Gloomhaven Board Game Rules | Is the Campaign Worth It?

Gloomhaven is worth it if you have a group of adults who will commit to a 300 hour campaign and you do not mind 30 minutes of setup. It is a 1 to 4 player cooperative dungeon crawl for ages 13 and up, and the box you want in 2026 is the Second Edition, not the 2017 first edition.

I am Spector, a dad to Alex, 7, and Emma, 10. Gloomhaven is the single most impressive object in our house and it is the one Emma is most annoyed that she cannot touch. So let me be straight with you about what it is, what changed, and who should spend the money.

The short version: this is the best tactical card game ever printed, it is a genuinely enormous commitment, and if you are reading this in 2026 you are probably about to buy the wrong box. The 2017 game was rereleased as Gloomhaven: Second Edition in 2025, it is the only Gloomhaven Cephalofair currently sells at full size, and it rewrote about a dozen rules that the version most reviews on the internet still describe. Everything below is checked against the official 74 page Second Edition rulebook, the publisher product pages, the current store catalogue and the publisher errata page.

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Gloomhaven in 2026: Which Box Should You Actually Buy

The most useful thing I can tell you is that the game you have read about is not the game on the shelf. Cephalofair rereleased Gloomhaven as the Second Edition, announced it in June 2023, ran it through BackerKit, and it is now shipping. The publisher store lists it at a $199.99 sale price, tagged Players 1 to 4, Age 13 and up, Playtime 1 to 2 plus hours, and Setup time High. Their own blog post from March 2025 says Age 14 and up and around 300 plus hours of overall gameplay, so the age on this page is a conflict I am not going to hide.

Product	What it actually is	Players	Publisher price September 2026
Gloomhaven: Second Edition	The current flagship. 101 scenarios, 6 starting classes and 12 to unlock, 185 tiles, 236 monster standees, 250+ miniatures, ages 13+, 1 to 2+ hours a scenario	1 to 4	$199.99 sale
Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion	A fully standalone prequel with 25 scenarios and 5 built in tutorial scenarios. The right first buy for almost everyone	1 to 4	$59.99 sale
Frosthaven	The standalone sequel set in a northern outpost. Bigger and harder than the Second Edition, and a separate campaign you never finish	1 to 4	$250 sale
Gloomhaven 2nd Edition: Solo Scenarios	18 solo scenarios built around one class each, with a deck of 18 item cards as rewards. Not a campaign, a practice course	1	$15
Gloomhaven: Buttons and Bugs	A pocket sized solo micro game with the same turn structure and a fraction of the ceremony. This is the one you hand a kid	1	$21.99
Gloomhaven: Map Tile Archive	Storage for 185 tiles, and the single accessory that solves the one complaint every Gloomhaven owner shares	Any	$24.99

One correction that will save you money, because a lot of people get this wrong. The Crimson Scales is not a Gloomhaven expansion. It is a fan made expansion that has been sold next to the official boxes for years, with 66 scenarios and 11 to 14 classes of its own, and its own publisher states plainly that it is not an official Cephalofair product. Forgotten Circles and the Havoc bundle are also not in the publisher current catalogue. The official Gloomhaven family in 2026 is the Second Edition, Jaws of the Lion, Frosthaven, Buttons and Bugs, the Solo Scenarios book, the Mercenary Packs and the accessories.

The Card Play: One Card Sets Your Turn Order, Not Two

You secretly choose two ability cards, and only the initiative value in the centre of one of them counts. When initiative is set, that card is revealed on top of the other so only one value is visible.

This is the rule the old version of this page got wrong in the way that would have hurt a new player most, so it gets stated plainly. The round runs in four printed steps:

1. Card selection. Every character secretly picks two ability cards and puts them face down. Of the two, one is chosen for its initiative value, and the number printed in the centre of that card is the only one that matters.
2. Ordering of initiative. Everyone turns their cards face up, and the chosen card is revealed directly on top of the other. The initiative values are compared, the tokens are placed on the map, and everyone is arranged from lowest to highest, earliest to latest. Long resting characters sit at 99 and therefore go last.
3. Character and monster turns. Every figure on the map takes a turn, in initiative order.
4. End of round. Five printed operations, and discarding your unplayed cards is not one of them.

