Gloomhaven stamina and exhaustion guide

Your character’s number of starting cards directly influence how fast you’ll become exhausted. For example, without playing lost cards nor taking long rests, a Tinkerer becomes exhausted after 36 rounds, but a Scoundrel already after 20 rounds.

The Spellweaver is a special case: with her Reviving Ether card she can pick up all her lost cards once. If her timing is right, she can last 28 rounds, longer than half of the starting classes.

These character differences have some consequences:

Normally a scenario takes 10-15 rounds, so even the Scoundrel’s low stamina of 20 active rounds is plenty, if you play her cards right…​

What’s the stamina cost for playing a lost card?

Well, it depends on the timing. To illustrate, let’s presume you’re playing a Brute or a Mindthief:

If you play a lost card before your first rest, you effectively loses 4 rounds in the scenario:

On the other hand, if you play the same lost card near the end of the scenario, you only lose 1 round (or less):

Each lost card you play early on in the scenario costs you a lot of stamina. The stamina cost of the first lost card reduces by 1 round for:

Round cost of playing the first lost card:

So if you’re a Scoundrel or a Cragheart, you might wait until after the first or third rest to play a lost card. On the other hand, if you’re a Brute, Mindthief, Tinkerer or Spellweaver, there’s no point in waiting until after the first rest to play a lost card: you need to wait an even number of rests.

Again, the Spellweaver is a bit special. In her case, that higher than normal cost, occurs twice: at the start of the scenario and after you play Reviving Ether. And the cost is only 3 rounds. Furthermore, there is a moment when playing a lost card actually increases your stamina: it’s best to combine her Reviving Ether with another lost card, that is played first, so that other card ends up back in your hand, instead of on the discard pile.

So avoid playing your lost cards before the first few rests, especially if you’re a low-stamina character. On the other hand, if you’re a Tinkerer and play 2 lost cards before the first rest, you still have more stamina left than a Brute, Mindthief or a Scoundrel that didn’t play any:

To avoid damage from a monster attack, you can choose to lose 1 hand card instead. Losing a hard card actually costs more rounds than playing a lost card. For example, a Brute loses 4 rounds if you play a lost card before the first rest. But if you bleed a hand card before the first rest, you lose 5 rounds:

That’s awful lot. If you can survive a heavy attack in the early game, take the damage, instead of losing a hand card. You can use the rounds that you don’t lose to ignore attack damage 3-4 times in the late game instead.

Instead of losing 1 hand card, you can also choose to lose 2 discard cards to nullify an incoming attack. That’s even worse. For example, if our Brute needs to avoid an attack and has no hand cards left, he’ll lose 8 rounds by bleeding a pair of discard cards:

Remember that the 2 cards you’re playing in a round cannot be used to mitigate damage! They’re considered to be locked in. So be especially careful of taking too much damage in the last round(s) before your first rest, when you have no hand cards left: you might need to forfeit 2 discard cards and a lot of stamina to survive, per attack. One attack can cripple you. Two attacks can devastate you.

If the Tinkerer bleeds 2 pairs of discard cards (so 4 cards), she loses 18 rounds and has a maximum of 18 rounds, which is still acceptable. Ironically, the Spellweaver in the same situation only loses 10 rounds and because her Reviving Ether works like a reset button, she’s also left with a maximum of 18 rounds:

A minor stamina potion allows you to pick up 2 discarded cards once per scenario. That effectively gives you only one extra round. It doesn’t return any lost cards, so it’s no excuse to play a lost card or bleed early, because those actions cost you far more rounds (usually 4 or 5).

The real advantage of this stamina potion is that you can pick up your best 2 cards and play them an extra time.

If you have 0 or 1 hand cards left at the end of a round, it’s time to take a short or long rest. But what if you rest to get your discarded cards back earlier?

The stamina cost in rounds is always the number of hand cards divided by 2 rounded down. This calculation is the same early in the scenario as near the end (although you’ll have less hand cards on average near the end).

For example, if you have 6 or 7 hand cards left at the end of a round, a rest will reduce your stamina by 3 rounds. Remember that a Brute loses 4 rounds for playing a single lost card. So even if you rest with half your deck in hand before the first rest, you’ll still lose less rounds than playing one lost card!

I hope you enjoyed this guide. If you want to do your own experiments, try our interactive stamina calculator.