Gloomhaven

I had quite a nice board game collection by the time I left Japan, and was organizing (mostly) weekly game nights at my place. When I did leave, I sold all of it to friends, and then put all of that behind. I did get a chance to play a few games since moving to Montreal with colleagues at work, and over the past couple of years bought a few small 2-player games to possibly play with my wife (we played some, but not that much). Recently though I started playing pretty much weekly with a few colleagues at work, and it gave me the bug again, not only to be playing regularly, but also to get some games of my own. I bought a few small things over the holidays and in January, but then I made the big jump, and got the most insane board game I’ve ever owned (well, the World of Warcraft board game is pretty close). Currently ranked #1 on BoardGameGeek, Gloomhaven is all the rage, selling out through its print runs (following the re-release last month, there’s already a new print run announced). I’ve liked this sort of hack-and-slash board game adventure style forever, from the 80s when I was playing Talisman (and that’s the only board game I kept, that original edition), to more modern stuff like Runebound. This of course promised to trump them all, with an insane amount of scenarios (95), legacy-style development as you play a campaign, and just so much stuff in the box that I felt like a kid on Christmas morning when I opened the box. I’ve only played 1 session so far, and a lot of it was spent going over the rules with all the players, but we were already having a lot of fun as we started the first scenario, and I’m incredibly excited to play more (which will be this Thursday, and we’re planning weekly sessions).