I own the original Gloomhaven. I have played it, generously, four times. Jaws of the Lion I finished, start to campaign end, with a friend, and that gap tells you basically everything about what this smaller box gets right that the 16-kilogram monster doesn’t.
Teachability is the whole pitch here, and it delivers on it better than almost any legacy-style campaign game I’ve played. The introductory scenarios function as an actual, honest tutorial, layering in mechanics gradually instead of dumping the full rulebook on you at once, and more than one player has called it exactly what the original always needed and never had. A spiral-bound scenario book replaces loose map tiles, which sounds like a small thing until you’re the person who used to spend twenty minutes hunting for the right tile in the base game.
Setup and teardown, my usual sore spot with anything in this genre, is genuinely improved here, though I want to be precise about how much. The scenario booklet cuts real time off finding pieces and laying out a map, but it hasn’t eliminated the fundamental issue that this is still a game with a lot of small tokens and enemy standees to track. A few players specifically flagged that the smaller box, while more portable, is almost too small for how much stuff has to live inside it, and an aftermarket organizer insert is more or less a mandatory add for anyone playing this more than a handful of times. It’s better than the original. It is not solved.
The card-based combat system is the actual reason to be here, though, and it’s genuinely brilliant, a hand of ability cards each turn where the order you play them determines your initiative relative to the monsters, no dice for the core action resolution, just planning and a little bit of anxious guessing about what everyone else picked. One player compared the feel to Root’s approach of dangling a Euro-style optimization puzzle in front of players who might not normally touch a dungeon crawler, and I think that’s exactly right, this scratches the tactical-puzzle itch as much as the adventure itch.
Where the criticism lands hardest, and where I have some sympathy even as a five-star reviewer, is the combat-modifier deck swinginess, drawing a miss card at the wrong moment can genuinely tank an otherwise well-played scenario, and enough players have described losing a near-perfect run to one bad card flip that it’s clearly a real, recurring frustration rather than a one-off bad beat. And the story, more streamlined and more grim than the original’s wandering, open narrative, isn’t going to convert someone who found the base game’s writing thin to begin with.
Five stars from me, not because it’s flawless but because it did the one thing I needed a Gloomhaven product to do: get me and a friend to an actual ending. If the size and cost of the original scared you off, or if you tried it and bounced hard off the setup time, this is a real, honest on-ramp rather than a watered-down demo, and I’d recommend it over the base game to almost anyone starting fresh.