The premise alone got me, a hero shrunk down to button-sized and dropped into a miniature Gloomhaven adventure that fits in a box small enough to take camping. I brought it to work in my truck for a couple of slow week stretches and that portability really is the whole pitch delivered honestly, it’s Gloomhaven’s system compressed into something you can actually carry, and that’s a genuinely hard thing to pull off given how sprawling the original is.
Where it lost points for me is the rulebook. It’s an adaptation of a much larger, more complex game, and that shows in how the manual handles edge cases, thin where the base game’s book is thorough, and my group ended up making a few calls we weren’t fully confident in more than once. First scenario as tutorial is a rough entry point too, mine was a little underwhelming and fairly easy to bounce off of if you don’t already know the bigger game’s rhythm going in. Once you’re through the opening stretch and the rules click, it opens up, but that first hour asks for patience I didn’t expect to need from something this small.
Difficulty swings hard in the back half, several scenarios lean on close to perfect rolls and card sequencing, and losing a card to the “lost” pile because your turn count runs too low stings more here than it does in the full-sized game, since there’s less room to recover. I don’t regret owning it, it’s genuinely impressive what they fit into this box, and the theme lands, it does feel like Gloomhaven shrunk down rather than a cheap knockoff wearing its name. But I reach for the full game over this one more often than not when I actually have table time, which tells you where the ceiling is here even with real affection for what it’s doing.