First Impressions: Founders of Gloomhaven

Founders of Gloomhaven is a euro game where the players score points by building Gloomhaven. I was pretty excited to try the game, since I absolutely love the Gloomhaven legacy game.

The basic game is to build resource buildings that use resources from other resource buildings (for example, People + Stone are required to build Bricks. Scoring buildings are placed as the game goes on, and if one is connected to your resources of the correct type, then you get points.

It was not that bad in the beginning when options were rather limited, but the complexity soon explodes. You need influence on resources to be able to build the more advanced resource buildings, and then you need to build roads, and you need to time everything so that another player does not grab things before you. This can be pretty hard to control since other players also decide what order actions happen in and what those actions are.

As the game progresses it gets pretty crazy. I found myself having to think and check and think and check all the time in order to figure out what was actually connected where, and who could do what. Add in a lot of restrictions on where buildings can be placed, voting, special action cards, special connections only one player can use, workers, special building abilities, special racial abilities, and it just becomes way too much stuff to keep track of.

I played Twilight Imperium for the first time last weekend and even that monster of a game was way easier to get into than Founders of Gloomhaven.

Maybe there is some fun to be had if you play it a lot of times and start learning the strategies... but there is no way I will bother to put in all those play sessions when there are a bunch of more accessible and fun games to pick from.

Verdict: This game is not very good. Three of the four players seemed fairly confident they would never play it again. I'll generously give it 2 out of 6 for being pretty and with good quality components.