Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it. I think we have 25 or so reviews in the series. We aren’t going to stop doing playthroughs, but hopefully these videos feel like a nice complimentary element.
If one is to split dungeon crawls into roughly 2 categories: one-off combat-centric and campaign-driven story-centric ones, I definitely prefer the 2nd. Gloomhaven I looked forward to getting until I played a friend's copy and discovered that there really is barely any story. Middara definitely has that in spades, so my money (is quite literally) going to Middara this year. Thanks, Mike!
Yeah, GH has a few fun story beats, but was for me fairly blah in the story. It didn’t help that the available missions were so numerous that I forgot which plot threads led where.
Great job. I have never played this before but I am considering backing it. My wife and I typically duo these type of games because of the rules overhead. That is if we even buy a game with a massive amount of rules. We much prefer things a bit lighter for the most part. Unpopular, but we both could not get into Gloomhaven. For my wife it was mostly because of AP. Because of that the rules felt too daunting and we ended up selling it. Just not for us. On the other hand we both love Kingdom Death Monster and too Many Bones, which both have arguably more rules and are both more complicated when it comes to rules. Those games clicked with us though and getting through the rules was easy. We really like the theme, story, art, and character customization of Middara and are hoping it will end up being our equivalent to a dungeon KDM with more story. Still undecided, but in for $1 at the moment.
The rules are pretty extensive, more than they need to be. They feel a little drawn out and not always well organized. I had to read through them cover to cover twice and still got things wrong. That said, once you get the basics down they aren't too bad, though you'll have a tough time tracking down edge cases at times.
You just saved me the pain of realizing this is not probably for me. What I always loved about jrpgs in the video game format was the combination of a great story, tactical turn based combat (not really that swingy usually) and very few items to use (most were just consumables that could help you instantly, but most games I played had 1 armor either in one piece or split for each part of body, 1 set of weapons/shields for 2 hands and that was it). Having tons upon tons of items is what usually deters me most in board games, I don't want inventory with 200 items, I want a few, but unique ones. And I absolutely hate swingy combat. I mean if an attack can mean anything in a range of 0-6+ dmg, it's getting in the range of "no thanks" for me. So even though I was really drawn because of the theme, narrative and the joy of discovery, I'll give this a hard pass. Thanks so much for this review, I find you always pick the potential misses that one might find in a game and make my decisions way easier.
How did you feel about player count? It sounds like solo or 2p with multiple characters is best, but does the managing multiple characters with multiple loadouts ever get to be too much? Very interesting and I love the 5 in 5 format, but this is one of those times I'd have liked a deeper dive. Hope this gets covered on the podcast before the KS is up! :) Great work per usual, definitely makes me want to re-look at it.
Yes, with increasingly complicated loadouts solo can become a bit of a beast to manage. And sadly, I found the company's official 2 and 3 hero variant to be fairly unbalanced, so you kind of have to always play with 4. Though to be fair, a decent number of items are mostly just straight stat boosters. Not all have some complicated effect, so you might be okay. Some of the members of our Slack said 3 player was great too. They'd run an extra character as kind of a shared responsibility, and if one player got killed early they'd pass over the extra character. I never had more than one insta-kill in any of my plays, at least until right at the end of a scenario, so that should be enough to work. I think 2-player should be pretty smooth, by the way. Managing 2 characters isn't tough. It's not like Gloomhaven where you have to constantly parse through a whole hand of cards.
@@OneStopCoopShop That's good to know! I love Gloomhaven quite a bit, but solo at 2p was a bit rough on me, although very fun. I'd love to do this 2p, will look into it. Thank you for your insight!
I have to agree with your #2 complaint about swingy combat, and the number + icon distribution is mostly to blame for it as you said. Usually you either miss, or you hit, and blow everything up, because you need nearly max rolls to hit anything, also later weapons have +2/+3 damage/icon, and you can roll 6-10 icons easily when you hit. One thing I must respectfully disagree, is that you said gloomhaven has more distinct characters. Hust after you mentioned you can be anything you want in Middara :D. Right now we have 7 very unique character in our party, and you can make them as specialized/broad as you want. Also items play a HUGE role in builds, they enable a lot of crazy combos later on. The problem is, that most of them are broken and even without min-maxing, the game becomes very easy. Let's hope that the print and play errata coming with the next KS will solve the balance, and then Middara won't have any competition in my book :).
