I’m not a Gloomhaven guy, for a variety of reasons, but foremost among them is that I just don’t care for modern role-playing games. I did play a little pen-and-paper D&D in the 1980s, and got into several CRPGs, including the Bard’s Tale, before going all out on the Baldur’s Gate series. Those experiences cemented a style of RPG in my brain that’s hard to dislodge; if a modern RPG isn’t built on the same framework, it feels counterintuitive and slow to me.
Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs gives me that same feeling, although I do respect the cleverness of the design and the way it packs a lot of game into a tiny box. Based on a fan expansion for the massive, $120, 20-pound Gloomhaven tabletop RPG, Buttons & Bugs is a strictly solo endeavor that has 20 scenarios to play through where your character gains levels, skills, and items … but the combat system at the heart of the game is so clunky that it drove me kind of nuts. (It’s between printings, but you can pre-order the second printing here, with shipping expected in September.)
In Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs, your intrepid hero has been debiggified (my word, not theirs) to a miniature size and must fight through a series of adventures to get back to some kind of final boss that will reverse the curse and make you full-sized again. The battles will increase in difficulty, and your character will gain some new skill cards, better items, and a very modest number of hit points as the game progresses.
The combat system revolves around cards, and I don’t care what Gloomhaven fans say – this is the clunkiest combat system I’ve ever seen. You start out with four cards in your hand, with two actions on each side. You’ll pick a top action from one card and a bottom action from another on each turn. If those are the A sides of the cards, you’ll pick them back up and flip them to the B sides, which have different actions. Once you’ve used all of the B sides, you have to rest to pick them back up, but you will lose one card from your hand each time you do this. If you ever have just one card left in your hand, you lose the scenario. (You also lose if you run out of hit points.) Top actions usually involve attacks; bottom actions usually involve movement. That means if you’re hemmed in by a monster and just want to attack with both your actions, well, tough luck – you’re going to waste some of your turn with movement points you can’t use. I played several scenarios as the thief, and there’s a lot of movement on the thief’s initial action cards that is close to useless on the early maps because there’s no place to run, literally.
There’s also a single die with three values on it that works as a sort of attack modifier for you and determines the monsters’ initiative and exact actions (skewing towards more movement or more offense) on each turn. It’s fine for the monsters, as it mixes things up a little bit, but for you it’s just a nuisance – it adds a tiny bit of randomness in most cases, adding or subtracting one from your attack value, except very rarely it can either double your attack or void it entirely. Remembering to use it and then move the peg down the board to track the current modifiers was more trouble than it was worth.
I think the design here also presupposes some familiarity with Gloomhaven’s combat system, icons, and terminology. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what one symbol meant, since it’s not explained on the one reference card with the game itself, so I had to read the online rules (accessible with a QR code) and then go re-read them to find the symbol, which was just off to the right of my phone’s screen. It’s a dark element, and while it appears on one of the thief’s starter cards, there’s no explanation anywhere in the box of what elements are, and I don’t think you can even use that bonus action (+2 to your attack if you have consumed a dark element) with that initial card set.
I absolutely love the idea of this game – a solitaire dungeon-crawl with a solid story that’s a little bit funny and that has some great components to keep the game truly compact, like the hit point dials you use for yourself and for your adversaries. A whole campaign in a box the size of a new set of business cards is awesome. If the game had a more user-friendly combat and item system, I probably would have played it all the way through. It’s just too fiddly for me, and that may be just a function of my own experiences playing RPGs with other ways of handling combat.