Ericj32
Well-Known Member
Thanks for the tips! Any and all words of advice are more than welcome in helping this first time Gloomhaven party.
I’m not sure how much experience you have with other legacy games or how many of them are like Gloomhaven in this way, but I’d say it’s definitely a good idea to figure out how you’re going to keep track of the legacy aspects of the game - and also how much you want to keep track of. The game itself gives you some ways of tracking some things, but it also relies on you to track other things.
Must keep track of:
- which scenarios you’ve unlocked (might want something easier to peruse than the stickers on the map when you’re trying to decide which one to do next)
-global achievements (can track with the stickers on the map pretty easily)
- what your party’s reputation level is
- what your party’s prosperity level is
- which party achievements you’ve received (this is really easy to forget to keep track of)
- each character’s amount of gold, XP, items, perks, and progress towards completing their character’s quest (can just do this on the player pads)
beyond that, there are a lot of other things that you might want to keep track of, even though its not required (just depends on how much effort you want to put into tracking and how much value you think it will add to your own enjoyment of the game or how OCD or nostalgic you’ll be after dozens of scenarios and how badly you’ll want to remember what you did all along the way):
- which city and road events you’ve done, including what choices you made in them and what the outcomes were (since some of them may pop up again or lead to other things that happen later in the game) (all these event cards are numbered so it can be helpful to keep track of the number)
- bits of information/messages you’ve received about Gloomhaven and it’s history
- the characters you’ve met who’ve asked you to do things or sent you on errands or whatever (if you’re bouncing around with the scenarios it can be easy to forget who they are and what their deal is)
- the backstory and/or preceding scenarios and/or events that led to the scenarios that are currently playable for your party (this is helpful in terms of narrative continuity but also in resolving confusion over whether you actually unlocked a particular scenario or got the achievement needed to play it - it can be helpful to be able to trace these things back)
- which person in your party got which treasure chests, or other rewards and special items from scenarios or events (if you want to spread things around evenly, or just see who the greediest jerk in your party has been haha)
There are all kinds of smartphone apps and google docs that people have created and shared for free to track this stuff so I’d definitely look around pretty early on and try to find something you like and start tracking everything you want to keep track of as early as possible.
I use the Gloomster app, but I each person in our group uses something different.
I’m curious how other Gloomers on here track things though. There’s so much going on in this game that I feel like every party puts their own spin on how they play, without really meaning to necessarily - it just happens. It’s fun to talk to other people who play and hear how differently they do things and which rules they didn’t realize they were breaking/forgetting about haha.