Great thoughts! And yeah, I noticed some... interesting balance in the talents. As for the characters, I guess it’s kind of a perception thing. In JRPGs like a lot of Final Fantasy games, the fact that any character can technically get any skill felt like it kind of cheapened the uniqueness of each character. I felt the same here. Sure, my characters WERE very different, but a few levels could have brought them together again. Compare to Gloomhaven where each character does unique things that no one else can do, and it just felt more exciting to me. But, in a way, it might just be semantics.
@@OneStopCoopShop @ Szendrői Balázs I'd say it's not just sementics. It's like you said, each character are unique in GH, whereas each character are almost the same in Middara. Of course you can make lots of build in Middara, and that will make your experience unique, but it's not the character that is unique, it's the build. In Gloomhaven, you can also make different build. For example the Tinkerer can be play on full support, full DPS, full tank, full healer, or a mix of any of those. But no one else can do what the tinkerer does. When the Brute is played like a tank, it's not the same tank as the Tinkerer at all. So each character on GH are totally unique, and each have access to a small number of builds, whereas in Middara the characters feels samey but they all have access to all the builds available.
Thing is, with stuff like Gloomhaven the core gameplay is so solid that they can fix the story issues in expansions (and I have high hopes the Forgotten Circles expansion and the ones surely to follow will do that). But if the core gameplay is weak/boring, well there's no saving that. Guess I'll pass this one, my wallet says thanks ;)
Mihnea Cateanu I really hope the expansion adds more interesting scenarios for gloomhaven, they’re far too linear and similar that I quickly got bored of them.
Thx, this showed me, that this game is not for me. I was already worried about he story, don't want to read 1h a Story to my Komrads, but that the Gameplay is swingy and not as taktical as Gloomhaven, finished the game off for me. I mean, Gloomhaven is already not the best in taktiks, but lower means it is like Massive Darkness 🙂Thx
@@OneStopCoopShop Yes, you are right, that was to harsh, I guess. But I am a fan of Galaxy Defenders and S&S. And I hoped for a game with more Taktik, and was afraid of the story. Not any more, cause I will skip the game
@@daodasbrot4817 for my tastes, comparing the three, I actually liked Middara's tactics a bit more than S&S, but neither is as good for me as Galaxy Defenders. Love the way they handled enemy versus character movement and activation there.
Gloomhaven is not for me. The combat system in Middara is more my style. And my group doesn't care for backgrounds. (we're just a bunch of Murder Hobos") The customization is great, any character can be built to any class. Some are better at some classes than others. I've seen Rook be a "Cleric" (smash and heal) and as a straight up "Tank". Remi and Zeke make great "Archers" and great melee "DPSes". Nightingale is most always a magic user, but she can choose what type. Middara wins hand down for my group. Of course, neither beat the grand-daddy of all rpgs: D&D. That's my opinion, glad to see yours.
@@OneStopCoopShop: To be honest, I never gave Gloomhaven a fair shot. The combat system is so off putting to me, I don't what to even play it. However, Gloomhaven does one thing better than all other rpg board games: The monster cards. They level up as the PCs do. Not even D&D does that; it has none, unless you count the different ages of the dragons. Middara has three level for monsters to level, but only for certain ones. But GH has 8 levels for each monster.
@@arikwolf3777 yes, although I never fully liked how freeform GH difficulty is with those levels. One scenario would feel way too easy, then we'd up the level and suddenly it'd feel too hard... I dunno :)
Depends on what you are looking for. The enemy AI is well done and adds some nice tactics. The story is really involved, which might not be great if you don’t want to read a lot. The upgrading is very freeform, so characters aren’t necessarily unique, but if you like customization it’s great.
Looking forward to giving it a whirl. Its been sitting on my shelve for a few weeks now...just not finding the time to get it to the table. and then there's the Kickstarter with Act2 & 3 coming up...so much content, so little time :(
Hm, if you want to space out playing it so that you finish Act 1 right as 2 and 3 deliver, I wonder how often you'd have to play a scenario? Once a week maybe :)
I missed the last KS and was heavily anticipating the new one but I'm now struggling to be sure that it would get to the table often enough to justify the purchase. Because of that I'm debating switching to all in TMB (which I also own none of) as I feel it would just get more gameplay, which at the end of the day, is more important than simply owning something because it looks awesome.
