Recent reviews by Zubon

Evocative but tedious. There are puzzles, but you spend far more time brute-force tracking your way through every room of mazes to find items spread at random. Go to the top of the map to find the key to the bottom left of the map to find the lever that plugs into the top right of the map to open the path to the new top of the map. Maybe the later levels are better, but they are locked behind maps with 100 rooms to find 10 items to plug into slots and 2 or 3 puzzle mini-games.

Neither "solo" nor "digital" is probably the best way to experience Gloomhaven, but digital is probably the best way to experience Gloomhaven solo. If you have an in-person group, go for the physical game; if you are reading this soon after I type it, how about Jaws of the Lion while waiting for Gloomhaven 2nd edition later this year. I have not played with online multiplayer, and I have yet to meet anyone who recommends that.

The digital implementation seems adequate. It is imperfect, but it also handles all of the setup, cleanup, and bookkeeping. Granted, the fiddly physical elements are part of the experience of board games, but we are already assuming you don't have a group and oh golly I cannot imagine setting up all those maps for a solo game.

I had a good experience with Gloomhaven digital. I do recommend looking up a PDF of the scenario book, just because some scenarios do not explain the special rules well or visibly, whereas the book calls your attention to them. Granted, that spoils some ambushes, but it is helpful to know what the game expects you to know. Part of the digital handling of special rules is just spawning more enemies, not throwing up a paragraph shouting "this pipe/tree/whatever spawns more enemies until you fix/destroy/whatever it!"

Edit: the game updated within the day after I posted this, specifically addressing D1 difficulty. Did it work? I have not yet gone back to check, but check updates and discussion starting with version 4.1.6 (108.4f0) to see what others think.

One of the better "Slay the Spire with dice" games, but not something I can recommend in the February 2025 state of its Early Access release. The basic gameplay is good, although it feels very slow. The base difficulty is fun. Elite enemies do not exist (yet?); elite fights on the map are just double-fights, which encourage slowing the game more so you can scale up against the first fight before starting the second. D1+ (Ascension) balance is poor; in theory, giving enemies not just bigger numbers but also new abilities is good, but the abilities make several starter characters/relics unusable, and you need to plan your entire run around Act 3 normal enemies instead of bosses or what would normally be challenging fights. Several mechanics are either intentionally unintuitive or not working as intended, such as enemy thorns triggering before player block (there are a few ways to get block before attacking, which you want to find before those D2+ fights with multiple thorn enemies) or poison damage hitting the player after the fight (so make sure your block and heal is on the board, because your board will also trigger after the fight). Luckily, the content gated behind increased difficulty is not very good yet either.

Promising start, but at the moment the full game is worse than the demo.

Addictive in its simplicity, but I don't know that I can quite round it up to "good." If I had this on my phone and were playing it at a bus stop, its simplicity would be optimal, although I might miss the screen size. Also there is no save or continue, so you play all 50 levels at once or forfeit, which would be bad for a phone game. It's pretty bad for a computer game.

Another review says you have to spend hours unlocking the interesting items, etc. that overcome the balance issues of the first few hours in the game. That will be great for people who are interested in playing more than a few hours of the game. As I am reading further, it looks like there may in fact be content unlocked "agonizingly slowly" that fixes some of the issues with the game. So hey, maybe I'll come back to it? But the developers have already moved on, a couple of games down the line with a note that adding save/continue was on the to-do list in 2022.

If you get this in an inexpensive bundle, it will probably be worth poking at just to see how the concept works. It almost works, and maybe it starts working if you give it more investment than "almost works" deserves.

Slow and shallow. Blackjack just doesn't have enough depth to make this interesting.

Cute and briefly entertaining but I can't really *recommend* it. The entire game is matching 100 doodles to their outlines. 15-20 minutes depending on how long it takes you to work out the interface details (scroll around to see the rest of them), feel free to repeat the same thing with randomized placement. Note "Profile Features Limited" if you were planning to get this farm a quick 100 achievements.

Cute and briefly entertaining but I can't really *recommend* it. The entire game is matching 100 doodles to their outlines. 15-20 minutes depending on how long it takes you to work out the interface details (scroll around to see the rest of them), feel free to repeat the same thing with randomized placement. Note "Profile Features Limited" if you were planning to get this farm a quick 100 achievements.

Not very interesting relative to other idle games. You merge 1s into 2s, 2s into 3s, etc. There is no next layer of mechanics or anything more interesting than getting upgrades to accelerate the progress of generating higher numbers. The screenshots above really do show the entire game.

The drawings are cute.

I got this in The Great Escape Room Bundle from Humble Bundle. It has been the least interesting of the games I have played so far. The veneer of a story just highlights how arbitrary most of the puzzles are, rather than having something thematically tied to the escape room. Some of the puzzles make sense for where they are (garden), but the more common "figure out a sequence of numbers or shapes" just seems out of place or random. This game had a higher frequency of "what do you even want from me?" and "I know what you want, but the interface is too opaque for me to see how to give you the answer" than competing games.

Fun theming, dull gameplay. Was it a phone timewaster first?