My Wife Is Better at Gloomhaven Than I Am and I've Made Peace With It

Somewhere around scenario six of our Jaws of the Lion campaign I stopped pretending I was the one calling the shots at our table, because my wife had quietly become the better tactician of the two of us and pretending otherwise was starting to actively hurt our scenario completion rate.

I play the tank, the big slow melee character who’s supposed to hold a doorway and eat hits, which suits me fine, there’s not a lot of subtlety required in “stand here and get hit.” She plays the support character, and support in this game means actually reading the enemy AI decks, tracking which monsters are about to get bonus actions, figuring out positioning two rounds ahead of where the pieces currently sit. I used to think I was doing the harder job because I was the one absorbing the damage. I’ve come around to thinking her job’s harder, she’s the one actually solving the puzzle every round while I’m mostly just standing where she tells me to stand.

That’s not an exaggeration, either, she genuinely tells me where to stand now, and I genuinely listen, because the two or three times early on that I ignored her positioning call and did my own thing, it cost us the scenario both times. There’s a particular tone she uses, calm, a little clipped, when she’s already three moves ahead and I’m about to do something that’ll mess up her plan, and I’ve learned to just stop and ask what she’s seeing instead of committing to my move. It took longer than it should have for me to get there, honestly, there was a stretch a few campaigns back where I’d get a little prickly about being told what to do in a game I’m supposedly the reviewer of on this site, which in hindsight is a genuinely silly thing to have felt defensive about.

What changed it wasn’t one big conversation, it was just losing enough scenarios to my own stubbornness that the pattern became impossible to ignore. She’s better at the specific skill this game actually rewards, which is reading a system and planning around it rather than reacting to it, and I’m better at, I don’t know, showing up and absorbing punishment without complaining too much. Different skills. I used to think being the one who writes the reviews meant I should also be the one who’s better at actually playing the games, which doesn’t hold up under any scrutiny at all once you say it out loud.

We’re deep enough into the campaign now that our characters have specific gear loadouts and a pile of unlocked class envelopes we’re saving for later, and most sessions still end with her having called the last three rounds correctly while I nod along and do what I’m told. I’ve made my peace with it. The scenario completion rate’s a lot better since I did.