Overview
At a glance
Is this game right for my group?
ABG editorial scores on a 1–5 scale.
Harder to teach
High replayability
Highly interactive
Scales well
Deep strategy
How it plays
How does it play?
Description from the publisher: Founders of Gloomhaven is a competitive tile-placement, action-selection, city-building game in which each player controls a fantastical race working to build the city of Gloomhaven and gain influence over its residents.
Core mechanisms
Key systems that shape the decisions players make.
Auction/Bidding
Bid against other players to determine who receives an item, action, or priority.
Action Retrieval
Previously used actions must be recovered before they can be selected again.
Deck / Bag Building
Add new pieces during play to improve the cards, tokens, or dice drawn later.
Hand Management
Time and sequence a limited hand of cards to preserve future options.
Follow
Choose whether to perform a reduced version of another player’s selected action.
Read the full game description
Description from the publisher: Founders of Gloomhaven is a competitive tile-placement, action-selection, city-building game in which each player controls a fantastical race working to build the city of Gloomhaven and gain influence over its residents. This is a standalone game set in the same universe as Gloomhaven. The events, however, take place hundreds of years before Gloomhaven and depict the original construction of the city. In Founders of Gloomhaven, players use action cards to place resource buildings on the map of the city, use these resources to create more advanced resources, then deliver them to proposed building sites to earn prestige. An individual player, however, cannot do everything on their own because they can import only a small number of resource types, depending on their race. To create more advanced resources, they have to work with other players. The game also features an auction mechanism in which players vote periodically to determine which new building proposals come out and where they are placed on the board. Players can also add the influence they've gathered to increase the strength of their vote.