Ok so, the insert. I know starting a Gloomhaven review with the box insert sounds like a bit, but the thing genuinely dictates how this game lives in your house, every sticker’d sleeve slot has a job and if you skip organizing on day one you will pay for it every single session after. Mine took a full evening before we even opened a scenario book, and I don’t regret an hour of it.

Our group is running a party of three and a full scenario is landing us around four hours most sessions, which some weeks feels earned and some weeks feels like a grind, there’s a real tension in this game between “tedious setup, sometimes grindy mission design” as one reviewer put it and the genuine high of a scenario clicking into place. The card play system, deciding when to burn a powerful slow card versus a fast weak one, is the actual engine here and it stays interesting far longer than I expected a euro-adjacent dungeon crawler to. What surprised me is how little downtime there actually is between turns once everyone knows their deck, the early sessions dragged with people rereading their hands, but four or five scenarios in it moves.

I will say the expansion dependency conversation around this game online undersells how complete the core box already is, you do not need Frosthaven or Jaws of the Lion sitting on your shelf to get a hundred-plus hours out of this, though I understand the appeal for people who’ve burned through it. Two-player felt noticeably different from three, tighter, more room for a single bad monster AI draw to swing a fight, worth knowing going in if that’s your usual table size.

Four stars, not five, because the opening scenario’s difficulty spike nearly lost a player in our group before the game had earned any goodwill yet. It gets so much better once it trusts you a little more.