The cards you do not play stay in your hand. That is the single most repeated myth about this game and it is simply false. There is no end of turn card discard and no reshuffle mid scenario. Your hand is your engine, and the reason a good player holds a card is that they are saving an initiative number or a once per scenario ability, not that they are avoiding a discard.

On your turn you play the top action of one of your two cards and the bottom action of the other, and you can choose which of the two you perform first. You cannot play two top actions or two bottom actions. Each half of a card is a single action, and an action can be skipped, so choosing your card pair is really a choice about which of four abilities you want available.

Monster turns work the same way from the other direction. Every monster set on the map draws one ability card per round, and that card decides when the whole set acts and what the set does. Within the set, elites act first in ascending standee number, then normals in ascending standee number.

Abilities and Enhancement Stickers, Not Enhanced Cards

There are no enhanced cards in the Second Edition and there is no card to flip. Ability cards carry printed Enhancement Marks, and you fill them with stickers you buy with gold in the city once you have earned the Power of Enhancement achievement.

If you have been told that characters upgrade by flipping a card face down to reveal a stronger version, that was true in 2017 and it is not true now. The current system is:

• Ability cards are all unique, and each one prints a card name, an initiative value, a level, a top action and a bottom action, plus any number of Enhancement Marks sitting next to specific abilities.
• A level up adds one new ability card to your pool, matching your class, of a level equal to or lower than your new level. It also increases your maximum hit points and gives you one perk mark. It is never a choice between two cards.
• Perks permanently change your own attack modifier deck, adding and removing cards, and you buy them with perk marks during Downtime. The old page said leveling is what tunes your deck. Perks are.
• Perk marks come from four printed sources: every level up, every set of three battle goal checkmarks, every new mastery achieved, and every new character you create.
• Enhancement stickers are bought in the city with gold, and only once the party has earned the global achievement called Power of Enhancement. There are five types of enhancement mark, being Square, Circle, Diamond, Diamond plus and Hex, and each accepts a different set of stickers. A Square mark takes only a +1, or a jump sticker if it sits on a non summon move ability. A Circle takes square or element stickers including a wild element. A Diamond takes square, circle or negative condition. A Diamond plus takes square, circle or positive condition. A Hex takes only a hex sticker.

That last rule is the elegant bit and it is what stops enhancements from running away. An enhancement, once bought, is never removed, and it persists for every future character of that class you create.

The Attack Modifier Deck Belongs to Your Character, Not the Table

In the Second Edition each character has their own attack modifier deck of six cards, and all monsters share one deck. The old advice that everyone shares a deck and tunes it by leveling is wrong on both counts.

A standard character deck is exactly six cards: two of +1, one of +2, one of -1, one of 0, and one of 2x. There is no Miss card and there is no card called x2, and there is no -2 in a standard deck. Monsters share a single deck between all of them, and scenario allies use a separate ally deck.

Everything about an attack runs through this deck, in a printed order: apply attack bonuses and penalties from the card, draw one modifier card for each individual target, apply the target’s shield, then apply ward. Only after all of that can the target try to negate the damage, by spending an ability or by losing cards from hand or from the discard pile.

Perks are how you fight this deck over a campaign, and the usual plan is to delete the -1 first. Removing a single -1 from a six card deck is worth far more than adding a second +1, and when I sit down to a scenario I count my deck before I count the monsters.

