A family affair

I bought my own copy of Gloomhaven.  Naked Man continually accuses me of cheating on his Gloomhaven group, and now it isn't just limited to cyber cheating - I am cheating in person.  Sweat, groans, hours of grinding and all.

Pinkie Pie was intrigued by the gigantic size of Gloomhaven and wanted to play, so we began a game with just the two of us.  I had intended to give her the Scoundrel as a starting class because it has a pretty easy path to competence.  There are many things you can do to be superb, but if all the Scoundrel player does is move next to an enemy and do a stabby thing each turn they will be pretty good, and I can pick up the slack.

Of course that didn't work.  Pinkie Pie saw the Spellweaver and wanted to blast things with magic!  Pew Pew!  Unfortunately the Spellweaver has a complicated base set of cards that requires you to really understand the cycle of resting, and the penalty for screwing it up is severe.  This is fine if you are a gaming veteran who can pick things up on the fly but I was concerned that Pinkie Pie would flub it big time.

It went fine!

We played on Easy difficulty to start as Pinkie Pie hasn't played before and I know how she is - she will want to pick up every piece of treasure and will wander around randomly instead of maximizing her beatdown.  She doesn't have that deep seated desperation to get her numbers as high as humanly possible like I do.  This may be a good thing for her, now that I think about it.

At any rate Easy difficulty was no problem for us.  She had the Battle Goal of gaining 7 or less experience and she made that no problem - she only got 2.  Of course I would have rather liked it if she had used her powerful nukes more often and gotten more experience, but honestly I can't complain about the result.  We were super efficient about gathering up the loot too, so we were both very happy with what we got out of the dungeon.  I had to work pretty hard to deal enough damage to complete the scenario but in the end it was enough.  We did have an issue that she ran into a room by herself, ran into melee with the enemies, and then blocked the only spot which I could attack from.  This is, obviously, not an ideal situation for a squishy caster to be in.  It will take some time for her to figure out the strategy, that is sure.

It looks like this may be an ongoing thing for us.  Pinkie Pie loves the idea of family game nights and I think I prefer doing Gloomhaven over running RPGs, at least with this group.  Part of the thing I really like when GMing RPGs is sitting back and letting the players roleplay amongst one another and talk things out, but with only Wendy and Pinkie Pie, I am pretty much on for the entire night and that is tiring.

Education can take many forms, and I think in my household it will take the form of a lot of strategy gaming.  Not much good for reciting facts certainly, but I think it is quite a solid way to keep her brain engaged and thinking and that has its own use.