Yesterday we restarted our Gloomhaven campaign. It had been so long we couldn’t rightly recall exactly where we had left things. So we chose the Vibrant Grotto mission which roughly fits in where things were left, I think.

Basically we had to get some biteroot to allow a location spell to be cast so we could locate Jekserah (who I think is the merchant we foiled the plans of and is now on the run if my memory does not play tricks on me).

As luck would have it, or not, the grotto we needed to get the biteroot from had one or two monsters in our way. Right away we were facing 3 cave bears and 2 forest imps.

We spent way too much time fighting these 5 foes. We had to loot 5 chests to achieve our goal for the mission. At the rate we had killed these initial creatures we would not be successful. So we decided to split up and make a dash for each of the remaining chests. The split went one small character, like my spellweaver with one of the big hitter brute/tank characters.

For this mission my secret goal was to kill at least one “leader” monster. Which I did manage to do in our dash for one of the final 2 chests.

But we nearly failed. Myself and one of the brute characters had a single turn left before we became exhausted and would fail the mission. Luckily we were able to clear a path through to the 2 remaining chests and loot them in the nick of time. It was scarily close.

Naturally after such a long gap between plays we were a little rusty on the rules. Which helped because we had a new member to the team, playing a new character.

Gloomhaven is still a nice dungeon crawler. It was nice to play a scenario that was not all about trading blows and slogging it out, but moving fast to achieve the goal. And also luck that we realised this about at the right point in the game. Any later and we would have failed big time.

I must remember to take my iPad next time. It’s handy having a copy of the rules and scenarios book to look at. Plus the scenarios pdf hides parts of the map and conclusions, so I can check things without ruining the surprises.

Definitely a fun afternoons gaming.

I’m now feeling inclined to paint the mini for my character. So I started to look at what colours are needed. As you can see below I did find the original artwork from the game to use as a reference.

One or two of the figures I saw painted on line I wasn’t too impressed with the finished results or colours used. I’m way way off being perfect, so maybe I was being too judgemental. However I have some shades of blue on their way. But now as I’m typing this and looking at the art, maybe I should be looking at purple shades. I have a leather brown coming. This is going to be a hard model to paint. Luckily I have 2, and I know how to clean the paint off so I can start again. This one is going to be a steep learning curve. At least the primer coat was easy.