I'm not the best to comment on that, because neither me nor my design/podcast partner Peter enjoyed TMB much. You can check our podcast episode on it to hear why. But I agree with you on the campaign worries. I'm most excited by Altar Quest at the moment for the same reason. From the demo I played, it has excellent tactical one-off play, but also a hopefully fun shorter campaign option.
@@OneStopCoopShop Good question. Its the kind of game I find easy to binge, though. I could rarely play "just one" scenario at a time with Gloomhaven. It did take me forever to tackle that one, though...kinda similar to what's happening with Middara. Anyhow, I still have not played the game, but i feel like you've nailed it on the head with your 5in5. Luckily I'm happy about the ton of skills and items customization. I tend to enjoy that. I also like that it is different than Gloomhaven because, you know, I do have Gloomhaven =P.
VERY different! They are going to be compared endlessly, because of their similar massive size, but such different experiences on the table in a bunch of ways.
The issue I was referring to was that, once you stop moving, you cannot move again. The extra stamina can only be spent to boost your initial move action, not to give you additional movement after you've done something else, like attacking.
I really like the 5/5 format. I hope to see more like this going forward. Great job! 👍 I think you have a winning idea here.
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it. I think we have 25 or so reviews in the series. We aren’t going to stop doing playthroughs, but hopefully these videos feel like a nice complimentary element.
If one is to split dungeon crawls into roughly 2 categories: one-off combat-centric and campaign-driven story-centric ones, I definitely prefer the 2nd. Gloomhaven I looked forward to getting until I played a friend's copy and discovered that there really is barely any story. Middara definitely has that in spades, so my money (is quite literally) going to Middara this year. Thanks, Mike!
Yeah, GH has a few fun story beats, but was for me fairly blah in the story. It didn’t help that the available missions were so numerous that I forgot which plot threads led where.
Great job. I have never played this before but I am considering backing it. My wife and I typically duo these type of games because of the rules overhead. That is if we even buy a game with a massive amount of rules. We much prefer things a bit lighter for the most part. Unpopular, but we both could not get into Gloomhaven. For my wife it was mostly because of AP. Because of that the rules felt too daunting and we ended up selling it. Just not for us.
On the other hand we both love Kingdom Death Monster and too Many Bones, which both have arguably more rules and are both more complicated when it comes to rules. Those games clicked with us though and getting through the rules was easy. We really like the theme, story, art, and character customization of Middara and are hoping it will end up being our equivalent to a dungeon KDM with more story. Still undecided, but in for $1 at the moment.
The rules are pretty extensive, more than they need to be. They feel a little drawn out and not always well organized. I had to read through them cover to cover twice and still got things wrong. That said, once you get the basics down they aren't too bad, though you'll have a tough time tracking down edge cases at times.
I like this review - makes me wana see what else you've done. Great 5 point format.
Thanks! Hope you enjoy some of the other videos :)
I like this concept.
The game or the review series? :)
You just saved me the pain of realizing this is not probably for me. What I always loved about jrpgs in the video game format was the combination of a great story, tactical turn based combat (not really that swingy usually) and very few items to use (most were just consumables that could help you instantly, but most games I played had 1 armor either in one piece or split for each part of body, 1 set of weapons/shields for 2 hands and that was it). Having tons upon tons of items is what usually deters me most in board games, I don't want inventory with 200 items, I want a few, but unique ones. And I absolutely hate swingy combat. I mean if an attack can mean anything in a range of 0-6+ dmg, it's getting in the range of "no thanks" for me. So even though I was really drawn because of the theme, narrative and the joy of discovery, I'll give this a hard pass.
Thanks so much for this review, I find you always pick the potential misses that one might find in a game and make my decisions way easier.
Happy to help! It definitely has fun stuff going on. But if the things you identified are make or break for you, I think it would be a miss overall
0:51 - The Red Scanner 😍
AGEMO it’s fun, though the official one tends to bend a bit in humidity. A member of our slack made one that was much higher quality ;)
How did you feel about player count? It sounds like solo or 2p with multiple characters is best, but does the managing multiple characters with multiple loadouts ever get to be too much?