Elements: Six of Them, Plus Wild and Plus Mixed

The old page said the Spellweaver manipulates “the elements” without ever saying how many there are. There are six, and the rulebook lists them on page 21: Fire, Ice, Air, Earth, Light and Dark. The First Edition had five, with Lightning and Void sitting where Earth and Light now sit. There is also a Wild icon meaning any one of the six, and a Mixed icon meaning two at once, where you choose which two to infuse.

Infusion is the quietest system in the game and the one new players miss entirely. If an action has an elemental affinity, then when you perform any part of that action you must infuse that element at the end of your turn by moving its token on the element infusion board. At the end of every round all infused elements wane, moving one column to the left. Consumed elements are pulled off the board into the inert column, and to consume an element it has to be strong or waning at the start of your turn, which is a real timing constraint on Spellweaver and Cragheart turns.

Conditions, and Why There Is No Sticky Condition

Gloomhaven has seven negative conditions, being Wound, Poison, Immobilize, Disarm, Stun, Muddle and Curse, plus five positive ones. There is no sticky condition in this game, in either edition.

The word sticky appears zero times in the 74 page Second Edition rulebook. It appears exactly twice in the First Edition rulebook and both times it is flavour text about stumbling into a thicket filled with sticky spines. It appears zero times in the official FAQ. If you have read a Gloomhaven guide that tells you to make conditions stick, that rule was imported from a different game. Here is the real list.

Negative conditions, all of which can be removed voluntarily at the end of the next turn by spending a specific ability:

• Wound is 1 damage at the start of each of your turns, removed when healed.
• Poison is 1 damage at the start of each of your turns, and unlike Wound it stops the heal that would clear it.
• Immobilize stops you using any move ability.
• Disarm stops you using any attack ability.
• Stun stops you using any ability or item at all, and at the start of the round a stunned character still has to select two cards or declare a long rest, but those cards are discarded with no effect and stun is not removed by anything that happens before the end of their turn.
• Muddle is disadvantage on all of your attacks, and the disadvantage is fixed before the end of your next turn.
• Curse shuffles a curse card into your deck. There are 10 curse cards with the light icon, which can go in character, monster and ally decks, and 10 with the dark icon, which can only go in a monster deck. A curse drawn as a modifier acts as a 0 and returns to the supply rather than the discard pile.

Positive conditions are Safeguard, Ward, Invisible, Strengthen and Bless. Two of them are worth knowing cold. Ward halves damage from any source, rounded down, and is then removed, so one Ward is a one hit shield on a big hitter. Bless makes you shuffle a bless card into your deck; there are 10 of them, and a bless card drawn is a permanent 2x for that attack.

One structural rule that catches people: a figure can only hold one of each condition, and if a condition is applied and the figure already has it, the effect resolves and the duration resets rather than stacking.

Exhaustion Removes Your Character From the Game

There are only two ways to become exhausted: drop to zero hit points, or start a round with fewer than two cards in hand and fewer than two in the discard pile. When you exhaust, your figure is removed from the map and you are out of the scenario.

There is no Exhausted card and no skip a turn penalty in the Second Edition. That was a First Edition mechanic, and a lot of online advice still describes it. What actually happens is worse for you. All of your ability cards, including summons and any other cards in your active area, go to your discard pile, your figure is removed from the map, and you cannot participate in the scenario in any way. Exhaustion does not reduce the number of characters in the scenario, so the party keeps playing at a disadvantage. If every character exhausts, the scenario is lost.

The two ways in are printed on page 36 and there is no third. Drop to zero, or find yourself with nothing to play. That second one is the interesting one, because it makes resting a defensive act rather than a chore.

Resting is how you get cards back. A short rest is allowed during the End of Round step and costs one random card from your discard pile returning to your hand. A long rest is declared during card selection, costs initiative 99 for the whole round so you go last, and makes you lose one card of your choice from your discard pile, which is mandatory, then optionally Heal 2 yourself, then optionally recover all your spent items.

