Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs Review: Can It Play Well On the Go?
If you’ve spent any time around tabletop or video games in the past few years, you’ve probably run into the name Gloomhaven. The original has become a bit of a modern heavyweight: an all-in-one role-playing board game with legacy-style progression, and a consistent fixture in the top tier of BoardGameGeek rankings since it launched in 2017.
It’s also widely known for two things that don’t exactly help when you’re trying to fit gaming into real life: it’s pricey, and it’s incredibly dense, both in weight and in the amount of space it demands for storage. Cephalofair’s first move toward making the experience easier to access came in 2020 with a narrative prequel, Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, which reduced the cost and cut the physical footprint by about two-thirds.
For players who still felt that even Jaws was more than they wanted to carry around, Cephalofair’s response arrived as Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs. It’s a solo-focused spin-off that costs only a little more than a typical tabletop word game and ships in a compact box roughly the size of a stick of butter packed into brick-like proportions.
During development, the publisher claimed the game was compressed enough to be playable on an airplane tray table. I had a trip already booked from Australia to the U.S. starting about a week after it hit store shelves, so I wanted to see whether that promise held up in the least comfortable “desk” imaginable.
From MEL to LAX: learning the rules mid-flight
To fully commit to the experiment, I didn’t even crack the box until I was seated in my economy seat. That decision turned a simple travel annoyance—departure delays—into a bit of a gift, because it gave me time to be ready for what came next.
My first surprise was that Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs doesn’t include a printed rulebook. Instead, there’s a 35-page quick-start guide in the box, and while it’s undeniably helpful, it’s also kind of wild to have the “quick” material stretch that long. The actual rulebook is presented as a text document hosted on Cephalofair’s GitHub.
To avoid relying on in-flight internet, I found a fan-made PDF version that uses more thoughtful formatting and clearer layout than the raw text. It wasn’t the cleanest first impression, but at least it solved the immediate problem without forcing me into the airline Wi-Fi trap.
Of course, long-haul flights aren’t ideal conditions for learning anything complicated. Even after landing and getting properly rested, I still found the quick-start, the full rule explanation, and even the quick reference card to be frustratingly unclear when it came to communicating the rules.
The quick-start booklet kicks off with a big QR code encouraging players to “skip the rulebook” and instead use an interactive tutorial app on a phone. That single design choice felt extremely revealing about the intention behind the product. Still, I stayed the course without it, and after about an hour of bouncing between the different rule materials, I finally got the terms of play down—though the process was more irritating cross-referencing than smooth onboarding.
A title that matches the premise
Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs leans into its premise right away: your new adventurer has been shrunk down to the scale of a housefly and must fight through a mostly straight-line sequence of numbered scenario cards to return to full size. The joke lands visually too—because the included miniatures for the six playable heroes (along with colored cubes used for enemies) are built to true-to-scale size, they end up looking like they belong in the same world as the story.
That scale is also exactly why the game becomes a bit of a logistics problem in transit. On a plane—where even mild turbulence can turn a “table” into a moving surface—those tiny pieces are alarmingly easy to misplace. There’s also a custom die that you roll throughout play. Because the prospect of turbulence felt very real, I waited until after the first in-flight meal before attempting an actual session, and I asked to keep the meal tray with me so I’d have a flat area with some boundaries.
Despite the learning friction, Buttons & Bugs does a genuinely impressive job of compressing the epic action role-playing feel of its larger relatives into a much smaller package. Once I got past the rules confusion, the early scenarios ran smoothly. Each scenario doesn’t give you a ton of things to “do” beyond fighting, but the card-based combat has real strategic weight. As you progress through later scenarios, the escalating complexity of encounters forces you to think further ahead across multiple turns rather than just reacting on the spot.
Still, the very structure that makes the game work indoors starts to clash with the reality of playing it in a cramped, unstable space.
Every scenario card includes printed loot on both the top and bottom edges. When you finish a scenario, those cards move into your stash, and you can equip the appropriate items on your character card when the next scenario begins. Later fights can bring up to four different enemies at once, and each requires its own card plus a health tracker dial. As chapters continue, the number of components you must lay out at the same time grows quickly—so the “where do I put everything?” question becomes harder as the campaign goes on.
Read: 11 of the best travel-sized card and board games
On the story side, I wouldn’t call the narrative particularly gripping, but it’s a perfectly pleasant framework for the adventure and it matches the game’s light, silly energy.
The six heroes each play noticeably differently, and the level of complexity varies as well. There’s also a small but important twist to keep solo play feeling fresh: at the end of many scenario cards, the game may instruct you to jump to a specific numbered card rather than continuing sequentially, depending on which character you’re using. That kind of branching goes a long way toward making the solo experience feel more replayable than it otherwise might.
The box claims each scenario should take around 20 minutes, but in practice the learning phase—especially the fiddliness of getting the rules straight—pushes the time way past that on first play. On top of that, scenario difficulty can be fairly demanding, adding more time to sessions. If you’re thinking about picking up Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs specifically to use during a commute, it’s worth tempering expectations.
After putting in many hours, my opinion didn’t swing wildly compared to my first hour. It remains a genuinely impressive game, but it’s also one that kept nudging me with small annoyances, the kind that don’t ruin the fun but do prevent it from feeling frictionless.
The rulebook situation is definitely rough, and the way you’re expected to piece things together can be uncomfortable. That said, the gameplay itself eventually becomes more intuitive. The mechanical design is clever, and I also think it’s strong value at the recommended retail price of AUD $39.95.
Even though it’s technically playable anywhere, I found that most scenarios rely on too many physical components to be comfortably handled in transit—at least not in any setting smaller than the back seat of a car. The time it asks for, combined with the amount of mental attention required in each scenario, also edges it beyond what feels realistic for a simple half-hour lunch break.
Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs is a terrific game and an impressive downsizing of its gargantuan predecessors. The only real shame is that it doesn’t quite compress down enough to make travel play feel as effortless as the pitch suggests.
Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs
Designer(s): Joe Klipfel, Nikki Valens
Publisher: Cephalofair
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Jam Walker is a games and entertainment journalist from Melbourne, Australia. They hold a bachelor’s degree in game design from RMIT, though they joke they probably should have chosen journalism instead. They also talk about wrestling at length on Twitter/X under @Jamwa.
