by Iron Gates
Hey,So I started playing Gloomhaven and while it's a pretty cool game, I still like Descent better. Since GH is quite a time commitment I thought I'd give people on the fence my thoughts about the two games. Not really a review; just a little opinion piece.
Hard to Plan
In Descent your basic speed, weapons, and skills are always available. You can spend your actions and stamina on anything depending on what the game throws at you.
Gloomhaven works pretty differently. Every action comes from your constantly shrinking hand. Each round all the heroes have to choose two ability cards and then draw random AI cards for the enemies. Then the round plays itself out (faster moves go first). It just feels pretty restrictive to shoehorn myself to two cards before I know what the enemies are going to do. Once you draw the enemy cards the party can further plan how to combo their chosen cards (which admittedly is cool, like making a slow attack faster by comboing it with a faster card). But that initial layer of cutting out most of your options is off-putting to me.
It catches up to you in the long term, too. Since you keep drawing random AI cards, chances are you chucked out cards that you could have used now. It would be fine if the enemies behaved non-randomly, like in Mage Knight (for the most part), but it's just really hard to plan a current round or a series of rounds against what ends up being randomness anyway. I like Descent because you have a fixed amount of actions and stamina, but you can spend them on anything. Seems like a more enjoyable way to deal with random enemy actions.
Campaign
In Descent you can actually lose the campaign. You level up faster the better you do, and you have a finite number of quests/weeks, so if you flub up too many quests you might still be too weak to win the campaign. In GH the quests scale to your level and you can repeat quests to grind XP, so there's no threat of losing and less drive to level up. At least for me. I think character development is actually quite a bit better in GH, but I just prefer the possibility to lose in Descent. I don't like the character building in GH enough to play through the quests which contain features I described above that I don't enjoy much.
So yeah... those are my opinions. You might like GH if you want to really familiarize yourself with the enemy AI decks, or if you care more about a shared story than the threat of a loss, or if you really like the aspect of character leveling. But for me I think Descent is still the game of choice.