There is one more piece of card economy worth knowing, because it is printed on page 36 and no review mentions it. Cards without a lost icon sitting in your active area count as being in your discard pile for resting purposes, and they do not have to be returned to your hand when you rest. That is how summoning characters and characters with permanent board pieces keep their value engine alive.

There Is No Retreat Ability in Gloomhaven

Gloomhaven has no Retreat ability, in either edition. What backs you out of a fight is Push and Pull, Jump, Teleport, or an escape hex, and none of them is called retreat.

The word retreat appears twice in each rulebook and every occurrence is flavour text about a guard watching somebody back away. The real movement rules are on page 22 and page 30, and the honest version is friendlier than the myth. You can move back the way you came, because there is no printed rule forbidding you to reenter a hex you already used. The printed restrictions are: figures can move through allies but not through enemies, obstacles, objectives or walls; a figure must always end its movement in an unoccupied hex; and unspent movement points are lost at the end of the move ability. That last one is the real constraint, since a two move ability followed by a one move ability does not leave you a spare point to correct a mistake.

The four ways to actually disengage are all real and all named:

• Jump is an added effect on a move ability that lets you ignore enemies, obstacles, objectives, traps and hazardous terrain for every hex except the last one.
• Flying is an active bonus that ignores all of the above including the last hex, with the carve out that a flying figure still cannot end its movement in an occupied hex.
• Teleport takes you to any hex within range, ignoring everything between, and is not considered movement at all, so walls do not block it and a teleport can be a legal way to cross a locked room.
• Push and Pull are the only forced movement in the game, and they follow all normal movement rules for the target.

And in a handful of scenarios there are escape hexes drawn on the map, which is a completely separate rule: if a character ends their turn in an escape hex they may escape, and that figure is then removed from the map along with their summons and tokens. An escaped character cannot participate in the scenario in any way, which is not quite exhaustion because you keep your experience and gold.

Setting Up a Scenario: The Fifteen Printed Steps

The old page said setup takes 45 minutes and never gave a single step. Here is the actual sequence, in the printed order, because the order matters in two specific places.

1. Choose which scenario to play, open the scenario book to the scenario entry, and keep the section book nearby. You can only play a scenario that has been unlocked and whose requirements you meet.
2. Resolve a road event if one is called for.
3. Set out all map tiles for the scenario from the map layout.
4. Retrieve the ability deck, stat card, standees and initiative order token for every monster in the scenario key, and shuffle the ability decks and insert the stat cards into stat sleeves so only the relevant stats show.
5. Retrieve all overlay tiles shown in the scenario key.
6. Set up the first room as depicted in the main floor of the scenario entry.
7. Retrieve and shuffle the attack modifier decks: your character decks, the monster deck, the ally deck if there are scenario allies, and the additional yellow, purple and light attack modifier cards.
8. Read the scenario goals, the introduction and the special rules.
9. Deal three battle goals to each character and keep one. The other two are secret from you and from every other character until the scenario is over.
10. Put the token tray nearby.
11. Place the six element tokens in the inert column of the element board.
12. Decide which items each character brings from their pool and apply any negative and start of scenario effects.
13. Decide which ability cards to bring, selecting a number of cards equal to your hand size as printed on your character mat, and put them in your hand.
14. Set each red hit point dial to the maximum printed at the bottom of the character mat, and each blue experience dial to zero.
15. Apply any road event effects and scenario effects.

My own setup number, which is not a rule: 25 to 35 minutes at our table for a 4 character party, and closer to 20 if the box has been repacked since last week. The bottleneck is stat cards, not tiles. There are 47 monster stat sheets and 67 stat sleeves in the box, and inserting each one the right way round is the part that eats the evening. This is the argument for the Gloomhaven Map Tile Archive, which is the one accessory I would call essential.

Monster Selection, Normal and Hard Difficulty, and What the Scenario Book Decides

There is no monster selection step, and there are no Normal and Hard difficulty settings. Both of those are First Edition ideas, and both get their own answer because people still ask.

