agreed!

I've been out of the gaming community for awhile. What is the difference?

Me tooo!

thank you so much for the offer. as it happens, someone else already offered as well so i sent them away, but in the future, if the offer's still up, i'll definitely come back your way! :)

yes, MvM, legends of Andor, this war of mine, aeon's end... publisher pursuing the "learn to play by playing" is a great initiative! :)

ausgezeichnet! :)

I was in the same boat. Never took the plunge into Gloomhaven because of how vast it was right out of the gate. I'm picking this one up tomorrow though.

This looks neat and streamlined and i will definitely buy and play it. But there will also be less to unlock, less to develop and less to play with mechanics. Get your toe in the water with this one - und dann hol dir Gloomhaven auf Deutsch ;)

oh i recommend it. also the game does come with a very robust difficulty modifier to make it easier or harder as you need :)

@@rahdo Fabulous. I think I'm definitely sold, then. =)

i would definitely recommend this. the only reason not to would be the additional $ you have to spend

yup, the whole thing is in there, and it is a tight fit :)

The game is so huge I usually take a sitting just to do the bookwork and set up the next scenario so I can play in reasonable amount of time. It was taking me 3 hours to solo a game including set up, break down, and bookkeeping.

a good problem to have :)

i'd say so. the characters can level up in significantly different ways, plus once you've played it, if you want to go through the missions again you can increase the difficulty which will likely force you to approach the same scenarios in different ways. and if you're not playing the whole thing 4p, then that means one or two of the characters you won't experienced at all :)

yes, though it gets easier. you have to control 2 characters, and you know exactly what each character will do. it's still fun though

sure if you want 20 or so new missions and 4 new characters :)

there's no denying that Lion's tutorial makes the process of learning this game sooo much easier!

no i think it would be totally fine. the majority of changes are very small, and a bunch of them are self evident when you play the full game. i'd bet money that by the time you'd finish Lion and are ready to move on tot he full game, there will be very through lists of "here's what you need to know" stuff available, and the transition will be easy peasy :)

James A At least this is half the price...

@@johnathanrhoades7751 don't get me wrong, I'm still getting this and frosthaven. I'll just have to fight off my inner scrooge when I back the kickstarter for frosthaven!

i would say that if you can handle wonder woman, you can handle the jaws tutorial that gets you read for full gloomhaven play. now, there's no guarantee that full gloomhaven play is something you'd like, but jaws will get you there to find out, no problem! :)

@@rahdo that is fantastic news! I will be adding this to wishlist then. Thanks again Rahdo for everything you do for the hobby. :-)

Do you think JotL would spoil regular GH for newbies in the sense that they'd get attached to the way things are done in JotL and then be irritated by regular GH? Or would it just make regular GH less frustrating to learn overall?

@@ModernPlague I think we all find building the boards frustrating, most other things you could adapt from JotL if you so chose , and we'll have to see exactly what ends up in Frosthaven. If JotL is the heaviest a player would go then yes, GH will frustrate them, if they don't mind heaver games in general and liked JotL then GH will probably just offer more things to uncover and explore (specially new characters). I personally really like how they've handled the maps and scenarios in JotL and I hope they've embraced that going forward with FH (which I think I heard said that they have).

F4R207 by handle the maps do you mean having the map in a book then no that won’t be happening in FH. The KS page shows the tiles and the overlays so they are sticking with those for FH.

it's been over half a decade since i played an S&S prototype, but from what i recall, gloomhaven is probably overall less overwhelming, and if you use Jaws of the Lion as your intro, then it's a very smooth ride as it grows to full gloomhaven complexity over the first 5 missions

@@rahdo that is good enough for me. Thanks Rahdo! Other than this crawler I am on versed in D&d Wrath of Ashardalon, Zombicide BP and Hellboy so I am pretty excited to expand to this

it's surprising that this list doesn't exist in the rulebook. iirc there's instead a link to a rodney smith how to play for the full game, which will be 95% the exact same game so hard to find what the differences are.

