Gloomhaven: The Board Game, the Rules and the Boxes

What the Gloomhaven board game is

Gloomhaven is a cooperative campaign game. You and up to three friends play mercenaries working out of a fantasy city. You take jobs, walk into a dungeon or a forest or a sewer, fight the monsters there, and come home with gold, experience and a slightly worse reputation than you left with. Then you do it again, and the story moves on.

Three things set it apart from most games in a closet:

• It's a campaign. Your choices open new scenarios and close others. Your character sheet carries over from night to night.
• It's cooperative. The players win or lose together against the scenario. There's no game master. The monsters run on their own decks of cards.
• There are no dice for attacks. Every character has a hand of ability cards, and each card has a top action and a bottom action. Picking which two cards to play each round is the game.

Here's the table version of the box facts, from the base game listing on Amazon US and Cephalofair's own product page:

• Players: 1 to 4 (listing and publisher agree)
• Ages: 14+ on the listing, 13+ on the publisher's page
• Play time: 60 to 120 minutes per scenario on the listing
• Mode: cooperative, with a solo mode marked on the listing
• Expansion: no, it's the base game

The current box on Cephalofair's site is the 2nd Edition. The publisher lists six starting classes: the Bruiser, Cragheart, Mindthief, Silent Knife, Spellweaver and Tinkerer. Its page also describes 12 more classes that open up during the campaign and counts 101 scenarios. That's not a weekend. That's a school year.

How Gloomhaven plays

The rules below are in my own words, from Cephalofair's Gloomhaven 2nd Edition rulebook, the PDF linked from the publisher's product page. The rulebook runs 74 pages and opens with a table of contents, which already puts it ahead of half the boxes in my house. I'm covering the shape of a scenario, not every keyword. For the rest, the PDF is free to read before you buy.

Before the first scenario

Each player picks one of the six starting classes and builds a character. The rulebook calls the classes low, medium or high complexity, so a new player can take the Bruiser and a veteran can take the Mindthief. Each class has its own deck of ability cards. Your hand size is set by your class, and that hand is your clock for the whole scenario.

Then you open the scenario book, lay out the map tiles it shows, and place the monsters for the first room. The scenario lists its goal and any special rules.

A round, step by step

Every scenario is played in rounds. Each round has four steps.

1. Card selection. Every player secretly picks two ability cards from their hand and lays them face down. One of the two is your initiative card. Instead of playing cards, a player with at least two cards in the discard pile can declare a long rest.
2. Ordering of initiative. Everyone reveals. Each monster group also flips one card from its own ability deck. Every card shows an initiative number, and turns go from lowest to highest. A long rest always goes at 99, dead last.
3. Character and monster turns. On your turn you use the top action of one card and the bottom action of the other. Tops tend to be attacks, bottoms tend to be movement, though plenty of cards break that habit. Monsters follow the card their group flipped.
4. End of round. Cleanup happens, and a player can take a short rest here.

I teach middle-school math, and initiative is the one rule in any game where my students would cheer. Low number goes first. Finally, a place where a small number wins.

What you can and can't say at the table

This is my favorite rule in the book, and the one new groups break first. You may talk strategy. You may not say the numbers or names on the cards in your hand. "I'm going to hit the archer late in the round" is fine. "I'm going at 17" is not. The rulebook gives examples of both kinds.

The rule makes the game feel like a real team that can't quite see each other's plans. It also makes the table quieter than you'd expect, because everyone is doing math in their heads and pretending they aren't.

Resting, losing cards and getting exhausted

Played cards go to your discard pile. To get them back, you rest:

• Short rest: at the end of a round, you lose one random card from your discard pile and take the rest back. If you don't like which card got lost, you can take 1 damage to lose a different random one, once per rest.
• Long rest: your whole turn, at initiative 99. You choose which discard to lose, heal 2, and recover spent items.

Either way, every rest costs you a card for good. Some powerful card actions also send the card to your lost pile right away. That's the clock. Your hand gets smaller as the scenario goes on, and you have to finish the job before it runs out.

A character becomes exhausted in one of two ways: their hit points hit zero, or they can't play two cards and can't rest at the start of a round. An exhausted character is out of that scenario. If every character is exhausted, the scenario is lost.

How a scenario ends

The scenario tells you the goal: clear the rooms, reach a spot, protect someone. Once the goal is met, or the loss condition happens, you finish the current round and then stop. If both happen in the same round, the rulebook says it counts as a loss. Tough but fair.

Win or lose, everyone keeps the experience and gold they picked up. Win, and you head back to town for the city phase: shopping, leveling up, story events. Lose, and the party chooses between heading back to town anyway or replaying the scenario right away.