Monsters are chosen by the scenario entry, not by you. The scenario key on the map layout shows you every monster and overlay tile the scenario needs for the whole scenario, not just the opening room. One printed warning is genuinely useful: some monsters in a scenario key are only set up if you have earned the matching City Rule global achievement, or if you sided with that faction for that specific scenario. Named monsters go in red bases, are not normal or elite, are unaffected by abilities that target those ranks, and act before elites of the same type. Bosses go in red bases, use a different stat card and their own boss ability deck, and their stat card C value is the number of characters in the scenario. The only place monsters are picked at random is the printed Random Dungeons variant, where a random room card and a random setup card generate three rooms that must be cleared in three rounds.

Difficulty is a single number called the Scenario Level, and it runs from 0 to 7. The recommended level is the average level of your characters divided by 2, rounded up, so a party of four level 4 characters is level 2. Before any scenario starts you may set the level to any number from 0 to 7, and the rulebook says plainly that lowering it can help a struggling party while raising it keeps the game challenging as the party grows. One scenario level is the recommended level, and one above it is a genuine step up. The name Normal and the name Hard do not appear in the Second Edition rulebook at all; they were First Edition tiers, along with Easy and Very Hard.

Scenario level	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
Monster level	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
Gold conversion	2	2	3	3	4	4	5	6
Trap damage	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
Hazardous terrain	1	2	2	2	3	3	3	4
Bonus experience	4	6	8	10	12	14	16	18

The Tracking Sheet: What the Campaign Sheet Actually Holds

The old page never described the sheet you write on, which is a shame, because the campaign sheet is where most of the game’s decisions get made.

The party keeps one Campaign Sheet, and only one campaign can be in progress at a time. It holds:

• Three faction reputation tracks, for Demons, the Merchant’s Guild and Military. The maximum with any faction is 12, anything above 12 is lost, and you can never have less than -10 with any faction. There are additional reputation sections at 6, 9, 16 and 20, and the first time you reach each of those levels you read the corresponding section immediately. This is the real replacement for the old page claim that low reputation locks you out of questlines.
• Inspiration Value, which the party adjusts when it receives inspiration. Completing a scenario grants inspiration equal to 4 minus the number of characters.
• The Prosperity Track, which sets the maximum starting level for new characters and the items available to buy. Every time a numbered box is marked, prosperity goes up and new items are added, and the previous boxes are never erased. Every fifth box on the Temple of the Great Oak Track is 1 prosperity.
• The Imbuement Track, which you are told to ignore until the game tells you to use it.
• The Retirement Table, where retired characters are recorded, and which sets how many bonus perk marks a newly created character gets.
• Classes Unlocked, a record of which classes exist in your campaign.

Each character also has a Character Sheet with class, name, level and experience, gold, notes, two masteries, a checkmark track up to 18, and a list of perks. Gold cannot be transferred between characters, which is a small rule with a large effect on how you spend a Downtime.

There is also a Map Board, and it is the one piece that really is persistent. When a scenario unlocks, you take its sticker from the matching flowchart window and stick it on the board at the printed coordinates. When you complete a scenario, you tick the checkbox on its sticker. Global achievements get their own sticker on the matching space at the top of the board.

Scenario Chaining and How the Campaign Actually Moves

Scenarios are chained three ways: Section Links read the section book the moment a condition is met, force-linked scenarios must be played immediately and skip the city, and the scenario flowchart tracks which scenario unlocks which.

Every scenario is self contained and played in a single sitting, and the campaign is a series of them. The Scenario Phase has exactly three steps: Beginning a Scenario, Playing a Scenario, and Ending a Scenario. The chaining lives in the scenario book itself.