Yea that seems like a huge missed opportunity to me. This version is supposed to make it easier for people who aren’t hard core gamers get into a really deep game. They set this one up really well to learn but have no transition into the next game. To me that’s basically the whole point of this game.

good question. the stamina nerf has been semi-official for awhile, so i'm sure that will transfer over. afaik though, the other stuff i mentioned (item trading, events don't effect scenarios, some removed functions) won't be in in frosthaven, and FH will be back to 'original rules. there is one slight change in Lion that i forgot to mention that i *hope* becomes the standard moving foward for all interations though: there's no long the "as the crow flies" tie breaker for enemy decision making. one less step (eve a small one) in enemy resolution is a welcome change to me! :)

​@@rahdo :'( I love item trading and events not affecting scenarios

very replayable. the stickers are mostly optional :)

watch the runthrough, which is me playing solo, though really you're playing a 2p game where you control 2 seperate characters. it gets easier because you know how all the timing is going to work between players, but the game gives you an adjuster so that you can balance it to ensure you've still got a decent challenge. if you don't mind controlling 2 very complex characters, it works fantastically.

Supposedly, the first couple are pretty short because they're tutorials, but they are then similar length to what you're used to.

the first 3 tutorial missions are very short (we finished them in one sitting). the 4th one is slightly shorter than an average scenario. #5-25 are all effectively regular length, regular depth experiences :)

@@rahdo Never having played Gloomhaven before, how many minutes is a regular game? :)

oh really!? could you ping me about this at questions @ rahdo (dot) com (the email i use for podcast q&a) :)

Rahdo Done!

the void warden and demolitionist are female :)

the first 3 missions are fast, tutorials. missions 4 - 25 are standard length, standard complexity, standard gameplay (and in fact, they tend to have more variety and unique designs, compared to basic gloomhaven's 'kill all enemies') :)

@@rahdo That's nice, but I don't like the fact that it doesn't have map tiles, instead it's on paper. Can you play with characters from JotL in Gloomhaven?

@@swvi9459 yes, characters from GL can work in Lion, and vice versa. also as i understand it, you can recreate all of the Lion maps with the hex pieces from GL (i'm not 100% sure about that, but i have heard it mentioned a few times... might want to double check at boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/291457/gloomhaven-jaws-lion/forums/0

@@rahdo Thank you for the info. I will check it out. Nice video btw, keep up.

we do... makes the game significantly easier if you don't, and you should probably bump up the difficulty to compensate

being born white (and male) opened so many doors for me that i didn't even know existed. i worked for 20 years in the videogame industry with hundreds and hundreds of co-workers, and i could count on one hand the # of black developers (and also a stupidly small percentage of female devs as well) which is insane. i've never once in my life had to fear for my safety when interacting with authorities, i've never really lived with fear at all. when i was around 10 or so, my parents moved us all onto a boat, and we started a very nomadic lifestyle for about a half decade, and for one school year, my parents enrolled me and my brother in a local school in the california delta that was probably 90+% mexican-american, and i still remember the feeling of isolation and "otherness". it affected my school performance so badly that my parents decided it was better for my future to homeschool, and that really sticks with me. where would i be today if i had continued to be the marginalized one (in the tiniest way possible, because hey, i was still white, and so were almost all of the teachers). and i imagine what that must be like, every day, for POC who look around and see nothing but white faces in most every facet of their lives. that's not right, and at age 51, i think it's LONG past time i finally start declaring that. back in feb when i was finally convinced to look for contributors to my channel, i definitely wanted to to bring in people of color, and i spent a lot of time looking for someone who was successfully running a channel that might be able to emulate my gonzo runthrough style. i'm sad to say i couldn't find anyone at that time, but i'm still looking (and i think i've made some good progress recently).

@@rahdo Thank you for responding! Appreciate the videos and the candor always.

we found summons to be incredibly useful and versatile. my first character was a mindthief, and there wasn't a scenario where that summon wasn't a huge boon for us. but they are very difficult to use well. protip: they're not supposed to survive long :)

Rahdo is correct. Summons are very effcient when you use them at the right time. Always go late when u summon them and early on the next turn for them to attack. Ranged summons are much better than melee summons.

We found the summoner character one of the strongest (if not THE strongest) character in our two player campaign. She is almost overpowered. And , the puzzle of manipulating tactics to get the summons AI to do what you want is a lot of fun. Also, as you slowly ramp up your summons over time, your turns get longer and more involved, and so it kind of feels like a engine building euro game with escalating actions.