Very interesting and I love the 5 in 5 format, but this is one of those times I'd have liked a deeper dive. Hope this gets covered on the podcast before the KS is up! :)
Great work per usual, definitely makes me want to re-look at it.
Yes, with increasingly complicated loadouts solo can become a bit of a beast to manage. And sadly, I found the company's official 2 and 3 hero variant to be fairly unbalanced, so you kind of have to always play with 4.
Though to be fair, a decent number of items are mostly just straight stat boosters. Not all have some complicated effect, so you might be okay.
Some of the members of our Slack said 3 player was great too. They'd run an extra character as kind of a shared responsibility, and if one player got killed early they'd pass over the extra character. I never had more than one insta-kill in any of my plays, at least until right at the end of a scenario, so that should be enough to work.
I think 2-player should be pretty smooth, by the way. Managing 2 characters isn't tough. It's not like Gloomhaven where you have to constantly parse through a whole hand of cards.
@@OneStopCoopShop That's good to know! I love Gloomhaven quite a bit, but solo at 2p was a bit rough on me, although very fun. I'd love to do this 2p, will look into it. Thank you for your insight!
I have to agree with your #2 complaint about swingy combat, and the number + icon distribution is mostly to blame for it as you said. Usually you either miss, or you hit, and blow everything up, because you need nearly max rolls to hit anything, also later weapons have +2/+3 damage/icon, and you can roll 6-10 icons easily when you hit.
One thing I must respectfully disagree, is that you said gloomhaven has more distinct characters. Hust after you mentioned you can be anything you want in Middara :D. Right now we have 7 very unique character in our party, and you can make them as specialized/broad as you want. Also items play a HUGE role in builds, they enable a lot of crazy combos later on. The problem is, that most of them are broken and even without min-maxing, the game becomes very easy. Let's hope that the print and play errata coming with the next KS will solve the balance, and then Middara won't have any competition in my book :).
Great thoughts! And yeah, I noticed some... interesting balance in the talents.
As for the characters, I guess it’s kind of a perception thing. In JRPGs like a lot of Final Fantasy games, the fact that any character can technically get any skill felt like it kind of cheapened the uniqueness of each character. I felt the same here. Sure, my characters WERE very different, but a few levels could have brought them together again.
Compare to Gloomhaven where each character does unique things that no one else can do, and it just felt more exciting to me.
But, in a way, it might just be semantics.
@@OneStopCoopShop @
Szendrői Balázs I'd say it's not just sementics. It's like you said, each character are unique in GH, whereas each character are almost the same in Middara. Of course you can make lots of build in Middara, and that will make your experience unique, but it's not the character that is unique, it's the build. In Gloomhaven, you can also make different build. For example the Tinkerer can be play on full support, full DPS, full tank, full healer, or a mix of any of those. But no one else can do what the tinkerer does. When the Brute is played like a tank, it's not the same tank as the Tinkerer at all.
So each character on GH are totally unique, and each have access to a small number of builds, whereas in Middara the characters feels samey but they all have access to all the builds available.
Excellent points. I agree completely. But I still think some will prefer Middara’s way of doing things
Thing is, with stuff like Gloomhaven the core gameplay is so solid that they can fix the story issues in expansions (and I have high hopes the Forgotten Circles expansion and the ones surely to follow will do that). But if the core gameplay is weak/boring, well there's no saving that. Guess I'll pass this one, my wallet says thanks ;)
Mihnea Cateanu I really hope the expansion adds more interesting scenarios for gloomhaven, they’re far too linear and similar that I quickly got bored of them.
Good review
Thanks man!
Thx, this showed me, that this game is not for me. I was already worried about he story, don't want to read 1h a Story to my Komrads, but that the Gameplay is swingy and not as taktical as Gloomhaven, finished the game off for me. I mean, Gloomhaven is already not the best in taktiks, but lower means it is like Massive Darkness 🙂Thx
Oh, I dunno, there is way more tactical nuance here than Massive Darkness ;)
But happy to help in any case!
@@OneStopCoopShop Yes, you are right, that was to harsh, I guess. But I am a fan of Galaxy Defenders and S&S. And I hoped for a game with more Taktik, and was afraid of the story. Not any more, cause I will skip the game
@@daodasbrot4817 for my tastes, comparing the three, I actually liked Middara's tactics a bit more than S&S, but neither is as good for me as Galaxy Defenders. Love the way they handled enemy versus character movement and activation there.
