The tight little Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs contains a small, thirty-six page rulebook, a set of plastic cubes to use as markers and monsters, six tiny miniatures representing each of the characters a player can choose from, five dials for tracking Hit Points—for both those of the monsters and the character, and a single die. The die is marked with an ‘O’, a ‘+’, or a ‘—’ symbol. This is used to determine if the movement, attack, and defence values for a hero are lower or better in round, and if the initiative, movement, attack, and defence values for the monsters are lower or better in round. There are also a lot of cards. These start with the Character Cards. There are six of these and include a brawler, a fighter, a spellcaster, a tinkerer, magical manipulator, and an assassin. Each give the character’s Hit Points, Ability Cards—at both the base level and the improved level, and also a complexity indication. There are three low complexity characters and two high, but only one medium complexity character. There is a set of Character Ability Cards for each character. As well as indicating the Initiative value for that round, each one provides two actions, at their most basic, a move action and an attack action. Other actions might provide an area attack, an elemental spell effect, or a piercing blow that ignores part of the defending monster’s defence value. On a turn, a player will choose two of these cards from his hand. He will use the best Initiative value of the two cards and when it is his turn to act, he will use two actions. These cannot come from the same Character Ability Card of the two, meaning that the player will choose the one from the top of one Character Ability Card and the one from the bottom of the other Character Ability Card. This gives a player some great choices when mixing and matching the actions on the Character Ability Cards.
Character Ability Cards are double-sided. The abilities on the ‘A’ are played first and then the Character Ability Cards are flipped over and the abilities on their ‘B’ side can be used on subsequent turns. When the latter have been used, the Character Ability Cards are discarded. Some Character Ability Cards have the ‘Lost’ Icon, which means that when it is used, it goes into Lost pile. Some have ‘Active’ abilities, which remain in effect. Should a player be in danger of running out of Character Ability Cards, he can perform rests to restore cards. Resting also forces the player to lose one card into the Lost pile.
The Monster Ability Stat Cards give values for their initiative, movement, attack, and defence in three different columns. The middle column gives the standard values, the lefthand column the lower values, and the righthand columns the better values. At the start of a round, the player will roll the die. If the ‘—’ is rolled, the lower, lefthand column values are used; for a ‘O’ symbol; there is no change and the middle column is used; and for the ‘+’ symbol, better, righthand values are used. The Monster Ability Stat Cards are double-sided and have a different monster on each side. The Monster Difficulty Modifier Cards are used to make the monsters more or less challenging to defeat and are used in conjunction with the Player Modifier Tray. There are some counters to track the effects of elemental icons and conditions during play and there is also an Icon Reference Card, which is definitely needed as there are a lot of Icons in the game.
Then there are the Scenario Cards. There is a deck of twenty of these, which together make up the whole campaign in Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs. They are double-sided. One side is split into three parts. The top part is the introduction to the scenario and how to set it up, whilst the second is the outcome if the hero is successful. In between, there is a list of the monsters required. At the very top and bottom of the card are the rewards that the hero will earn if successful. The hero can only use the one at the top or bottom of the Scenario Card—not both! On the reverse is the actual play area, a grid of hexes five by hexes, each hex being a centimetre across. The grid is also marked with the starting position both the hero and the monsters, obstacles, and possible traps. Some may also include effects and goals specific to the scenario. Whilst the hero has his own miniature, the monsters are represented by coloured cubes. These are not sophisticated maps, but to be fair, they do not have to be. Each scenario is intended to be completed in roughly twenty minutes.
There are several thick cardboard trays. There is a Player Modifier Tray and several Monster Modifier Trays. The Player Modifier Tray has a slot to track the adjustments made to the character action from one turn to the next. At best, the adjustments will add a bonus, at worst they will completely negate the effect of the decided action that turn. Different cards be slotted into the Player Modifier Tray to represent a character improving. A Monster Ability Stat Card slots into a Monster Modifier Tray, which has a slot to track the column used on the card.
Set-up of a Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs session is easy. Once set up, play is mechanically very easy, with relatively few components for the player to keep track off, a light skirmish game in which the player focuses on the Character Ability Cards and keeps track of the various conditions and icons. Then when play starts, Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs really is fun to play. And what is even better is that the game does not outstay its welcome because the play time for a single scenario is so short, and then set-up and put away time is so short.
The events of Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs are set after those of the main board game. A would-be adventurer approaches Hail, the mysterious Aesther who lives in the Crooked Bone, a derelict tavern, and who is said to be capable of turning anyone into a hero. This is what the character wants, but as soon as he steps over the threshold of the Crooked Bone, things go awry! He is shrunk and quickly finds himself attacked in the first scenario. It appears that Hail has set a trap to dissuade people from following up on the rumours, so the would-be hero must strike out across the ‘Button Realm’ and into the Crooked Bone where he will both prove himself worthy and find a way of being restored to normal size. So not only has Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs been shrunk from standard Gloomhaven, so has the effective play area—across a street and into a building—and the size of each scenario!
Physically, Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs is small, but impressive. The production values are good and the artwork excellent. If there is an issue with the game is that out of the box, some of the cards are slightly warped. If there is another issue, it is that the rulebook in the box is really an introduction to the game rather than a full set of the rules.
The scale and size of Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs does come at some cost. The story is linear and progression in terms of the characters is limited. Nor does it have the expansiveness or the ability to unlock elements of play like its big brother. The rulebook which comes in the box only really covers lay of the first scenario. The player will need to download the full rulebook. Yet these are minor issues in comparison to what Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs does offer. A self-contained game with twenty scenarios and six different characters to play, easy to learn rules, and then constant choices in play as to which combination of Character Ability Cards and their actions to use from one turn to the next. It is also easy to set-up and once you have played through all twenty scenarios, there is still the option of return to play another character. The replay value is very high—as is the portability. Plus, there is certainly scope for expansion as well.
Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs is incredibly pocket-friendly and packs a lot of game play and a surprising amount of depth into that game play. Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs is proof is that tiny can be great.
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