• Section Links sit at the bottom of each scenario entry. Green means opened, red means locked. When the condition on a link is met, you read the specified section in the section book straight away, and the rulebook says section links are read immediately even if it interrupts an ability mid resolution.
• Scenario chains are shown on the flowchart as a coloured bar under the scenario name, telling you which chain that scenario is part of, with arrows showing how scenarios connect.
• Lockout stickers. Some unlocked scenarios get locked again during the campaign, and you find them by affixing a red lockout sticker to the flowchart window, which is how the campaign narrows instead of just widening.
• Force-linked scenarios are marked with a printed red bar. If one is force-linked to the scenario you just completed, you must play it immediately and you skip the City Phase. If this was the first time you played that scenario, all its scenario links are ignored and you go back to the city instead.

Ending a completed scenario is six printed steps, and two of them are commonly missed. You collect your battle goal checkmarks, you gain one perk mark per new mastery, you read the conclusion section, you gain scenario rewards, you gain inspiration, and you update the map. Scenario rewards can be gained only once per campaign, so replaying a completed scenario is for mastery, not for loot. The last point worth memorising: even an exhausted character keeps everything if the scenario is completed. They still get their battle goal, their masteries, the scenario rewards, and all the experience, gold and loot they picked up. Exhaustion only really hurts you when you lose.

And after a lost scenario you choose one of two things. Return to Gloomhaven, keeping all experience, gold and treasure, resolving a road event if one is called for, then you can immediately replay the same scenario. Or replay it, keeping everything, but the City Phase does not happen and no road event is resolved.

Playing Gloomhaven With Two Players or Alone

There is no printed two player ruleset. The words two players and two player appear zero times in the Second Edition rulebook, zero times in the First Edition rulebook, and zero times in the official FAQ. What actually changes at two players is party size, and party size flows into everything: the monster counts in the scenario key, the C by H scaling equations for elites and named monsters, the battle goal difficulty, and the fact that each character has to cover twice the tactical ground.

The old page called two players the sweet spot. For most groups I would now say three, because two characters means every exhaustion is half your party and every retirement is a third of your power. But if two is all you have, nothing in the rules stops you and nothing in the rules makes it easier.

Solo play is a printed mode and it comes with a real difficulty rule the old page never mentioned. One person controls two or more characters, and solo reduces uncertainty and makes coordination easier at the cost of a harder scenario level: take the average level of all characters, add 1, then divide by 2 and round up. The rulebook works it through, being that four level 4 characters in solo is level 3 where the same party with four human players is level 2. That is a full step of difficulty for playing alone, and it is the reason solo Gloomhaven is a real commitment rather than a relaxing one. It is also the reason our best solo board games guide treats Gloomhaven as a different category from everything else on it.

There is one more variant worth knowing because it fixes the thing solo players complain about most. Open Information lets a party that wants fewer restrictions share exactly which cards they have in hand and discuss specific details of their plans during card selection. The rulebook says this is not the recommended way to play, that some parties prefer it anyway, and that it reduces uncertainty and makes coordination easier while decreasing the difficulty. My group uses it for teaching and hates it for campaigns, which I suspect is the most common reaction.

Our House Strategy, Not Official Rules

None of this is in the rulebook. It is what works at our table.

• Count your deck before you count the monsters. Six cards, and I will happily lose a scenario to remove a -1.
• Buy enhancements early, not late. A Circle mark with a wild element on a big attack is worth more than almost any item at the same price, and enhancement costs scale with your prosperity.
• Set the scenario level one below recommended for your first eight scenarios. You are learning the card language, not being tested on it.
• Long rest early and often in the first scenario of a session. Going last with one card back and a Heal 2 is a real heal for the whole party.
• Read the scenario special rules out loud to everyone, including the section links. Half the losses in a new campaign are setup mistakes, and the special rules are printed in a box on the entry.

Is Gloomhaven Worth It? The Verdict

Yes, if you will play it 100 times with adults who like tactical card play. The publisher says around 300 hours for a full campaign, which is roughly three years of one evening a week.