Good review, straight to the point
Gloomhaven is not for me. The combat system in Middara is more my style. And my group doesn't care for backgrounds. (we're just a bunch of Murder Hobos") The customization is great, any character can be built to any class. Some are better at some classes than others. I've seen Rook be a "Cleric" (smash and heal) and as a straight up "Tank". Remi and Zeke make great "Archers" and great melee "DPSes". Nightingale is most always a magic user, but she can choose what type. Middara wins hand down for my group. Of course, neither beat the grand-daddy of all rpgs: D&D.
That's my opinion, glad to see yours.
Great points, and glad you are enjoying the game! Bairnt is doing his “forever games” list tomorrow, and I’m pretty sure Middara will be on it!
@@OneStopCoopShop: To be honest, I never gave Gloomhaven a fair shot. The combat system is so off putting to me, I don't what to even play it. However, Gloomhaven does one thing better than all other rpg board games: The monster cards. They level up as the PCs do. Not even D&D does that; it has none, unless you count the different ages of the dragons. Middara has three level for monsters to level, but only for certain ones. But GH has 8 levels for each monster.
@@arikwolf3777 yes, although I never fully liked how freeform GH difficulty is with those levels. One scenario would feel way too easy, then we'd up the level and suddenly it'd feel too hard... I dunno :)
Found this review after listening to your recent Descent discussion. Would you still recommend this over Descent Legends?
Depends on what you are looking for. The enemy AI is well done and adds some nice tactics. The story is really involved, which might not be great if you don’t want to read a lot. The upgrading is very freeform, so characters aren’t necessarily unique, but if you like customization it’s great.
@@OneStopCoopShop Thank you for the insight 🙏
Looking forward to giving it a whirl. Its been sitting on my shelve for a few weeks now...just not finding the time to get it to the table.
and then there's the Kickstarter with Act2 & 3 coming up...so much content, so little time :(
Hm, if you want to space out playing it so that you finish Act 1 right as 2 and 3 deliver, I wonder how often you'd have to play a scenario? Once a week maybe :)
I missed the last KS and was heavily anticipating the new one but I'm now struggling to be sure that it would get to the table often enough to justify the purchase. Because of that I'm debating switching to all in TMB (which I also own none of) as I feel it would just get more gameplay, which at the end of the day, is more important than simply owning something because it looks awesome.
I'm not the best to comment on that, because neither me nor my design/podcast partner Peter enjoyed TMB much. You can check our podcast episode on it to hear why. But I agree with you on the campaign worries. I'm most excited by Altar Quest at the moment for the same reason. From the demo I played, it has excellent tactical one-off play, but also a hopefully fun shorter campaign option.
@@OneStopCoopShop Good question. Its the kind of game I find easy to binge, though. I could rarely play "just one" scenario at a time with Gloomhaven. It did take me forever to tackle that one, though...kinda similar to what's happening with Middara.
Anyhow, I still have not played the game, but i feel like you've nailed it on the head with your 5in5. Luckily I'm happy about the ton of skills and items customization. I tend to enjoy that. I also like that it is different than Gloomhaven because, you know, I do have Gloomhaven =P.
VERY different! They are going to be compared endlessly, because of their similar massive size, but such different experiences on the table in a bunch of ways.
You can spend extra stamina to move further than your movement limit :)
The issue I was referring to was that, once you stop moving, you cannot move again. The extra stamina can only be spent to boost your initial move action, not to give you additional movement after you've done something else, like attacking.
Thank you. I'll keep my Gloomhaven then :)
They are different enough to own both, but I don’t know how someone would find the time to play them ;)
@@OneStopCoopShop My point exactly.
JRPG = Japanese Role-Playing Game. I had to Google it...
Matt Bowden sorry, should have said the full thing at least once!
@@OneStopCoopShop No worries! I love this channel. Great review of Middara. Thank you!
I’m just realizing between this, adventure tactics, diceborn heroes, the JRPG adventure game... I made the mistake a lot this year ;)
One Stop Co-op Shop I had a 2-hour performance review with my boss last week. I made a lot of mistakes too! 😂🤪😭
@@mattbowden1981 that sounds painful!!