Gloomhaven Starter Classes

Of the starting six characters, there is a Human Scoundrel, who plays like a typical rogue/thief class. Lots of very fast initiative cards. Very mobile, with lots of advantages for flanking and the ability to stealth and backstab. This is probably the class that will be most familiar at first glance to people familiar to people. It's also the one I have the least experience with, which is why this entry is a bit brief.

There is an Inox Brute. Inox are the obligatory proud warrior race people, and the Brute plays the way you'd expect a class named that to play. Lots of running boldly into battle and swinging wildly with either hard hitting single target attacks or sweeping cleave style melee AE attacks. Some light tanking abilities. A good amount of pushing. One of the highlights of the games we played involved our brute opening a door and blindly charging through it headlong into some bandit guards, one of which he promptly collided with sending it flying backwards through two damaging traps in a row and instantly killing it before it got a chance to do anything. Probably the most straight forward of the starting six.

There is the aforementioned Quatryl Tinkererer. I guess Quatryl are the dwarf equivalents. They like technology, and the Tinkerer has a whole lot of gizmos. He seems to be a jack of all trades character. Do you want to flamethrower your enemies? Place mines? Summon a harmless, but distracting robot to follow you around? Throw smoke bombs? Shoot nets? All of the above? The tinkerer is the character for you. He also seems to have the most healing abilities of the starting classes. I'd say this is one of the two most complicated characters of the starting six.

The other complicated character is the Orchid Spellweaver. Orchid are the elf equivalents. They live for thousands of years and mostly spend their time in quiet meditation, often for long enough that crystals begin growing on them. The Spellweaver, as the name implies, is the mage of the starting group. Almost all of their abilities either generate elements or consume elements for an additional effect, so there is a lot of nuance of either coordinating with your allies, or else imbuing an element one round and then consuming it the next (you can not do both in the same round). They follow all of the other mage tropes. They are flimsy, and this is represented both in their hp value and also in their hand size. They only get 8 cards as opposed to most classes 10 (the tinker gets 12!), though they also have an amazingly good card that lets them retrieve lost cards so they can theoretically cycle through all of their cards twice, unlike most classes.

Then there is the Savvas Cragheart. This is one of the most unique of the starting characters, both in terms of race and class. Savvas look like earth golems with a clear pane of glass in their chest, and spend most of their time studying the elements. Mastery of an element gives them a power core of that element behind the pane of glass... except for the Craghearts. The Craghearts are outcasts. They get their chest cavity smashed in and kicked out of Savvas society. The end result is a kind of tanky, strongly earth themed physical fighter. If the Cragheart has a single theme, I would say it's probably obstacle manipulation. They can summon new obstacles in the form of giant rocks that they throw, blow up existing ones (which is non-standard, those are usually permanent), move them around, etc. They also have a lot of melee AE. Way more so than the brute, which has a handful of "Hit enemies in this particular arc" cards. The Cragheart has a ton of "Do damage to everything around you", with the caveat that most of those abilities also affect allies (which again, is non-standard. There is no friendly fire by default). The result is a character that it seems like should play like a bruiser character, but is really more about tactically manipulating the battlefield.

And now we get to the character I've been playing the most, the Vermling Mindthief. Vermling are rat people with psychic abilities, and hoo boy is the Mindthief fun. This is another "Big bag of nasty tricks" class. I guess in D&D terms, the best starting point is that he's a rogue, except a rogue if you're playing with the psionics rules. He's primarily a melee fighter, and has a series of cards that provide mutually exclusive powerful buffs to his melee attacks, but he's also got a pretty good selection of ranged abilities, many of which incapacitate the enemy with various debuffs, and then conveniently enough he's got a series of abilities that deal more damage to an enemy based on the number of debuffs on it. On top of that, he's got one of the few low level summon spells in the form of a rat swarm, which is actually damaging, unlock the tinkerers robot buddy. And it poisons them to boot. More delicious debuffs to take advantage of. And if that wasn't enough for you, he can also manipulate the enemies. One of his cards lets you move the enemies around at long range, so you can march them into traps, or move ranged fighters into disadvantageous melee, etc.