Communication - Teamwork makes the dream work

Gloomhaven is harsh. Being able to work as a team will often make the difference between survival and failure. Good team work means good communication. This post we'll cover ways to improve your team coordination so you can make it to the end of the scenario in one piece.

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Initiative  

The first thing you and your party want to sort out is how you communicate initiative. Which order your party acts is critical, especially for characters that depend on each other for magic or for healing. Here's a few useful tips:

• Low initiative in Gloomhaven means the opposite of what it does in Dungeons & Dragons. If you have DnD players in your group, avoid using "High/Low" to describe your initiative, and use "Fast/Slow" instead. 
• Learning where different classes typically sit in the initiative band will help temper your expectations. "Fast for a Cragheart" is not the same as "Fast for a Scoundrel".  
• There's a chart here if you want to be gamey about communicating initiative, u/SgtAngua has a useful chart.
• Which order your characters activate in is more important to communicate to your team in certain circumstances and less important in others.  Maybe you're generating a fire element the Spellweaver needs to use, so you absolutely need to make sure you activate first.  Trying to heal a teammate near you? Make sure they go after you or else they'll go charging into battle before you can heal them. 
• On the flip side, sometimes what order your party acts doesn't matter. If it's not important, you might even be better off not communicating your initiative with your team. It avoids burdening your team with information overload. Which brings me too...

Sometimes less is more...

Your party will develop their own way to communicate their intent. There's some ground rules so lets review Pg 17 of the rulebook first:

Players should not show other players the cards in their hands nor give specific information about any numerical value or title on any of their cards. They are, however, allowed to make general statements about their actions for the round and discuss strategy.

So as long as we steer clear of specific card names and numbers we're playing Gloomhaven properly. I actually would like to suggest that sometimes less is more. If you over-communicate you may end up flooding your teammates with more information than necessary, which can lead to confusion or bad decisions. At first our party used to communicate like this:

"I'm making a big attack on Living Bones number 4 and moving towards the next door. Is anyone going to kill this one too? should I change targets? I'm going slightly faster than average speed. I will generate Fire Element, does anyone need it? If so please go slow!... WAIT don't flip the cards yet, who's going to finish off Living bones 2 this round? I don't want to take hits"

Now imagine that not only 1 player is doing this, but all 4 party members. That's a lot of noise! After a number of games, we learnt to streamline this and just focus on communicating the important parts of intent. It's a skill to filter down only the key pieces of information. Lets take what we had above and shorten it. 

Going to try kill Living Bones 4. Generating fire element. 

So if someone cares about the Fire Element they can speak up and we can mention our speed then. We only need to tell our team what we're trying to do. Everyone knows it's not guaranteed that we kill the Living Bones, as you can flip a null damage card, but they know you're going to try.  Regarding movement, we can decide how to move once we see our teammates cards, it's not something we need to commit to at this stage and so we don't need to share that with our teammates. 

The game becomes less chaotic and you can focus on more the tactics once you reduce the noise.

Magic / Elemental Infusions

Most characters have a way of interacting with Magic, but there's a huge difference in how interactive these characters are. All of the starting characters have early cards that interact with some elements. Scoundrel (Night), Mindthief  (Ice, Dark), Brute (Air, Earth), Tinkerer (Earth, Fire, Dark),  Spellweaver (All elements) and Cragheart (Earth, Air). However, the depth and how dependent each character is on the 6 Magic elements varies greatly. 

A quick overview of the starting characters and their Magical affiliations.

• Cragheart - Multiple cards generate and depend on Earth magic to be powerful and gain XP. Can generate Air. 
• Scoundrel - Can utilize Dark via Sinister Opportunity, but Scoundrel is not dependent on magic to be effective. 
• Mindthief - Can leverage Ice to stun enemies, uses dark for minor curse effect. Cold magic makes Mindtheif notably better, but Mindthief is able to still be effective without magic.
• Tinkerer - Generates Fire, Earth & Dark on it's starting cards. Tinkerer is not dependent on magic to be effective.
• Brute - Can generate Earth and Air, and utilize Air via Skewer, but Brute is not dependent on magic to be effective. 
• Spellweaver - Dependent on magic in general. Her main early game cards consume Fire, Ice & Air. Mana bolt and Frost Armor can consume any element available, and become more deadly when they do.

