Game Night: Jaws of the Lion

I really want to apologize for the gaps in game blogging. I’m still gaming, as much as ever. I have a lot to write about with EverQuest II, the PlayStation 5, and especially Assassins Creed: Valhalla, and I will try to get to these things 🙂 As well as streaming again. But for now, here’s our latest adventures in Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion.

When the pandemic hit, we stopped having game nights. When Connecticut flattened the curve in the summer and things eased up again, we started meeting and playing the new Gloomhaven game, Jaws of the Lion, every other Game Night, which we hold every other week. It used to be weekly before the pandemic, but we want to space them two weeks in case anyone is sick without knowing it.

Now that the pandemic has come back, worse than before, this may have been the last Game Night for some time. We now have family members who have the disease (thankfully, their symptoms are not yet severe, and we don’t live near them). It’s only fitting, I guess, for this last Game Night, that we finally are out of the five scenario tutorial 🙂

Scenario 5: A Deeper Understanding

Back from a mission to parts unknown, our famed mercenary band, the “Jaws of the Lion”, come upon a woman begging for help to find her blacksmith husband, which leads us to a bodysnatching Vermling ring that is feeding corpses to a cult of red-robed zealots who are sacrificing to the Blood God. Each scenario pulled us deeper into the plot, uncovering layer after layer, until finally, after fighting through Vermlings and zealots and giant snakes and golems, we come to the deepest part of the lair where a wicked summoning unfolds.

Bubbling pools of poison gas (effect: poison and muddle) hide chaos demons (here played by snakes, as we couldn’t find the chaos demons we printed months ago). A zealot had torn open rifts to the chaos dimension to slow us down as we chased him through the lowest depths of the dungeon.

Confronting the zealot at last (that’s the heading image), he sputtered out one last curse as he died, willing his blood to feed the summons on the other side of the door he guarded with his life: A Blood Tumor.

That Tumor was not doing well. We’d been starving it of its necessary meals, and it was struggling. The zealots were hoping to use our bodies to finish the summoning, because otherwise, they themselves would pay the price. A price that they were not entirely unwilling to pay.

The Tumor has one weird trick that zealots don’t want you to know: Any damage taken by anyone other than the Tumor, zealot or adventurer alike, will power the Tumor. Once it reaches full power and the summoning completes, then the scenario — and likely all of Gloomhaven — is lost.

I, as the Voidwarden, was able to coerce them to walk away, and the others had Push abilities that also helped keep them at bay. I also coerced one of the zealots to help attack the tumor. By this time in the game, we didn’t have a lot of good damage cards left, but we did manage to make the thing dead before the zealots were able to complicate things again.

I’d just gotten the new Prusa printer assembled and calibrated the night before, so while I was working, I had the Prusa printing up the poison traps and the regular traps ahead of game night. By coincidence, we also got the Final Fantasy XIV Doman Mahjong mat that goes with our Doman Mahjong set, and its rubber-backed grip made it the perfect base for our map.

The immediate blood cult threat eliminated, we finally made it back to our home base, the Sleeping Lion Inn, and spent our hard-earned gold on beer and perk points. The entire group leveled to level 2, and all the training wheels are off.

I don’t know when we’ll be able to continue the adventure, but I guess I’ll miss seeing my family together even more. Thanks, Covid, and the leadership of the country that, at every step, made things worse instead of better.