Founders of Gloomhaven.

If you go over to Boardgamegeek.com and browse their enormous database of games (over 100,000 and always growing), you’ll see the #1 game is something called Gloomhaven, a mammoth, $140 game that, in my personal opinion, isn’t actually a board game: It’s a role-playing/miniatures game that comes in a board game sort of box, but isn’t something the average person would consider a regular tabletop board game. It’s expensive, huge (the box weighs 20 pounds), and requires playing over many sessions, while borrowing heavily from the mechanics of RPGs. It may be great, but that’s not a board game to me, or, I think, to most of my readers.

The designer of Gloomhaven, Isaac Childres, has extended the brand by developing a true tabletop game in the same universe as his hit title, one that is also still complex but plays very much like a regular, heavy strategy game, and manages to introduce some clever tweaks that produce a novel playing experience. This new title, Founders of Gloomhaven, somewhat de-emphasizes the Gloomhaven part – the title on the box has Founders in huge letters and puts the “of Gloomhaven” part in a tiny font that’s easy to overlook – but still comes with a million pieces and an elaborate set of rules and mechanics to satisfy the hardcore gamers in your group. The rules are not well written or organized, unfortunately, and my first playthrough was marred by a lack of understanding of the real point of the game, along with questions we had to head online to answer, but at least when I tried the game a second time I knew what my goal was and what basic actions were required to get me there.

Founders of Gloomhaven is a game of hand management and pickup-and-delivery mechanics that also works in tile placement, route-building, worker placement, a technology tree, and some basic economic elements, so … yeah, there’s a lot going on here. Each player controls two or three of the eight basic resources at the start of the game, and players will build resource production tiles of their own while also paying to get ‘access’ to the resources owned by other players so that they can build better buildings that require delivery of those resources. Eventually, larger “prestige buildings” will appear on the board, and players will earn larger point totals by delivering resources to those while also creating new actions for players to use with their workers.

The real core of the game is in how you connect these resource buildings to the upgraded buildings, which produce level 2 and level 3 resources, and to the prestige buildings, using roads, bridges, and gates. There are ornate rules about where you can place buildings – primarily that you can’t just place new tiles next to your own tiles already on the board – and you must use those connector tiles to create uninterrupted paths from the resources’ origins to their destinations. That means you will often want to forego certain actions or income to place more roads and thus create multiple paths to ship your goods around the board, especially if your competitors might have their own resource production buildings they’re trying to connect to the same destinations.

On a turn, you play one of the five action cards from your hand (six in a two-player game, with a card to collect Income added to the hand) to the table, take its main action, and then let other players take a similar but lesser ‘follow’ action. These include Construct, where you build a personal building like a house (freeing up a worker meeple), a bridge or a gate; Recruit, where you pay one or two coins to add an adviser card to your hand, giving you an upgraded version of one of the five basic actions; Upgrade, which lets you build an advanced resource building for either 4 or 6 coins, as long as you can deliver the required goods to it; Trade, which lets you place resource stalls on the board or pay to get access to someone else’s; and Call to Vote, which triggers a vote on the next prestige building to enter play, gives you some income or road tiles or influence tokens while paying more income to all other players. Your income increases as you bring more resources on to the board, so the game has an incentive built into the rules to keep the board growing and the pace moving along, although money is scarce within the game and you’ll make tough choices every round on what to do. (I rarely build houses, even though I’d get more worker meeples from them, because they’re pricey and I don’t think they pay off as well as upgrades do.) You can also use a card from your hand to take a basic action, like taking one coin, placing one road, or moving a worker to an open space.

Each player also plays as a unique race that owns one specific resource and that has a worker placement space on the main board for the player to use once s/he has built at least one house. The choice of race affects what other basic resources you can own at the start of the game, but beyond that doesn’t seem to have much effect on game play.

The points awarded for delivering resources don’t strictly go to the player who delivered each specific resource, which is one of the most important and most confusing aspects of the rules of Founders. If you deliver leather to a prestige building that rewards 4 points for that delivery, for example, but your leather production building took hides from someone else’s trade stall, you would have to give one point to the other player and keep just 3 for yourself. This means there’s a lot of accounting to do each time there’s a resource delivery, and it’s probably the biggest factor in increasing game time, because as the board fills up, placing any upgraded building or prestige building will likely result in a pause to figure out who gets how many points.

The game ends once six prestige buildings are on the board and completed, meaning someone has delivered each resource required by that building. Our first play-through, with two players, took about 2.5 hours, a little above the 120 minute time shown on the box. I also played a solo game that took an hour or so, although I am fairly certain I played a bit loose with some of the rules (mostly because I’d already had two drinks, which is not great for modeling paths in your head, it turns out). The solo mode has you playing against the clock, trying to complete seven prestige buildings in seven rounds, with certain costs increasing on you as the game progresses; either I missed a rule somewhere or there needs to be a better way to obtain income, both currency and influence tokens, to give you a fighting chance here. (I did “win,” technically, but again I think I skimmed some rules here.)

I see two fundamental problems with Founders of Gloomhaven, starting with the rules themselves. They’re not well written or organized, and terms are used to mean slightly different things – “own” in particular has multiple distinct definitions in the game, as does “import” when referring to resources. The BGG forums for the game are filled with rules questions like those, or asking about the multifarious rules on tile placement. The other is that it seems to be too hard to get roads to place on the board – if ever a game needed a card like Catan’s Road Building development card, this is it. You can forego money in the income phase to take and place roads, but that puts you at some disadvantage in the next round, and that is one of just two ways when you can place multiple road tiles at once, the other coming with certain adviser cards you must purchase. The game can’t work without a big network of roads connecting resource stalls and buildings around the board – you actually don’t have enough claim tokens to set up unique resource buildings in each section of the board – so all this shortage does is add some needless length to the game.

One last positive aspect worth mentioning is that there is some collaborative effort to the placement of buildings, especially prestige buildings, because multiple players can benefit from any such placement. That speeds the game up a little it, and also encourages players to work together on building the network around the board (which comes with two sides, one of which is apparently harder than the other). For a game of this depth and potential time requirement, a collaborative aspect is both welcome and necessary.

The game has a list price of $80 but I’ve seen it regularly under $50; amazon has it right now for $45. I imagine it’ll appeal to Gloomhaven players for its theme, but this is much more of a game in the vein of heavy strategy titles like Great Western Trail or Whistle Stop from last year, games that focused on tile placement but also required you to manage multiple other tracks (no pun intended) at the same time that you’re building out the board. It’s solid, and offers some novelty in the semi-collaborative aspect, but I don’t think I’ll pull Founders off the shelves before some other heavy strategy games that play more smoothly or are just more fun.