Here is the arithmetic I actually use. The Second Edition is $199.99 at the publisher on sale, and a 2 hour scenario is about the length of a good film. Ten plays takes a committed group roughly six months of twice monthly sessions, and that is a very cheap evening. Two plays is $100 an evening, which is the price of a decent dinner with the wine included, and at that point you should have started with Jaws of the Lion at $59.99 instead.

The honest case for it is not the components, though the components are extraordinary: 185 tiles, 236 monster standees, 232 monster ability cards, 457 attack modifier cards, 47 stat cards, 250 plus miniatures and 18 character miniatures, all in a box that will not fit on a normal shelf. The case for it is that Gloomhaven is one of about eight games in the history of the hobby to be rated number one on BoardGameGeek, it has been there for years, and the Second Edition is the first time the designer has had the feedback of eight years to fix it. When Isaac Childres rereleased it, he said in so many words that he was not sure anyone would call the original perfect.

Who it is for, and who it is not:

• Buy it if you enjoy tactical card play, hand management, and the feeling of a plan that nearly worked.
• Buy it if you are willing to lose badly for the first ten scenarios. Every party does, and the campaign improves dramatically after.
• Start with Jaws of the Lion if you have never played it. It is a standalone prequel with 25 scenarios, 5 of which are a built in tutorial, and it costs a quarter of the big box.
• Skip it if you want dice, direct player conflict, or a game that finishes in an hour. None of those exist here.
• Skip it for a family game night. The box says 13 and up, and our guide to games for kids who dislike complex rules is the honest list of what to play instead. For a child who wants the dungeon without the campaign, our 5 Minute Dungeon review is a 20 minute cooperative crawl that a 7 year old can actually finish. For the moment when a Gloomhaven loss is genuinely hard to take, our guide to games for kids who flip the board is the more useful document.

If what you want is the same card driven tension in a fraction of the time, our Board Game Zero and the world of abstract games with no luck page is the honest alternative for hidden information games, and Parks strategy guide is the closest thing to Gloomhaven card play that fits in a family evening. For a long legacy campaign with a fraction of the rules, Sleeping Gods and U-Boot are both real and both smaller commitments than 300 hours. If the real pull is the dungeon rather than the campaign, Mage Knight and Adventure Land both do the dungeon without the 101 scenarios. Spirit Island solo and cooperative play is the better cooperative game if your group wants shared decisions rather than shared card timing, and Gaia Project is the pick if you want a campaign shaped game that resets cleanly. For a two person co-op that fits on a coffee table, Sky Team is the one I would hand you.

• Similarities: Campaign branching, persistent world state, and a party of specialists who unlock new roles over dozens of sessions. Both are legacy shaped and neither resets between games.
• Differences: Gloomhaven is a tactical card combat game with a 300 hour campaign and a 30 minute setup. Gaia Project is a card driven engine builder with no combat, a 60 minute session, and no permanent changes between games.
• Why this game fans will enjoy it: If Gloomhaven is the game you keep thinking about and never starting, Gaia Project is the version of a campaign shaped experience you will actually finish in an evening.

If your problem is getting four people into the same game rather than finding the right game, our best strategy board games for modern gamers page is the shortlist, and if your problem is that the table is full of people who never lose, our cooperative games for siblings who turn feuds into teamwork is the other conversation. For the wider list of heavy games that do the same job, our 17 best board games like Gloomhaven comparison is the one to read, and our board games for adults roundup covers the games that do not need a campaign at all. One last thing worth naming, because people ask constantly: Gloomhaven has no dice, and if randomness versus skill is a question you care about, our guide to randomness in tabletop games explains where the hidden variance actually lives. And for a family with a big age gap who wants the same genre on one table, our mixed age family game night guide is the realistic answer, because Gloomhaven at 13 and up does not include a 7 year old.

