A few years back, a dedicated fan made a print-and-play Gloomhaven conversion that put a version of the game into 18 cards that you could play entirely in your hand. (This was called Gloomholdin’, designed by Joe Klipfel using assets graciously licensed by Cephalofair games). Gloomholdin’ won a bunch of awards and made a big splash in the online Gloomhaven community. I was thinking about giving it a shot. It was just so wild — arranging these cards like some intricate puzzle so you always knew what was going on.
Cephalofair licensed the idea back from the designer last year, and came out with their own version — Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs.
Unfortunately (or perhaps, fortunately), you can’t play this in the palm of one hand. But the spirit is the same!
Cephalofair leans into the theme by providing VERY SMALL minis of the original six characters, with the scenarios chronicling the adventures of a hero shrunken to very small proportions.
Buttons & Bugs is a single player game. Each map is printed on the back of the scenario card, so there’s none of that assembling the dungeon. It’s more akin to the scenario booklet provided in Jaws of the Lion or Frosthaven. Since there is only one player, there’s no monsters added or subtracted for that reason. There’s no elite monsters, either.
There’s no board of elemental infusions, either — those are replaced with a simplified system based on the cards in your hand or the monster card. Modifier decks are replaced with a chart with a row indicated by a white cube; as your character levels up, better modifier selections are slotted in. Same goes for the monsters. If you want to make the game easier or harder, you can slide in monster modifiers based on your preference.
I’m assuming some knowledge of Gloomhaven, here; if you’re not familiar with the game, this might be a good introduction to it, but I’d suggest trying the digital version of the game over on Steam (and other platforms) first to get a feel for it.
After going through the tutorial scenario with the Bruiser, I restarted with the Silent Knife, a rogue that moves around the board quickly and strikes from the shadows. To the left is the setup for the third scenario, “In the Walls”, where you fight three mice. You’re small. Three mice at this scale are deadly. Especially as they can cause wounds and sometimes retaliate with a nasty bite if attacked.
You have four cards in your hand; depending on your level, you can replace from one to four of the basic cards with advanced cards, and you can change which card or cards you upgrade before each scenario. Finishing each scenario grants you one of two items, and you can choose one or more of these items before each scenario, depending on your level. Your level is set by the scenario, so all the building up of faction and experience and perk points is just simply replaced.
At the start of each turn, you choose two of the cards in your hand. The cards have an A side and a B side; once you use an A side card, you flip it to its B side and put it back in your hand. After using a B side card, it is discarded, but these can be brought back with long or short rests, as in the main game. Still, so few cards means very few moves per scenario, and that’s born out by the short time needed to play a scenario — 10 to 15 minutes, if that.
Once you have chosen your cards, you roll a fate die for each enemy type to determine its initiative and actions. The lowest initiative goes first, and battle happens very much as in the original game, with all the same effects and triggers.
The modifier tables roll a fate die to see which column you take the modifier from, and the white cube marker is moved down to the next row (or back to the top, if on the last row) to be ready for the next roll.
Buttons & Bugs is a fantastic way to get some quick Gloomhavening in if you have a few minutes to spare. It’s fun to try out scenarios with different characters, as there is no penalty to just switching them out. All items that would have been given in previous scenarios are available, even if you skipped that scenario, so you could conceivably just skip to the final mission and you would have the same number of items and moves available as if you’d played every mission to that point.
I played a Cragheart in the original game, until my boyfriend got me the Forgotton Circle expansion, after which I played a Diviner. It’s nice to be able to dip into the other characters and see what it would be like to play a different class. And, it’s just plain fun… and makes me anxious to play Frosthaven, which has been weighing down a bookshelf downstairs for months and months now.
But until we get to that, there’s Buttons & Bugs. Highly recommended if you’ve played Gloomhaven before, or just want to have a fun little solo game that requires a fair amount of strategy and luck. It’s not quite as small as the 18 card supermini game that inspired it, but that game exists too, if you want to play it. Buttons & Bugs definitely feels more like playing the big game. But alone.
