Playing – Jaws of the Lion (Gloomhaven)

I was originally slow to the Gloomhaven party (for reasons) but my regular gaming table has been playing it for some time now. Currently, we’re working our way through Frosthaven using some suggested rules for adding a 5th player (increase base difficulty by two, keep the rewards at the usual for the base difficulty). This past week I had opportunity to play Jaws of the Lion, a stand alone in the Gloomhaven boardgame family and very much a ‘how to play’ tutorial for the full game.

For those unfamiliar with Gloomhaven, its very much in the same vein of Descent, Heroquest, and even the Dungeons & Dragons boardgame series TLDR – it’s D&D the board game with pre-generated PCs. Each player has a character that has a backstory and a range of abilities. Through playing scenarios, character’s improve and new options are unlocked for character abilities, available equipment, and even opening up new scenarios and new characters for future use. The scenarios themselves are very tactically crunchy, featuring cards that dictate the enemy actions and abilities while player’s choose their actions from character specific decks. As the turns go by, the actions available to the characters dwindle through use and suffered harm until they have no cards left, rendering them exhausted and unable to take any actions. If the scenario objective is achieved, characters gain rewards like experience points towards new levels (and new available abilities) and coins to buy additional equipment. Frosthaven added gaining resources to help build up the town, plus a few other changes that feel like fixes to the original (and possibly might be in the Gloomhaven 2nd Edition rules).

Jaws of the Lion starts out much much simpler than that, with starting action cards featuring the action symbols and a plain English explanation of what they mean. The game features are added on a little bit at a time, with scenario one just concerned with the basic mechanics and no XP or coin awarded and the objective to fight off a basic creature. Scenario two adds coins and XP and access to items from the store. Scenario three adds two more creatures to the enemies and more ability cards (specified in the rules), and so on until all the standard Gloomhaven rules are in play. It really holds your hand as you advance through the scenario book.

It doesn’t achieve the full Gloomhaven experience of unlocking additional characters beyond the starting four, but there is a pack of action cards that you aren’t allowed to open until your character reaches a higher level so there’s that. These four look like they would be fully compatible with Gloomhaven for later on. The mass of map tiles is simplified as a book that provides the 25 scenarios as well as the map to play on, complete with showing where the enemy creatures start. There is still a bunch of chunky cardstock tokens for enemy creatures, conditions, and debris / cleared hexes so the box manages to be pretty full at about a quarter the size of Gloomhaven itself. At $50 USD, that’s a pretty good deal and at the lower end of many board game prices out there (Gloomhaven 2nd ed. currently listed at $180 USD and Frosthaven at $250 USD).

I’d be willing to play it again, though odds are good I’d be trying to include the full rules set as best as I could in those early scenarios. The makers of the game now sell supplies for removable sticker packs so that one can play the campaigns multiple times, which is a good thing though based on how often I’ve gone back to replay other legacy games from the start I’m good with permanent stickers for now.