Gloomhaven is arguably the most widely acclaimed hobby board game of the past decade. This digital edition fully recreates the expansive campaign of Gloomhaven and adds an all-new second mode, Guild Master, and online multiplayer: nothing is left behind from the tabletop gaming experience. It is impossible to replicate the magic of playing around a table, but by designing the game to work on-screen, it offers something that a boxed board game never could. Nevertheless, occasional performance lapses, few quality-of-life features, and a smattering of bugs have hampered Gloomhaven.

The game is a dungeon crawler, a story of fantasy and adventure told by a Scottish narrator, with tactical missions that guide the adventurer through a series of rooms and monsters to accomplish fairly simple objectives. In between every quest, you "choose your own adventure," and the decisions you make will give you bonuses and penalties for the entire campaign and the next adventure. Scriptwriting is not my strong suit. This is by no means "Baldur's Gate," but the voiced narration adds meat to the bones of these stories. The simple campaign mode is enough of a fantasy epic to keep you going night after night as you build up the town of Gloomhaven and watch adventurers level up, retire, and be replaced by new blood.

Guildmaster mode is new to Gloomhaven and tempts even tabletop veterans, as is the built-in level designer and mod support. While it is fun to play with friends, Guild Master is a mode designed for a solo experience of everything Gloomhaven has to offer. There are no voices and the story is fairly loose, but it has its advantages: characters never retire, so you can tweak them as much as you want, and the scenarios are randomized, so you can literally crawl through the same settings over and over again without having to replay the same You can. Both modes can be played with one to four adventurers, or with up to three adventurers, one at a time.

Dungeons are card-based tactical battles with a flexible system that allows each adventurer to select two cards per turn and perform actions from the top half of one card and the bottom half of the other. Monster attacks are simple and there is no complex AI, but each round is planned in advance, so you never know what the monster will do until you have finalized your choices. Each card also has a numerical value called initiative, which is the timing of the action for that round. Oddly enough, the AI often takes quite some time after you make a move before it decides to act.

Thus, in a given round, your tinker might choose stun shot on initiative 20, which is a long-range stun attack on top and a 4-space move on the bottom, and flamethrower, which is a combustion weapon with a range of effect on top and a shield aura on the bottom. The combo of these two cards can produce two very different turns: either rush in and sear the enemy, or fire a stun shot at a tough enemy and provide a defensive buff to a nearby ally. When cards are used, they are either discarded or burned. Burned cards leave the game for the remainder of the adventure, and discarded cards eventually return to your hand, but at the cost of being burned forever. If the player runs out of cards in hand or strength, he is out of combat for the remainder of that mission.

Because of these fairly simple rules, the battle becomes a series of tough tactical choices and tight time limits. Missions are difficult, and even on easy difficulty, tactical veterans are beaten to a pulp. It may feel good to burn a powerful ability early on, but what if it's the power you need to get the loot or take out the last few enemies quickly" This is one of the best tactical plays in gaming, and also the most fun and difficult choice in dungeon crawlers. If that's not enough, there are 17 playable classes with their own unique mechanics and decks.

Inexplicably, Gloomhaven has no undo button. Mistakes that should be easy to fix, such as shifting one hex, selecting the wrong ability, or misclicking to pass an ability, cannot be undone. Misunderstanding the rules is extremely frustrating, and there is no comprehensive rulebook on the menu. It is downright bizarre to have to consult a tabletop rulebook to understand the mechanics: when is my character's battle deck shuffled? When is my character's battle deck shuffled?

Despite this, the campaign is a lot of fun with friends and much faster than a boxed game. If you play 4 hours at the table, you can play one dungeon and the encounters before and after. If you play 4 hours in the digital campaign, the fastest players can enter as many as 3 dungeons. If, like me, you like tactical play and are happy to let the computer handle the details, Gloomhaven's wildly narrated adventure is exactly what you want from the genre. This is exactly what a good tabletop game adaptation should have: a reason to play this rather than sit around a table.