This is a sponsored review.

Overview, How to Play, and Pros

If Gloomhaven is too big of an investment for you to try out, you could always check out Jaws of the Lion instead!

One of the big weaknesses of the original Gloomhaven was its lack of accessibility. That game has 95 scenarios, 17 classes, 30-ish monsters, and over a dozen bosses all on a brutal learning curve that wasn’t exactly smooth for newcomers. Thankfully, there’s Jaws of the Lion, which easily has one of, if not THE BEST tutorial segments the board gaming hobby has ever seen. And once players are through the tutorial, Jaws of the Lion doesn’t skimp on difficulty or mechanics either; players are still getting the tried and true Gloomhaven experience, albeit with less content to play through cause of the smaller box. But even then, for only 50 bucks msrp—and usually around 40 bucks if you’re looking around—Jaws offers 4 classes with absurd levels of customization and depth, and 25 scenarios to use them in. That’s still more content to playthrough than many other $100+ dungeon crawlers out there! Make no mistake, even with only 4 classes, you shouldn’t underestimate just how much gameplay you can get out of even just 1 class. Here at Shelfside we’ve completed the campaign and did most of the side quests from Jaws, so 21 scenarios total. Yet the whole time, we each stuck with 1 class, and we didn’t even try out half of the available builds that come from level up choices and item loadouts, nor did any of use hit max level.

Seriously though, we cannot sing the praises of the tutorial here hard enough! Not only is it a gargantuan upgrade compared to base Gloomhaven which threw players into the thick of it, but it’s also one of the best tutorials out there in general. Jaws incorporates multiple rulebooks, one of which is meant to be read while you’re going through the tutorial, and the other is an appendix that covers every term the game uses. The first 5 scenarios of the Jaws campaign are all tutorial missions, all of which seamlessly flow together not just in storytelling, but also in how they steadily teach you mechanics of the game. This is so much better than having isolated missions that don’t feel like they have any sway aside from teaching players, which can feel really dry to play through.

The tutorial takes great care to deliver information to newcomers in a way that makes sense and flows into the next lesson effortlessly. The first scenario is the most basic of combat with mostly just moving and attacking, and then each subsequent scenario steadily adds in more and more mechanics. By the time you reach scenario 4, it’s a full blown regular scenario! And then scenario 5 tops it all off with a boss fight, which not only feels awesome, but also caps off everything players are going to need to know to play the rest of the game.

But here’s the secret sauce: for the first 3 scenarios, both players and enemies will use tutorial ability instead of their usual cards. These tutorial cards have simplified versions of the normal abilities, and they also have these blue help boxes that explain what they do. It was incredible how little we needed to explain to our newcomer friend for how the game worked; they could just read the blue boxes on all the cards!

On top of all that, another major factor towards upping the accessibility is how Jaws doesn’t include a bunch of room tiles to tediously punch-out, organize, and setup. Instead, there’s a scenario book that has the tiles built in as art on the book. No need to spend a bunch of time dedicated to connecting tiles and placing terrain/obstacles on them if scenario book has the art already on it! Simply turn the page to the scenario you want, then plop down your minis and the enemy standees and you’re good to go. For the bigger scenarios, there’s even a secondary scenario book to attach for even more real estate.

And once you know the games rules, you’ll be able to pilot 4 classes that are excellently designed. All 4 are easy to pick up, but hard to master, which leaves them all with a ton of possibilities for where you want to develop their builds. They’re all the product of a much better development process, after learning from what works and what doesn’t from Gloomhaven’s classes. Basically, this whole experience is better balanced than OG Gloomhaven.

These 4 Jaws classes also have unique unlockables that are special only to them once they hit level 5. Because Jaws recognizes that there’s not as much to unlock versus the main game, they at least incorporated clever surprises in the form of crazy special unlocks that other characters in base Gloomhaven didn’t get. Obviously we can’t spoil what they are, but unlocking stuff in Jaws definitely feels just as exciting as regular Gloomhaven.

Cons & Nitpicks

So because there aren’t any accessibility cons and some random bits of balance issues that occasionally pop out, Jaws gets much higher marks than the original Gloomhaven. In fact, Jaws is sooo close to being a 10/10, but is just ever so slightly held back by some flaws that are currently still just innate to the Gloomhaven experience at the moment, especially some of the fiddliness.

And while thankfully, most the fiddliness has been cut down because of the scenario booklet, tutorial, and excellent insert, there’s still going to be annoyances like the tiny numbers on monster standees, managing damage tokens and status tokens, and a whole bunch of scenarios with bland objectives (kill everything).

Yet even then, Jaws still takes so many of these faults and addresses them in clever ways. Players and enemies have little tiles with their names on them that can be used to track turn order when initiatives get super confusing during combat, and ability cards now have divider lines in between abilities to make it super clear what lines of text are actually separate abilities that comprise an action.

Final Thoughts

Jaws of the Lion definitely isn’t a case of a few steps back, a few steps forward, it’s ALL steps forward and massive improvements to the Gloomhaven experience, especially since you can freely mix and most the content between games. For Gloomhaven veterans, they can bring their characters into Jaws if they wanted to or vice versa, making this an excellent expansion to base Gloomhaven for them. Whereas for newcomers, Jaws is now THE de facto starting point, and they should treat the original Gloomhaven as the expansion to Jaws if it turns out they really like Gloomhaven’s combat.

Ultimately, Jaws of the Lion’s existence strengthens the Gloomhaven experience as a whole, because now there’s no need to dive into the big box to try the out the combat when this smaller package exists that still has more content than many other dungeon crawlers. And seriously, it cannot be understated how good the Gloomhaven combat system is.