Founders of Gloomhaven

About this board game

Founders of Gloomhaven is a competitive tile-placement, action-selection, and city-building game for 1–4 players, with play time of about 120 minutes. Set hundreds of years before Gloomhaven, it depicts the original construction of the city.

Each player controls a fantastical race seeking to build the city and gain influence over its residents. Using action cards, players place resource buildings on the map, develop basic resources into more advanced ones, and deliver those resources to proposed building sites to earn prestige.

No race can accomplish everything alone. Each player can import only a small number of resource types based on their race, so creating more advanced resources requires cooperation with other players. This shared production system makes the development of the city depend on the connections between competing builders.

• Tile placement: Add resource buildings to the city map through card-driven actions.
• Resource development: Create advanced resources and deliver them to proposed building sites.
• Auction and voting: Periodically determine which building proposals appear and where they are placed.
• Influence: Add gathered influence to increase the strength of your vote.

The auction mechanism gives players a voice in the city’s direction. When new building proposals are considered, voting helps decide which ones come out and where they are placed, while accumulated influence can make a player’s vote more powerful.

As a standalone game in the same universe as Gloomhaven, Founders of Gloomhaven offers a city-building perspective on the setting’s distant past. Released in 2018, it combines competitive prestige scoring with resource interdependence and collective decisions about the growing city.