Tabletop Tuesday — Frosthaven
Since I chatted about Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs a couple of weeks ago, I’ve had thoughts about Frosthaven in my head. When we first got Frosthaven, we were super excited (seriously, even just opening the box had me giddy because of how Frosthaven, very unlike Gloomhaven, was able to go back into the box!), and I’ve mentioned previously how I struggle with Legacy games because, y’know, they make you change the game itself—stickers!—but I was happy I bought the reusable stickers for Frosthaven rather than the permanent ones. When Frosthaven arrived, I was so excited! And myself, my husband, and the two players we’ve played all the other Gloomhaven games with gathered and began our trek to the frozen wilds of this world to play this legacy game, which was the latest in the series of games we’d (mostly) really enjoyed (except for Forgotten Circles, which was so bad).
Frozen!
Okay, for the most part, now we’ve played three years worth of in-game timeline (and have been playing Frosthaven itself in the real-world for going on two years) the answer to “What do you think of Frosthaven?” is… it’s complicated.
Let me go back to our experience with what we disliked most about Forgotten Circles (which was a lot): the complicated scenarios that had you flipping back and forth through a book while playing, pausing to decode things mid-game (which ground everything to a halt), and a new character (which unfortunately I was playing) that was basically the antithesis of “fun” because every other scenario (or more) was designed with having stuff that only that character could even possibly attempt to do, which railroaded my playing experience down to “I have to be the move from this pressure plate to the next one rather than choosing to do anything else, or we lose.” It’s quite telling that in what they called the “second printing” they changed almost every single card for that character—I don’t call that a second printing, I call that a second edition.
Frosthaven is not as bad as all that. But it also hasn’t been as fun as Gloomhaven was. It’s in the middle.
The starting characters were all fun to play, and there hasn’t been one yet we haven’t enjoying playing (even the ones we’ve unlocked, although more on that in a moment). Each character is interesting, and the perk system has been adjusted slightly—there are more ways to gain the checkmarks you need (the battle goal draw deck is much larger, offering you way more challenges to play your character a certain way to earn those checkmarks and tweak your battle deck)—but there’s also “masteries” (which for me fall under the ‘caveat’ category below).
The scenarios do fall somewhere between Gloomhaven (where they were mostly “defeat all the enemies” with a smaller percentage of “here’s a nifty mechanic to apply to the game that changes the goal to something more than defeat all the enemies”) and Forgotten Circles (where it felt like every single scenario was awash in, “okay, so here’s all the rules we’re changing for this particular scenario, try to keep it in your head while you play.”) So, while we were hoping for a more Gloomhaven-like experience with scenarios, it’s more like a third of them? To the point where when it’s time to choose which scenario we want to play next, over the last two years we’ve gotten into a bit of a “brace yourselves” feeling when we see we’ve run out of 1- or 2- complexity options, and it’s time to crack a scenario that’s listed as complexity level 3. Oddly, though, now and then some of those higher-complexity ranked scenarios just… aren’t difficult. But that’s to be expected with four players bringing four different character skillsets to a given game. There are combos that just work for some scenarios. So, overall, the scenarios are okay. We aren’t grinding our teeth through them like we did with Forgotten Circles, but we’re not having as much fun as we had with Gloomhaven where I didn’t have to explain winning conditions at the start of scenarios very often.
One other major update we all like is the loot deck. Instead of just picking up coins when enemies fall, you pick up a loot token and draw from a loot deck which offers coins, yes, but also potentially metal, wood, hide, six different types of plants, or a random item (each scenario has its own combination thereof). Especially early on, when your characters need to craft equipment, those crafting supplies are important (but more on crafting later). It’s definitely more fun than coins, though, is what I’m saying.
The difficulty level feels like it spiked, too, though that could also be a function of not having access to the same solid levels of gear you have in the first game—that aforementioned crafting mechanic, rather than just flat-out buying equipment—and the scenarios having more complexity than “defeat the enemies” far more often. Especially when there’s a new (and therefore lower-level) character in a group with longer-played characters, we’ve found ourselves playing on “Easy” a lot more often than we did in Gloomhaven—and some of those issues are still there for four player games where bad enemy actions drawn on round 1 are just beyond punishing (one player getting pummelled by a half-dozen or more attacks before they even get to act, for example). Now, more difficult isn’t the end of the world, and we haven’t lost a tonne of scenarios, so it’s been okay—but as I said, we’ve definitely lowered our threshold for dropping to “Easy.”
Speaking of easy, I love the division between the Scenario Guide and the Section Book (which is where blocks of unlocked text or secondary locations in scenarios are kept)—huge improvement over Forgotten Circles. You do end up flipping through the Section Book multiple times, but the original scenario remains open the entire time, which makes all the difference in the world, and as yet there have been zero “now stop playing and decode this message” incidents, which huzzah.
