Resting like a pro in Gloomhaven.

Everyone needs to rest from time to time, and that includes your Gloomhaven mercenary band too. Short resting lets you keep your momentum and keep fighting but at the cost of losing cards unpredictably. Long resting extends your exhaustion timer by 1 round, provides a small heal, lets you strategically choose cards to lose and refreshes your items.

Long resting is obviously preferable if you can afford to spend the turn doing so. But is the loss of momentum worth it? And with such dangerous enemies around you, how can you afford to long rest?

Scoundrel needs a nap

When can you rest?

You can only rest once you have at least 2 cards in your discard pile. Pg 17 of the rulebook:

The rest action can only be taken if a player has two or more cards in his or her discard pile, and a rest action always results in losing one of the discarded cards.

This means you can't simply rest, then immediately rest again to try exhaust yourself (for battle goals or personal quests). You need to play some cards and start filling your discard pile first.

Resting mechanics

Before we dive into when and why you might want to short rest vs long rest,  let's make sure we're all resting properly. New players often get Gloomhaven rules mixed up so lets get them out here.

Page 17 of the rulebook has all the resting rules

Short rest: During the cleanup step of a round, a player can perform a short rest. This allows that player to immediately shuffle his or her discard pile and randomly place one of the cards in the lost pile, then return the rest of the discarded cards to his or her hand. If the player would like to instead keep the card that was randomly lost, he or she can choose to suffer 1 damage and randomly lose a different discarded card, but this can only be done once per rest.  

Long rest: A long rest is declared during the card selection step of a round and constitutes the player’s entire turn for the round. Resting players are considered to have an initiative value of 99. On the player’s turn, at the end of the initiative order, he or she must choose to lose one of his or her discarded cards, then return the rest of the discarded cards to his or her hand. The resting character also performs a “Heal 2, Self” action and refreshes all of his or her spent item cards.

A very long rest

One rule that many new players miss is that when short resting you can change the card you randomly lose. Normally after short resting you lose a card at random. However, if you really really really wanted to keep the card that was selected, you can take 1 damage and lose a different card at random. This is key for characters such as the Spellweaver who has one specific card they never want to lose on a rest. 

Another rule that sometimes gets overlooked is long resting doesn't mean you "Skip a turn". You instead act at initiative 99. Why is this important? Well, if your character has a wound effect or has a summoned minion, those still activate! Any summons act before you do at initiative 99 and you still take the 1 damage if you have a wound effect active (Wound happens before you receive the heal 2 effect from the long rest). Any end of turn status effects such as invisibility, muddle or disarm will also be removed at the end of your long rest. Initiative 99 is also used for determining monster focus so your faster allies may end up taking hits instead of you when you long rest.

Short resting

Deciding when to short rest is straightforward. If you are out of cards and your character is in immediate danger, you don't really have many good options other than short resting. 

Say the Scoundrel is on her last 2 cards and she hopes to kill of these bandits before the end of the round to remove the danger they pose.

Fate is whimsical, and unfortunately the Scoundrel flips one of these. 

A Gloomhaven mercenary's worst nightmare

Now we have a handful of mean looking, and very much alive bandits staring at us. We can't afford to long rest as these bandits will swing their weapons at us. Our best course of action is to short rest, hope we don't randomly lose one of our powerful cards and try to act next round before we take hits.

Short resting is also useful for catching up with your party. If you've fallen behind and your party is quite a bit ahead of you, ask them to Long Rest while you short rest and try to catch up. 

Setting up for long rest

If your party can clear a room successfully, it's always worth taking the turn to long rest before moving on. Not all parties have a healer, so long rests go along way to keeping your health up. Some characters such as the Spellweaver need to long rest to avoid randomly losing critical cards such as Reviving Ether. Some players prefer long resting as it refreshes their spent items like Boots of Striding. 

But what if there are just way too many enemies and you just can't kill them fast enough? How do you get the rest you need? 

Moving out of the way

One way is to plan ahead and make sure you have a solid move card ready on your last turn before resting. For example, a Scoundrel that planned ahead may have saved their Move 6 for their last 2 cards in their hand so they can long rest safely. 

This allows the Scoundrel to Attack and Move to a safe distance before committing to a long rest.  A play like this lets you take a shot and move to a safe distance so you can rest safely. 

A classic hit, run and rest

Using invisibility

Another effect that can help you long rest when you need it is the Cloak of Invisibility. 

Almost as good as the Harry Potter version

Long resting while invisible may even help your allies by blocking monster pathways. The Tinkerer here opens up a new door and is greeted by some aggressive guards. Oh no!

Why are mean enemies behind every door? 

The Spellweaver plays her last 2 cards. Spellweaver moves into the doorway, and activates her cloak of invisibility. Remember invisibility lasts until the end of the next turn... which means, next turn, if you choose to Long rest, you are still invisible until you act. 

Bandit Guard: A mysterious force is blocking us. Let's... do nothing. 

Since the Guards have no way to attack their focus (the Tinkerer) they don't move. The Tinkerer is free to take shots at the bandits hiding behind the invisible Spellweaver.

If the Spellweaver long rests next turn, the invisibility will remain until initiative 99. That gives the Tinkerer another turn of shooting to soften up the bandits. 

I like to imagine the Spellweaver wrapping herself in the Cloak of Invisibility and taking a nap... while the Tinkerer is frantically firing shots.

Using obstacles and/or traps

Some classes can create obstacles and / or traps. These can be useful in buying space for you to long rest. With some careful positioning and planning, you can create space to rest safely. 

Below we can see the Bandit is 3 spaces away from the Cragheart. The bandit is close enough to possibly be dangerous in the next 1 or 2 rounds.

Craggy is tired, give him a break.

Our Cragheart has a fun idea. What if we play avalanche before we rest?

The bandit now needs 5 spaces to reach the Cragheart. This gives us alot more distance to perform a long rest, and it also slows the Bandit down, so our allies have more time to cover for us.

Rock around it.

The Tinkerer can also do something similar by placing traps since monsters treat traps as obstacles too. Note this trick doesn't work on flying or ranged monsters unfortunately. 

Using summons

There's not too much to cover here, but since summons activate even when you long rest, they can cover and take hits for you. Summons activate before the controlling players initiative, so if you are long resting at initiative 99, the summon activates just before you. What's so important about this anyway?... Since the summon acts before you do, it means when a monster is determining focus, the summon is considered earlier in the initiative order. So you can really use summons to take hits for you as you rest up. 

The top reads: 6 Health meat shield to give the mindthief a break

Pg 30 from the rule book clarifies this:

If more than one enemy ties for being the closest, the second priority is to focus on the enemy who is earlier in the initiative order (summons are focused on before the character who summoned them in this regard, even on the round they are summoned, and a character who is performing a long rest would be focused on last).

Just taking the hit

So what if you're geared up? You've got all these items and you just want them refreshed. You're playing the Cragheart or Brute and you've got plenty of health to spare. 

 

Maybe you should just long rest even with enemies in your face. Once you get your Heater Shield and Hide Armor refreshed, you'll have plenty of shields to tank future hits anyway. 

And that's it! Get a good rest and punch on with the next room.