Whoever coined “Honey, I Shrunk the Gloomhaven” as a description for this deserves an award, because that’s exactly the experience, tiny insect and rodent characters navigating an oversized domestic world, all packed into a box small enough for a backpack, with a combat system that genuinely feels like the real Gloomhaven rather than a stripped down imitation. The four card A and B hand system this uses is a real improvement over the base game’s action selection, it rewards planning your whole turn as a unit in a way that clicked for me faster than Frosthaven’s version did.

Two real problems, though, and I want to flag both clearly. First, the printed rulebook in the box is incomplete, you have to go online for the full ruleset, which is a strange decision for a game explicitly marketed as portable, the whole point of which is playing somewhere you might not have reliable internet. Second, and this bugged me more over time than at first: my cards started warping within a few sessions despite sleeving them immediately, which for a box this size and this price point is a disappointing corner to cut. The switch from Gloomhaven’s card-based attack modifier deck to a plain die roll is also a real design downgrade, not a sidegrade, it introduces swing where the original system had you managing a modifier deck you could actually shape over a campaign.

All that said, once a scenario is actually running, it delivers. Fifteen to twenty minutes per solo scenario, genuinely tense combat puzzles, and the small footprint on the table is deceptive, it sprawls more than you’d expect from a “compact” game, which is a funny problem to have but a real one if your table space is limited. I’d steer a brand new player toward Jaws of the Lion first rather than starting here, this rewards existing familiarity with the system more than it teaches it from scratch. For an existing Gloomhaven fan wanting something to take on a trip, though, four stars and a real recommendation.