We already covered magic in a previous post, but for the sake of teamwork it's important to understand what your party members generate, and what they need. For example, if you're playing a Spellweaver and you are thinking of consuming that Earth element to power your Mana bolt, maybe you should check with your Cragheart first. The Earth element is usually crucial to the Cragheart's gameplan after all. What about consuming the Air magic while a Brute is in your party? Well that can usually be forgiven,as the Brute is perfectly capable of smacking enemies, with or without the Air element present.       

Mmaybe next time you're about to fire that Toxic Bolt, let your Cragheart know you'll be creating an Earth element this round. They'll be so much happier for it. 

Crowd control

What is crowd control (aka CC)? Crowd control refers to your abilities that reduce the number of enemies you actively fight in a round. Good crowd control is part of good team work, and Gloomhaven rewards good crowd control. Simply put, preventing damage through crowd control is more effective than healing through damage. Some examples of crowd control:

• Stunning or disarming enemies to prevent them from fighting.
• Becoming invisible to block enemies and force them to take a longer route to engage your party. 
• Immobilizing enemies so they can't move into attack range, particularly effective against melee enemies.
• Pushing slow enemies out of range.
• Creating Obstacles or Traps to funnel, block or slow down enemies.
• Pulling weaker enemies next to you to block strong melee enemies from engaging. 

For this article, we will cover the surface of crowd control. In a future post we will go into crowd control in more detail. 

Imagine the following situation. There's 4 Living Bones and 1 Archer. 

You're the Mindtheif. Each of your teammates tell you they are going early and doing the following.

• Scoundrel: Making a move and attempting to kill one of the enemies adjacent to Brute.
• Tinkerer:  Ranged stun and moving.
• Brute: Going to disarm a skeleton.  Not moving.

These are the cards in your hand.

While we think about what actions we might do to minimize incoming attacks, lets go over our teammates. 

The Scoundrel and the Brute are fairly straightforward. The scoundrel plays the following 2 cards. She's going to move and poison someone with Special Mixture (Bottom) and then Flanking Strike (Top) for Attack 6 (3 base + 2 for adjacent ally bonus, +1 for poison) against one of the Living Bones.

The brute plays Provoking Roar (Top) for the disarm and Spare Dagger (bottom) for the extra attack. 

The scoundrel will act first and can kill either Living Bones 1 or 2. The brute will disarm the other one.

The choice of whether to kill Living bones 1 or 2 will determine how likely you are to get hit by Living Bones number 3. 

If we killed living Bones 2 and disarmed Living bones 1. When it comes to the Living Bones turn to activate, they will likely perform a Move and Attack action. Lets say this time they flip Move 2. Living Bones number 3 would move in and attack the Scoundrel (Earliest initiative).  Not good.

What about if we switched it around? Living Bones 3 would not be able to get into attacking range with a Move 2. If the skeleton flipped a Move 3,we'd be in trouble, but this is still the better option. Anything to make it harder for enemies to hit us is good. The scoundrel is better off killing Living bones 1 and letting the Brute disarm Living Bones 2.

There's 2 remaining threats. Living Bones 4 and Archer 5. The Tinkerer's cards are Stun shot (Top) and Potent Potables (Bottom). The tinkerer's plan is to Stun one of the remaining active enemies. 

There's no way we could realistically kill the Archer or the Living Bones this turn as Stun shot doesn't hit very hard. We could instead, try to displace the Living Bones so they can't harm us.  

In this example we can push Living Bones 4 and Tinkerer can walk up and stun the Archer. In this specific example we've used crowd control and careful targeting to avoid taking any hits this round. 

Sorry if this diagram hurts your eyes :(

If we had tried to attack the Archer instead, we would have a low chance of killing it. The Tinkerer may have instead stunned Living Bones 4 and the Archer would likely still get a shot off.

This is alot to take in. The best way to learn is just play more games. You'll eventually learn how each character works, and coordinate your stuns, disarms and other crowd control effects. Let me know in the comments what you'd like to see next and I'll try to work in some content.