Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion

The learn to play tutorial in this thing does not feel like an insult to your intelligence, which sounds like faint praise until you’ve sat through a rulebook that talks down to you. The first three scenarios teach the combat system a piece at a time, kill everyone type objectives to start, and by the time the story starts asking more of you the mechanics have already clicked. I got both my kids through this, and the one thing I’d flag for anyone doing the same is that the two handed solo mode, running two characters at once, gets genuinely overwhelming, it took longer than I expected and burned me out faster than playing one character with a real second person would have.

The card system is the whole game and it’s quietly brilliant, you take every card into a mission, choose two each round which sets your initiative and gives you a top and bottom action, then burn the rest to refill your hand, and that refill count doubles as your mission timer. It’s elegant in a way that a lot of heavier games never manage, no separate clock token needed, the pressure is baked into the resource you’re already managing.

Table presence matters here more than people expect from a box this size, everything you need fits inside with a real storage solution, no baggies, no separate organizer purchase required, and that alone solves the biggest complaint people have about full Gloomhaven. The one gripe I’ll actually cosign is the vertical player mats, they take up more table real estate than they need to and don’t sit well next to a drink, so keep anything you’re sipping off to the side rather than in easy reach.

If you’ve been scared off by the size of full Gloomhaven, this is the actual front door, and once you’re through it you’ll want the big box waiting on the other side.