Founders of Gloomhaven is a competitive tile-placement, hand management, city-building game where each player controls a fantastical race working to build the city of Gloomhaven and gain influence over its residents. This is a stand-alone 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 will use card-driven actions to place resource buildings on the map of the city, use these resources to create more advanced resources, and then deliver them to proposed building sites to earn influence. An individual player, however, cannot do everything on their own, because they can only import a small number of resource types, depending on their race. To create more advanced resources, they will have to work with other players.

The game also features an auction mechanic where players will vote to determine what new building proposals come out and where they are placed on the board. These votes will determine which scoring opportunities are made available on the board and can drastically change the course of the game.

Gloomhaven is a game of Euro-inspired tactical combat in a persistent world of shifting motives. Players will take on the role of a wandering adventurer with their own special set of skills and their own reasons for travelling to this dark corner of the world. Players must work together out of necessity to clear out menacing dungeons and forgotten ruins. In the process they will enhance their abilities with experience and loot, discover new locations to explore and plunder, and expand an ever-branching story fueled by the decisions they make.

This is a legacy game with a persistent and changing world that is ideally played over many game sessions. After a scenario, players will make decisions on what to do, which will determine how the story continues, kind of like a ?Choose Your Own Adventure? book. Playing through a scenario is a cooperative affair where players will fight against automated monsters using an innovative card system to determine the order of play and what a player does on their turn.

Essentially, every turn a player will play two cards out of their hand. Each card has a number at the top, and the number on the first card played will determine their initiative order. Each card also has a top and bottom power, and when it is a player?s turn in the initiative order, they determine whether to use the top power of one card and the bottom power of the other, or vice-versa. Players must be careful, though, because over time they will permanently lose cards from their hands. If they take too long to clear a dungeon, they may end up exhausted and be forced to retreat.

Gloomhaven: Forgotten Circles, the first expansion for Gloomhaven, features twenty new scenarios that take place after the events of the original Gloomhaven campaign and involve one new character class ? the Aesther Diviner ? and her attempts to prevent an approaching calamity. The accompanying scenario book breaks these scenarios up across multiple pages to create more dynamic and surprising encounters.

The expansion also features seven new monster types (including three new bosses) and fourteen new items.