Gloomhaven: The Tinkerer’s Journey
Spoiler alert! I will be talking about Gloomhaven and the current game I’m playing with my group. I will be mentioning some minor spoilers towards the end of this article.
Gloomhaven is a tabletop game where a group of adventurers set off to complete dungeons, gain loot, and fulfill their personal quests. While D&D satisfies my desire for the flexibility and creativity of building fantastical characters in a sandbox world, Gloomhaven satisfies my tactical muscle as my group and I complete quests involving dungeons filled with seemingly near-impossible objectives.
My group is comprised of video game fanatics, ranging from Dark Souls to Divinity: Original Sin to Final Fantasy and more. While combat strategy and tactics weren’t new to us, the biggest challenge was meshing our individual skills and working as a team. (We’re coworkers in an office job but never played video games together.)
The group comprised of the hulking Brute, the mystic Spellweaver, the cunning Mindthief, and the quirky Tinkerer (that’s me). We spent A LOT of time getting in each other’s way and trying to understand the rules without accidentally cheating our way to victory. We individually had our own struggles:
- The Brute ran into the horde of monsters to deal some damage, only to realize he was a prime target for a boatload of damage himself.
- The Spellweaver was intent on hoarding as much loot as possible, even to the detriment of the quest completion.
- The Mindthief had to juggle between casting manipulation spells, getting up close to attack, and avoid dying in the process.
- I had so many different cards to pick from — bombs, traps, healing potions, and more — that it was hard to sort out, let alone know what to do during the quest.
As time went on and we all got familiar with our respective character’s play style, we organically tailored our abilities and equipment to not only enhance our skills, but to complement each other and to cover up gaps.
- The Mindthief, fastest out of all of us, picked off the most threatening monsters or rendered them completely useless so that the rest of the crew could release a torrent of destruction.
- While the Brute is not supposed to be treated as a traditional tank, he was built up to soak the damage so the rest of us weren’t hammered. He was built to get into the fray and deal out mad damage. He also always kept at range for healing at a moment’s notice and turtled up with shields while he rested.
- The Spellweaver always had the right spell to pick — whether to decimate hoards of monsters, drop a healing spell, summon a mystic ally, or fly across the map to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
- Me, the tinkerer, found a harrowing but exhilarating experience to be doling out damage to clear out some monsters, only to switch over to healing duty when the party is one turn away from a total wipeout, then literally go out in a blaze of glory to beat down the boss.
Strangely, even the loot hoarding has been adapted to a positive trait. The party accumulated a lot of gold from the greed. It’s also become a running gag for the party to steal gold from the Spellweaver.
Playing the Tinkerer
At first, I was extremely conservative with my lost cards. I only used them towards the end of the game, only to barely gain any experience and not contribute much to the quest completion. I had 12 cards, the largest hand size out of all the starter classes, and a lot of the most powerful abilities I had were lost cards.
With the exception of some road actions that forced me to spend a turn to heal the party back to their original state, I didn’t really need to heal that often. Sometimes my tinkerer became a sitting duck because I have exhausted all my damage abilities and was left with all my healing spells when it’s no longer needed. Turned out I had too many healing spells in my toolbelt.
After learning to balance my healing spells with ranged attacks, I referred to a tinkerer guide to get some more insight on how the tinkerer should be played. While I was on the right track in terms of picking a good set of abilities (I shied away from familiars and setting traps because of the team composition), the guide recommended to be aggressive.
And so I experimented for a session. The results were so amazing that I never looked back to a pure support role.
When I was not healing, I was pulling out all my AoE abilities and roasting the monsters to hell. Sprites with high shields and annoying abilities? Roast them. Kicked down the door to see golems greeting me? Back away and immobilize them with a net shooter. Big boss about to unleash hell? Stun ’em and shoot ’em with a crank bow to the face. It was the philosophy of healing as “dealing damage to the monsters is essentially damage prevented on your allies”.
I learned that the tinkerer’s role is that of a generalist — you have a wide set of abilities that are played out based on the situation. Do I move fast, or do I wait until everything else acts? Do I unleash my flamethrower and pour all my resources to clear out the monsters, or do I inflict statuses to set them up for my other team members? Do I heal someone, or do I run right into the fray to soak up the damage with my body? Even deciding whether I should be guns blazing at the beginning or at the end is a decision I make. Some scenarios are better for the tinkerer to clear out early and get exhausted earlier, so that my other party members get a clear path to the end. Other scenarios are easier for the tinkerer to burn abilities more slowly, then go in a blaze of glory at the very end.
I also quickly learned that the tinkerer is not a mobile character at all. In one scenario, there was a winding path filled with traps — and no one had any method of disarming those traps. While the rest of my party had the abilities and the equipment to bypass obstacles and sprint forward, my poor tinkerer had to keep up and shoot from afar. At some point, I ran into every trap to keep moving forward, eventually exhausting myself because I was too far away to be of any use. The next session, I quickly switched in more abilities for disarming traps and moving more quickly.
As a regular D&D player, there’s always the element of roleplaying in the game. The tinkerer is named Kathrix — the young, spirited quattrix who is generally good-hearted and is always fascinated with everything machines. I still had the habit of describing my actions with superfluous details — a small gnome-adjacent mechanic kicking a door open and unleashing a gout of flame on giants. Not to mention other gags like the players mixing up my character’s miniature figure for the Mindthief’s (“don’t mix up the small people”).
Conclusion
Gloomhaven is a great game to play with a group of friends who enjoy cooperative combat strategy games — video games on tabletop with a tinge of flexibility. It tosses some of the assumptions of combat roles that traditional strategy games delegate, and instead encourages a combination of character optimization and team synergy to pull through each scenario.
The Tinkerer (and I’ve seen the healer-type class in multiple tabletop games) have often been known as a class whose only purpose is to “heal the party”. The Tinkerer is indeed there to keep the party alive, whether it is to throw a healing potion, decimate the monsters before they dole out damage, or incapacitate the monsters so the rest of the party can clean up.
Alas, Kathrix was the first to complete his personal goal — watch his other party members get exhausted. (Tricky as a healer, but this worked out with another ally’s personal goal of exhausting himself.) To my surprise, the healer with the flamethrower retires, only to have a healer with a sawblade take his place.
