Cephalofair Games CPH0301 Founders of Gloomhaven, Multi

Well, what can I say? I *really* wanted to like this game. I backed the original Gloomhaven on the original Kickstarter and was amazed with how down-to-earth, emotive and generous Isaac Chilres was throughout that campaign. Quite how he managed to put out Gloomhaven with its gazillion pieces, scores of boards, hundreds of scenarios and thousands of cards at $100 I don't know, but I was very glad he had a lot of success with it since, because he very much deserved it.So I backed Founders of Gloomhaven the second the campaign opened. I'm more of a euro gamer, and much prefer competitive games to cooperative, so was delighted Mr Childres had turned his attention to this type of game. I was a bit disappointed he'd decided to set it in the Gloomhaven universe, but I understood that he wanted to piggy-back off of the attention Gloomhaven was receiving at the time (who could blame him) and he was also obviously still interested and proud of this world, lore, he had built around the town.So when the game finally arrived I eagerly got my boardgaming buddies to play it. We were all pretty excited and we're very much used to playing heavy euro games like Food Chain Magnate, Arkwright, 18xx, Trickerion, Through the Ages, &c. We got stuck in pretty quickly.And that's where it went wrong, I'm afraid. It just wasn't a very exciting or engaging experience. The 'tech tree' on the reference cards pretty much dictates what you have to do from your starting position and we were very much going through the motions. The Glory to Rome-esque card action following mechanic didn't really work here and the auctions for new building types seemed underwhelming.By the end of the game we were all done with it and I flipped it that evening. Huge shame.