The Digital Edition Is a Different Game

You will see Gloomhaven on Steam and on consoles, and it is worth being precise because it is a common purchase mistake. The digital edition is a First Edition adaptation developed by Asmodee and Flaming Fowl, released for Windows in July 2019 and for macOS in November 2021. Its Campaign Mode is an accurate reproduction of the original board game campaign with 95 missions, and it adds Guildmaster Mode, a digital only campaign of 160 plus missions, plus downloadable Jaws of the Lion and Mercenary Challenges solo content. It is a good game and it is roughly one third of the price.

What it is not is the Second Edition. It does not contain the Second Edition rules, the Second Edition classes, the Second Edition items or the Second Edition scenarios, and no Second Edition content is planned for it as of this writing. If you want the physical campaign, you want the box. If you want to learn the card system cheaply before committing $200, the digital version is a genuinely good deal.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does a game of Gloomhaven take?

Each scenario takes 1 to 2+ hours according to the publisher product page, plus 25 to 35 minutes of setup at a 4 character table, which is my own measurement rather than a printed figure. The publisher says a full campaign is around 300+ hours.

How many players can play Gloomhaven?

One to four. The publisher product page lists 1 to 4 players. One person can play solo by controlling two or more characters, and solo increases the scenario level by one before it is divided by two.

What age is Gloomhaven for?

The publisher product page says 13 and up. The publisher blog post about the Second Edition says 14 and up, and Jaws of the Lion is listed at 14 and up by retailers. Treat it as a 13 and up game that is realistically an adults game.

Is Gloomhaven Second Edition different from the original?

Yes, and the differences are in the rules, not just the art. Exhaustion now removes your character from the scenario instead of giving you a skip turn card. Each character has their own attack modifier deck instead of sharing one. There are six elements instead of five. Battle Goals are a new system. Enhanced cards are gone, replaced by enhancement stickers. Difficulty is a Scenario Level from 0 to 7 with no named Normal or Hard tiers.

Do you lose the cards you do not play in Gloomhaven?

No. Unplayed cards stay in your hand for the whole scenario. The End of Round step has five printed operations and discarding unplayed cards is not one of them. Cards come back through resting, and cards in your active area with no lost icon count toward resting.

What happens when a character is exhausted in Gloomhaven?

Their ability cards go to the discard pile, their figure is removed from the map, and they cannot participate in the scenario at all. You become exhausted by dropping to zero hit points or by starting a round with fewer than two cards in hand and fewer than two in your discard pile. If every character exhausts, the scenario is lost.

Can you play Gloomhaven with 2 players?

Yes, and there is no special two player ruleset. The rulebook never uses the phrase. What changes is party size, which affects monster counts, elite and named monster scaling, and battle goals. Two characters also means an exhaustion or a retirement costs you far more than it would at four.

Is there a sticky condition in Gloomhaven?

No. There is no sticky condition in either edition. The 2025 rulebook does not contain the word, and the First Edition rulebook uses it only twice and only in flavour text about thorn bushes. The real negative conditions are Wound, Poison, Immobilize, Disarm, Stun, Muddle and Curse.

Is there a Retreat ability in Gloomhaven?

No. Both rulebooks use the word only in flavour text. To disengage you use Jump, Flying, Teleport, a Push or Pull, or an escape hex in a scenario that has one. There is also no rule forbidding you from moving back the way you came, so a retreat is legal if you have the movement points to do it.

Should I buy Gloomhaven or Jaws of the Lion?

Buy Jaws of the Lion first if you have never played Gloomhaven. It is a fully standalone prequel with 25 scenarios and 5 built in tutorials, and it costs about a quarter of the Second Edition. Buy the Second Edition when you have finished Jaws and want the full 101 scenario campaign.

Is Gloomhaven out of print?

No. The Second Edition is currently shipping and on sale at the publisher. The 2017 first edition is still available in the secondary market at steep discounts and is no longer in the publisher current catalogue, and Forgotten Circles and the Havoc bundle are also not listed there. The digital edition on Steam is a separate first edition adaptation.