I Taught a Coworker Gloomhaven Over Lunch and It Took Three Weeks

The same coworker who quoted me that line from Superintelligence at lunch, the one about the atoms in your body not caring what they’re arranged into, is also the reason I now own a second copy of the Gloomhaven starter scenario cards, because you cannot run a real campaign in thirty-minute lunch increments without a second copy of anything that gets consumed.

It started as a joke, honestly. He saw me at my desk flipping through the campaign tracking sheet one afternoon, asked what it even was, and I made the mistake of actually trying to explain the whole thing out loud, the box, the stickers, the character classes locked behind envelopes you’re not supposed to open until you unlock them. He said it sounded like the most needlessly complicated thing he’d ever heard of and also that he wanted to try it, both in the same breath, which is honestly the correct reaction.

So we started running Jaws of the Lion at lunch, twice a week, thirty minutes a session, which if you know anything about Gloomhaven’s turn structure sounds like a terrible idea and mostly was. We’d get maybe two rounds of combat done before somebody had to go back to their desk, and I spent most sessions re-explaining status effects because thirty minutes isn’t enough time for anything to stick between sessions three days apart. It took us three full weeks to clear one scenario that my wife and I finish in an evening.

What surprised me was how much he got into the bookkeeping side of it, actually, more than the combat. He started keeping his own notes on enemy patterns, drew a little diagram of the room layout on a sticky note once because he wanted to plan his positioning ahead of time instead of improvising it. That’s the part of this hobby I never expect to translate to somebody new, the part where you’re basically doing homework between sessions because you want to, and he just leaned into it without me having to sell him on why that’s fun.

We finished the scenario on a Thursday, badly, half our characters exhausted and the loot barely worth the trouble, and he looked genuinely disappointed it was over rather than relieved. Told me the next day he’d been looking at his own copy online. I have not told my wife yet that there might be a second ongoing campaign competing for my evenings. She’ll find out eventually, probably when I start comparing notes between the two parties out loud without meaning to.

The lunch sessions have kept going since, not always Gloomhaven, sometimes just whatever fits in a half hour, but that first stretch is the one I keep thinking about, mostly because I’d forgotten how much of the fun in this hobby is just watching somebody else fall into it the same way you did.