Co-op dungeon crawling board game Gloomhaven has made the hop to PC today, though it’ll be a while yet until it’s really comparable to its giant-boxed physical counterpart. Today’s early access version lacks multiplayer or the campaign from the tabletop edition, and instead repackages the game into a solo roguelike experience. Developers Flaming Fowl say that all the missing bits are still coming, but won’t all be there until next year. Still, I can’t deny that this is a very pretty adaptation, and likely far easier to set up and play. Below, a rather dramatic debut trailer.
Asmodee Digital's video game adaptation of critically acclaimed dungeon crawler board game Gloomhaven will be entering Steam Early Access next week, on Wednesday 17th July.
The original Gloomhaven, by designer Isaac Childres, was enormously well received when it released in 2017, and has been hovering near the top of BoardGameGeek's Hotness chart ever since. It's a richly designed experience that employs a staggeringly flexible RPG system, featuring a vast array of characters, items, and scenarios (which account for the game's 1,500+ cards) that slowly unlock across a campaign that can last well over a hundred hours.
Asmodee's video game adaptation is interesting for a number of reasons. Quite aside from the fact that it'll be considerably cheaper than its 100+ physical version, and less fiddly (I'm still sleeving those damn cards, six months after I bought it), Asmodee, with assistance from Childres, has opted to create a brand-new experience, inspired by Gloomhaven's theme and mechanics, rather than delivering an exact digital replica of the original.
Gloomhaven, the board game with the intimidatingly large box, is headed to PC in just a few weeks. Kinda. The PC adaptation by Flaming Fowl Studios sounds like it’s going to be a very different beast to the tabletop edition. If early developer comments are to be believed, the version entering early access on July 17th will be a purely single player experience – a tactical rogue-like dungeon crawl with randomly generated dungeons. Still, they plan on adding multiplayer later, and it’s nice-looking too, with some neat comic-styled shading on its 3D models. See them in motion below.