I don’t like the combat in Gloomhaven. I’m the sap who read the rulebook enough times to know how all the bad guys act, so I end up being the computer my friends play against. It’s like being a Dungeon Master with none of the creative flair. Gloomhaven is a big enough game that it can take critiques from one more rando, but I’m driven to write this because of a persistent comment on Far Away’s creature management. Some folks can find that phase tedious or disproportional to the explorer phase. It’s a fair observation and, obviously, you can say whatever they want on the internet. To me, Gloomhaven has all the same problems and fewer of the emotional or narrative rewards Far Away offers. In analyzing the difference, I want to understand the role these systems play on the player.
First, I’m writing this assuming you have some base level of understanding of both Gloomhaven and Far Away. For the latter, check out this tutorial video, our free print-and-play, or get a new copy for the price of dinner and a drink at a perfectly okay Seattle restaurant. For Gloomhaven (let’s be real that if you’re reading a board game designer’s blog, you’ve been exposed to it, but if not…), you appear to be able to get a used copy (of a legacy game?) for the price of a sushi “curated experience”. (The motto is “write hungry, edit sated”, right?)
Most rounds of combat in Gloomhaven feel exactly the same. Creatures zero in on the closest target and hit them. Sometimes, they apply a status effect, or hit multiple people, or don’t move before attacking. Want to do some cool positioning? Too bad: nearly everything moves faster than you, terrain doesn’t block ranged attacks, and because most attacks are preceded by a move, the enemies do the James Harden stutterstep to ignore disadvantage. The most consistently successful tactic is to jam melee fighters in a doorway, Three Stooges style.
While the vibe of the fight is predictable, the enemy moves on a turn-by-turn basis are not. A melee fighter almost always has one or two ranged attacks, or a lot of creatures have some move that turns on shield and retaliate. This is fine on its own, but Gloomhaven is billed as a tactical puzzle. Your moves need precision to operate. You’re meant to step in front of an ally to take damage, but that’s rendered pointless when the enemy draws a “Target 3” card. Need a tense escape to finish the mission in a set number of turns? Get ready to be immobilized by an unpreventable condition. Uncertainty in strategy games only works when you can mitigate negative outcomes.
The underlying issue is the lack of risk/reward calculus. The enemies act as expected 80% of the time. You can’t base a strategy on a 1-in-5 chance. Moreover, the probability doesn’t appreciably change: the enemy decks reshuffle frequently enough to negate the most ardent card counters. Same goes for your chances to hit: your 20-card player deck has a single auto-miss – even if you go 10 rounds without drawing it, are you really going to hold back on an attack because of a 10% miss chance? Even then, what would you do instead? Most interesting actions (those that aren’t move or attack) cause the card to be lost: something that races you towards a failure state. You end up having two buckets of options: do something that has an 80-90% success rate or do something that has an 80-90% success rate and loses a card. Acceptable card loss rate is mostly deterministic, so your turn is often solving a math problem.
All of this leads to my core issue with player choice. Options aren’t the same as choice. D&D 3.5 has two spells at the same level: Fireball and Melf’s Acid Arrow. Fireball does more damage over an area. Melf’s Acid Arrow does less damage to one target. You really have to fabricate a scenario for the latter to be the choice, so why not take the thing that’s better 80-90% of the time?
Let’s finally get back to Far Away. Like Gloomhaven, you move each little creature one at a time. Far Away maxes out at 48 creatures, though I’d estimate you usually have 20-40 by the end, with the game building up to that number. Gloomhaven varies, but I’d say you probably have 5-20 enemies at any given time. Both have a little script the creatures follow, though the Gloomhaven experience has a bunch more numbers. The differences are the roleplaying and how these systems interact with the world.
We’ve talked a lot about the merits and challenges of the roleplaying in Far Away. To focus on this conversation, because each individual controls half of the creatures, you know what your creatures do, and infer what the other person will choose. Alternatively, with the AI cards, you know what every creature might do. You also know the probability of a creature’s Fight action dealing damage. This makes for a readily available risk/reward understanding. How you react changes based on your injuries, building damage, and ally proximity. Since Far Away doesn’t require you to kill every creature (by fair the most common Gloomhaven goal), how you work with or around the creatures varies based on the situation. Your choices aren’t always globally optimal.
The bigger difference for me is how everything interacts with the world. Gloomhaven creatures are brutes that only know violence. They crawl towards you every round they draw a movement card. They also don’t exist without the players (their movement rules literally do not work without you there). Far Away’s creatures interact with each other (the world existed before you rudely crashed into it). This makes the pockets of the world you don’t currently occupy interesting. Can the den of little rats take out the giant murder beast? Will the herbivores on opposite sides of the planet find each other? These micro stories help make unique memories.
If you’re able to get into these little stories, the tedium of moving 30 tokens goes away. I try to say this tactfully on BGG threads, but you shouldn’t be treating a pack of Praetor Vaccas as 6 creatures – they are a pack. Move the swarm as one. Maybe you split the group when a big predator comes around, but that’s a fun narrative twist. If they’re chilling in a forest on the other side of the map, you can let them be as the creature master (and maybe they’re extra protective when the explorers come by later).
Look, I get that I’m biased, but Far Away has the same potential to create memories as a role-playing game. The missions tell a story, but you’re an equal in that story. You help shape the challenge and the moments of intrigue and tension. Gloomhaven relies on luck for those organic moments. For me, what stands out in Gloomhaven are rarely moments of aristeia, but rather when I drew a miss card three times in a row or was disarmed before my all-out attack. I’d rather fail because of my poor planning or overconfidence instead of a bad draw.
To conclude, I want to comment on two similar Far Away complaints. First, that the end of a mission can be in sight without any remaining challenge. I give you full permission to end early and declare victory. We hit this in our Frosthaven game last week (yes, I have the sequel despite being non-plussed about much of the original). We had one wounded enemy left with plenty of cards and health. We wanted to call it, but realized loot and experience depended on these final actions (and drawing the game out to optimize points). The game discouraged us from skipping the boring bits. Second, folks get weirded out that you can choose to not lose with the roleplaying system. If at the end of a 3-hour Gloomhaven session, you have one turn to win, draw your attack, get the miss card, and don’t pretend you got any other card, you’re a more noble person than me.