I backed this on Kickstarter back in 2020, watched the estimated delivery slide from an early-2021 hope out past a full extra year, and it finally showed up in spring 2023. That’s a long wait even by this hobby’s standards, and I say that as someone who’s made peace with campaign-game Kickstarters running late as a rule rather than an exception.

The town phase is the single biggest improvement over Gloomhaven, more meaningful decisions about what to build and how your outpost develops between scenarios, and it makes the downtime between missions feel like part of the game instead of paperwork you’re rushing through to get back to combat. Characters feel genuinely distinct from the start too, several reviewers describe the new classes as strong and different right out of the gate rather than needing a dozen levels to find their identity, and that tracks with my experience.

Here’s the part that actually matters most if you’re deciding whether to buy this: two-player balance is a real, recurring problem. Scenarios with regular monster spawns don’t scale down cleanly, your party ends up facing nearly the same enemy mass as a three-player game without a third player’s damage output to compensate, which has forced replays in my games more than once. If you’re choosing between this and Gloomhaven for a strictly two-player group and haven’t played either, more than one experienced reviewer suggests sticking with Gloomhaven, and after thirty-some scenarios in myself, I understand exactly why they say that.

Setup and teardown are a genuine chore, worse than Jaws of the Lion by a wide margin, multiple reference books open at once for a single scenario is not unusual. The puzzle-book mechanic gating certain campaign content is the one addition I actively dislike, solving an actual physical puzzle to unlock story content breaks the immersion of everything around it for me.

Four stars. When it’s firing, this is the best dungeon crawler on my shelf. When the two-player math turns against you, it’s the most frustrating.