, who is a experienced and current Warhammer player, told me he didn't really rate Silvertower ?
And for all those incredulously asking why I would get rid of Rebellion - I am absolute crap at it, I just cannot work out how to get shit done and usually get walked over (nearly as frustrating as Mage Knight yet a game that has many more options).

stormseeker75 wrote: I have a copy of Silver Tower minus the minis if anyone is interested. Just pay me like $8 to ship and it's yours.

If this isn't gone already, I'll take it!

I have a bias similar to San, yet have played it a few times.

My plays of gloomhaven weren't enough to sway my bias. I personally view it as a mess.

I shall be happy if I never have to endure sitting in front of it again. Curmudgeonly cynical or not, I gave it half a dozen chances to break free of my inherent negative bias, and found it to be just what my prejudice told me it would be: more tos hotnizz schlock.

But beyond Wiz-War, I don't usually agree with Charles game choices anyways, despite respecting his opinion.

That said, I think silver tower is overrated too, but a hell of a lot more enticing than gloomhaven

Vote: silver tower