Gloomhaven

(75 hours played on Steam during Early Access) If you haven't played the board game yet, do yourself a favour and give it a try. It's not been #1 on boardgamegeek for ages for nothing. The computer game is an almost perfect adaption of the board game and that can't have been an easy task. The biggest advantage over the real thing is all the time you save setting up/packing away the real game. It makes it possible to have a quick game with friends for an hour or two, without having to plan for an extra hour of setup time. Really my only criticism is that you can't skip more of the animations or have them run parallel. They're well done, but I don't need to see 10 sekeleton warriors shielding themselves for ~3 seconds one after the other. Really only a very minor nitpick compared to all the stuff that the games does so well!

If you start Gloomhaven without GOG Galaxy running, it will stuck with the initial Loading Screen with running/changing Gametipps and a heavy load on the Graficscard (~ 90% on my 3080Ti for 1440p. I tried it (also started as admin) for more than 1 hour. There should be a hint from GOG on the Shopsite for Glommhaven for this behaviour !

Update: After playing for several hours with our group, I had to contact GOG to reduce my initial rating. I cannot, in good conscience, recommend this game. As much as I wanted to enjoy Gloomhaven on PC, I am sorry to say that it is a bug-riddled mess with horrible usability. I am a big fan of the board game - despite the heavy price and the insane difficulty. Sadly, I cannot recommend this game in its current condition. For a game that is no longer in early access, it has too many game-breaking bugs. Considering the enormous difficulty, it is all the more frustrating when you get stuck due to bugs. On top come so many missed opportunities that should be a no-brainer when digitizing a physical game. While you can create multiple heroes of the same class, the game does not allow you to bring them on a quest together. If you play online, other players cannot play with their own heroes but you have to assign them characters that you created. If you have not played the board game, you probably have no idea what is going on half of the time. My group has played through 3/4 of the main board game plus half of 'Jaws of the Lion' and we still have to consult the log. Many things happen too fast or are not adequately visualized (e.g. curses). Some non-consequential events have to be confirmed several times, either by the active player or by the whole party. But during a fight, you oftentimes miss using an active element because the 'highlight' is so far out of your field of vision. The many bugs we regularly encounter will hopefully get fixed in the near future. But this game lacks usability that could have been improved massively if the developer had run proper user tests or if they had employed a decent UX designer. This game should not have seen the light of day for another couple of weeks or even months of development. It surely has much potential, but so far, a lot of that has been squandered.

192 hours played on Steam during Early Access) A very challenging tactical game. Well done animations, nice graphics and atmospheric soundtrack. I played mainly in multiplayer, going through the whole game twice in different team configurations. And after yesterday's release, I'm ready for the campaign mode. In a time of buggy games, this early access was like a complete game. Very good contact with developers on diskord - you can report your comments and bugs and they respond very quickly - making updates fast. This is an unusual approach instead of focusing on the store with paid skins like everyone else in game industry. Highly recommend.