I Was Wrong About the Dice in Buttons & Bugs

I wrote a review of Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs a while back where I said, fairly confidently, that swapping the original game’s card-based attack modifier deck for plain dice was a real design regression. I stand by the observation, dice do introduce more short-term variance than a deck you can count and plan around. What I don’t stand by anymore is treating that as a flaw. I’ve changed my mind about it, and I want to actually walk through why instead of just quietly updating the number in my spreadsheet and pretending I always felt this way.

It took about fifteen more solo plays for it to click. With the card deck in the full-size Gloomhaven, I found myself doing a lot of mental math before committing to a plan, tracking what was left in my modifier deck, minimizing risk instead of just playing the character. The dice version doesn’t let you do that math, and at first I read that as the game being worse for it. But somewhere around play twelve or so, I noticed I’d stopped trying to solve the encounter like a puzzle and started just reacting to what actually happened turn to turn, which, it turns out, is a genuinely different kind of fun than the one I went in expecting.

I don’t think I was wrong about the fact, cards and dice really do produce different play experiences, one lets you plan around known information and one doesn’t. I think I was wrong about which one this particular small-box game actually wanted to be. A portable, quick-setup Gloomhaven doesn’t need the same deep planning layer the full game rewards, it needs something faster you can pick up and put down in twenty minutes, and dice do that job better than a deck would have.

What actually pushed me to write this down instead of just quietly revising my own notes was a conversation with Mara, who plays the full-size Gloomhaven and has basically no interest in the small-box version because she likes the planning layer too much to give it up. I told her about my change of heart and she pushed back hard, said I’d just gotten used to a worse system, and for a minute I wondered if she was right and I’d talked myself into liking a downgrade because I’d already spent the money on it. But that’s not it either. I still reach for the full-size game when I want the puzzle. I reach for Buttons & Bugs when I want something faster that doesn’t ask as much of me, and having both available for different moods isn’t a contradiction, it’s just two different tools.

I’ve gone back and bumped my rating up half a star in the spreadsheet, with a note explaining why, dated instead of silently overwritten. Some opinions need more plays before they’re actually done forming, and I’d rather admit that in writing than pretend my first read was the final one.