Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs

🎯 The Goal

Survive a micro-sized fantasy campaign as a classic mercenary who has been accidentally shrunken down to the size of a mouse by an eccentric mage. You must fight through rooms of aggressive insects and common house pests across 20 tactical scenarios to find a way to break the curse.

⚙️ Core Actions

The game condenses the classic, heavy big-box dungeon-crawler engine into a highly efficient solo puzzle box that fits on an airplane tray table:

• Micro-Map Tactical Play: Each scenario map is printed directly onto the face of a single card. You navigate a tiny grid alongside basic cubes and miniature models, dealing with localized hazards and obstacles.
• Simultaneous Card Selection: Every round, choose exactly two action cards from your micro-hand. You must resolve the top capability of one card and the bottom capability of the other, using their raw numerical values to determine turn initiative.
• Double-Sided Rotation: Instead of a massive starting deck, you possess just four core ability cards. Every card is double-sided; executing its side-A actions forces you to flip it to side-B in your hand. Resolving side-B actions sends the card directly to your discard pile.
• Manage Hand Exhaustion: When you run out of valid card pairings, you must take a resting turn to recover your discard pile. Resting permanently burns and removes one card for the remainder of the scenario, ticking down your operational time limit before your hero collapses from exhaustion.
• Roll the Attack Die: Instead of shuffling an extensive combat modifier deck, flip a die to resolve your combat fluctuations against a static stat tray. Level up across the linear campaign to permanently swap cards for higher-tier versions and buy specialized, micro-sized items.

🧠 Why you’ll like it

It is an incredible mechanical feat that captures 90% of the strategic brain-burn of original Gloomhaven and shrinks it into a 20-minute solo travel game. The double-sided card rotating system is a brilliant logistical puzzle; you aren’t just deciding what action to take right now, but calculating what side your card will land on two turns from now to ensure you don’t get stuck with mismatched actions. It is a fast, ultra-portable, and unforgivingly tight tactical challenge for fans of smart combat puzzles.