Gloomhaven

Took my group three tries to beat the very first scenario. Not because the combat is unfair, it’s because there’s just so much to internalize at once, the rulebook isn’t the clearest thing in the world and we ended up guessing on a handful of edge cases the first session and hoping we got close enough. Once it clicked though, it really clicked, and I get why people call this the D&D open-world campaign in a box.

The card-based combat is the real innovation here. No dice. You’re managing a hand of ability cards each with a top and bottom half, choosing one for initiative-and-action, one for a secondary effect, and slowly burning through your hand as a built-in exhaustion clock that forces you to retreat and rest. It’s meaty, it rewards planning several turns ahead, and the puzzle-vs-theme tension mostly resolves in the theme’s favor here, unlike a lot of legacy games where the story feels bolted onto a spreadsheet, this one earns its dungeon-crawl fantasy through the mechanics themselves.

Box logistics deserve a mention because they’re a whole experience on their own. Punching every component out felt like unwrapping presents on Christmas morning, genuinely, my group was giddy doing it together. Getting it all back in the box after a session is its own giant puzzle if you’re using any of the aftermarket organizer inserts, which I’d call mandatory at this point, not optional.

The legacy-style permanence, stickers on the map, cards you’re told to rip up and destroy, is where the table splits. I’ve heard the complaint that anything asking you to physically destroy a board game component you paid for is a disaster on principle, boardgames should be taken care of, not mutilated, and I don’t entirely disagree even though it didn’t stop me from doing it. If that’s a dealbreaker for you, know it going in. For everyone else, this earned its spot as a genuine top-20-of-all-time game in my house.