Gloomhaven - Solo Scenarios: Mercenary Challenges

My first hour with Gloomhaven was mostly quiet panic, and I say that as someone who reads tooltips for fun. You get two cards per turn, a top action from one and a bottom action from the other, and whichever card you lead with also decides where you sit in the turn order. There is no undo. Worse, the hand you are holding is also your health bar, so every wound and every burned card is time being scraped off your clock in that room. If you arrived from RPGs where you mash abilities off a hotbar, this feels like being handed a chess clock and a rulebook in a language you only half remember. Push through it anyway. Somewhere in the third or fourth scenario the fog lifts and you see the machine underneath, and it is a mean, elegant thing. What makes it click is that the monsters do not cheat and they do not improvise. Enemy behavior is deterministic, driven by readable rules about who they focus and how they move, which means a turn is not a prayer to the dice gods. It is a solvable problem. You count hexes, you work out who will be standing where when initiative resolves, you decide whether to eat six damage now to set up a two-target sweep later. Combat on the grid stops being about damage numbers and starts being about tempo and attrition. The tension is never "will I win this fight", it is "can I win it before my hand runs dry", and that reframing is the single best thing about the design. Losing a scenario rarely feels unfair. It usually feels like you spent a card on turn two that you needed on turn nine. The RPG layer is where I expected to be disappointed and mostly was not. Mercenaries level up, take perks that reshape their odds, and eventually retire, which unlocks new classes with genuinely different verbs rather than the same kit in a new hat. That retirement loop is the closest thing here to a character arc, and mechanically it works beautifully: you are constantly rebuilding a party rather than babysitting one optimized brick for eighty hours. Build variety holds up well past hour forty because the classes are not balanced along a single power axis. Some want you standing in the middle of everything, some fall over if a skeleton breathes on them, and figuring out which cards to leave out of a hand is as much of a build decision as which to put in. There is also an online co-op campaign and a scenario editor with Workshop support, so the tail end of this thing is longer than most tactics games manage. Now the parts that annoyed me. The writing is functional and no more. Scenario intros and branching events deliver flavor and a bit of choice, but nobody in this mercenary company has an interior life worth quoting back at you, and I say that as the person on this team who will happily recite dialogue at a stranger. If you want prose that rewards a second read, this is not the shelf. There is repetition, too: retrying a scenario means replaying the whole setup, and the events you draw between missions start rhyming with each other before the campaign is done. The presentation carries a board game's pacing, which means turns can crawl when you are watching enemy activations resolve one at a time. The solo mercenary challenges are the sharpest expression of the whole design, single-character puzzle boxes that will expose exactly which parts of a class you never understood, but they are also the most brutal on-ramp imaginable if you try them before the systems have settled in your head. So: this is for tactics players, board game converts, and anyone who wants an RPG where the interesting decisions happen on the grid instead of in a dialogue tree. It is not for people who want a story to carry them, and it is genuinely not for people who bounce off rules text. Very Positive across sixteen thousand reviews and an 82 on Metacritic tracks with my experience, including the 18 percent who hit that first hour and understandably walked. Give it three scenarios before you decide. That is the honest ask.

Monika · Scout Team

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