There's no final score. The campaign is the long game, and each mercenary also has a personal quest that, once done, retires them and opens a new class.

Gloomhaven boxes on Amazon US right now

Our data for this page lists 6 Gloomhaven products on Amazon US as of October 2026, all from Cephalofair Games. The table above shows what each listing states. Where a listing leaves a field out, you'll see a dash. Here's what tells them apart.

The base game

Gloomhaven is listed at 1 to 4 players, 14+, 60 to 120 minutes, with a solo mode and marked as a base game, not an expansion. The listing title doesn't say which edition it is. Cephalofair's product page today sells the 2nd Edition, and Cephalofair sells a separate class upgrade pack too for 1st Edition owners. If edition matters to you, check the listing's photos and description before you buy.

Everything else on this page either needs a base game or is a separate, smaller game. So if you're new to Gloomhaven, this box is the decision. The rest can wait.

Forgotten Circles, a 1st Edition expansion

Gloomhaven: Forgotten Circles Expansion 1st Printing is listed at 1 to 4 players, 12+, with a solo mode, and it's marked as an expansion. Cephalofair's page is plain about the catch: Forgotten Circles is only compatible with Gloomhaven 1st Edition. It adds twenty scenarios that pick up after the main campaign, a new class called the Aesther Diviner, seven new monster types (three of them bosses) and fourteen items.

So this box is for one buyer: someone who already owns the 1st Edition base game and has worked through its campaign. If you have the 2nd Edition, or no Gloomhaven at all, skip it.

My one opinion for this page: read the free rulebook before you buy any expansion. Cephalofair links the 2nd Edition rulebook PDF from its product page. Twenty minutes with it will tell you if your group wants a 74-page game, and that's a cheaper answer than a box on the shelf.

Buttons & Bugs, the one-player version

Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs is listed at 1 player, 14+, with a solo mode, and it's not an expansion. It's a separate game. Cephalofair's page calls it a stand-alone single-player game that shrinks Gloomhaven down to a small footprint, with the same six starting mercenaries, 22 scenario cards with small battle maps, and 10 double-sided monster stat cards. The publisher's page lists 20 minutes and ages 10+. The Amazon listing says 14+, so go by the listing you're buying from.

This is the box for one person who wants the card play without the shelf space. It's also the box for someone who wants to find out if they like the system before committing to the big one. The full rulebook for it is online, per the publisher.

Three Mercenary Packs

The last three listings are Mercenary Packs, each named for one character:

• Mercenary Pack – Anaphi, Fallen Lion
• Mercenary Pack – Hail, Irritable Enchanter (listing says 2nd Edition)
• Mercenary Pack – Satha, Mayor of Frosthaven (listing says 2nd Edition)

The listings don't mark them as expansions and don't give players, ages or play time. Cephalofair's page for the Hail pack says each pack holds miniatures, card decks, class mats and sheets, a bonus scenario, an item card reward, and tokens and standees. The page doesn't name which base game the packs are built for. The Hail and Satha listings say 2nd Edition, so if your base box is the 1st Edition, check with the publisher before you buy.

These are add-ons for a group that's already deep into a campaign and wants a new character to play. They're not where anyone should start.

Who should skip Gloomhaven

Skip it if your group meets once a month and changes members every time. A campaign needs the same people coming back, and a scenario that runs 60 to 120 minutes on the listing doesn't leave much room for teaching a newcomer.

Skip it if your table is small. The 2nd Edition box lists 185 map tiles, 236 monster standees and 457 attack modifier cards on the publisher's page. That's a lot of cardboard to spread out, and a lot of cardboard to sort afterward.

Skip it if anyone at the table is under the listed age. The listing says 14+ and the reading load is real.

And skip it if your group loves the moment of rolling dice and shouting at them. Gloomhaven's attacks are cards. The drama is quieter: it's the moment you realize you have three cards left and the door is still four rooms away.

If one player in the house wants Gloomhaven and nobody else does, look at Buttons & Bugs. It's built for exactly that person.

If you like Gloomhaven, look at these

Pages chosen by what they share with Gloomhaven: cooperative play, a long game, or a dungeon to fight through.

• HeroQuest: a dungeon crawl for 2 to 5, with one player running the monsters
• Spirit Island: another cooperative strategy game for experienced groups
• Pandemic: cooperative, and much shorter, for a group that wants teamwork without a campaign
• Eldritch Horror: co-op adventure with a long play time
• Strategy board games: the wider shelf of heavier games

For the rest of the board-game shelf, see the board games section.

Pick two cards. Make them count.