Also, Enhancement is really improved, using shaped dots on the cards so when you apply (in my case, reusable) stickers, there’s some sense to what can be modified how, which allows for much more enhancment options (since some cards will only let you add a +1 on a basic symbol, say, but other symbols will let you add +1s, elements, or statuses). But—once again—more on the reusable stickers below.
The Caveats (and there are quite a few)I mentioned that we’ve enjoyed the characters we’ve played and unlocked, and that’s true, but after two years of playing, we’ve still got five characters to unlock. Gloomhaven was far, far more streamlined in giving you new character options, and it’s frustrating to see those boxes still unopened. We know part of that is likely because we’ve been avoiding the higher complexity scenarios when we’re just not up for it Unlike Gloomhaven, you unlock characters in Frosthaven not when you achieve your character life goals, but… randomly at other times. Sometimes it’s upgrading or building a new location in Frosthaven, sometimes it’s at the end of a particular scenario. But there’s no clues to it, so our experience is possible: you can play, and play, and play… and be unlucky enough not to crack open new characters, even as you’re building up your version of Frosthaven and progressing your way through the game.
Also? Masteries. I loathe them. Frosthaven already has multiple ways that challenge your characters during scenarios, one being the battle goal deck, and another one is introduced once you build a particular building that creates an extra condition during each scenario, which I won’t explain because it’s a spoiler, but suffice it to say as you progress, you’ll end up with even the most basic scenario potentially getting quite a bit more difficult because of a drawn card. On each individual character sheet, however, there are also two “masteries.” If you complete a mastery during a scenario, you get a perk. Which sounds great, except the “masteries” aren’t. They’re not about mastering your abilities in a way that makes you more effective or useful to the party, they’re about using your cards in a specific way—one almost never effective or useful for the scenario goal—that leads to a frustrating experience for everyone else (or you, if you’re getting close and then someone else messes it up for you unknowingly). One of our group really likes the masteries, so your mileage may vary, but in the starter-class Geminate, for example, one of the masteries was to “swap forms” every single turn, and that led to three scenarios in a row of utter frustration for the rest of us while the Geminate’s turn seemed to consistently amount to “I move here, and swap forms, that’s it, that’s all I can do!” while we all got pummelled by the monsters. If the “masteries” were more consistently (or even often) something that helped the party, rather than making one player make bizarre choices, it might have been more fun, but for me, they quickly became something I ignored and hoped the other players would ignore, too.
Similarly: potions and crafting were hugely frustrating for the first year or so we played. Adding in a crafting mechanic was an interesting idea, but it had two problems we bumped into. One: there are only two of every crafted item card, which means for four players, we somehow run out of things we’re making out of raw materials we’re collecting. Make it make sense, please, that we can only craft two plain wooden shields when we’ve got the wood and the time? I understand the actual real-world reason—it would double the number of cards—but in-game it’s just bizarre, and especially when you start unlocking potion recipes with the herbs you gather and everyone wants a healing potion but you’ve only got the ability to brew two because… uh… um. Reasons.
Speaking of potions, that was the single most frustrating part of the crafting experience for us in the early game. We unlocked crappy potions first. Truly. It was so frustrating to go from a game where you could buy a healing potion for everyone to a game where we couldn’t even brew up one of the two we’d get access to—eventually. This is just crap luck, to be clear: the loot cards we drew gave us certain herbs, and we were unlocking new potions as soon as we were able on the little potion chart, but it took us ages to finally unlock some of the more basic potions just as a matter of poor luck, and those early games had a layer of unnecessary frustration because of it. Or, put another way, it wasn’t fun to unlock potions because we kept getting potions none of us wanted—we’d use them, grudgingly, but they weren’t what we were hoping for, and the grind to get enough ingredients to “try again” felt entirely like that: a grind.
And, speaking of grind—there’s the post-scenario “Outpost phase.” This is meant to be the “you get back to Frosthaven, what happens?” and while it’s not necessarily a bad thing—there are outpost event cards—sometimes Frosthaven gets attacked and it turns our you’re not done playing for the night, as there’s more card-flipping and a battle and decisions to make rather than a quick post-scenario “okay, let’s stock our loot, craft and buy things, and get ready for the next session.” We ended up “fixing” this (that’s over-stating) by just skipping it once until our next session, when we played it out. We do the Outpost Phase first, then head off to our Scenario, then stop again. So, we’re kind of doing “the last half of the previous session, then the first half of this one” every time we play, but it works for us and doesn’t feel like tacked on homework after a session.
Finally, the reusable stickers, which I bought because I wanted to be able to return the game back to its unplayed form to pass it forward to someone else, or just to start over completely. For whatever reason, in the pack of reusable stickers, there’s everything except the stickers you place in the rulebook, which defeats the entire purpose of the reusable stickers: you can’t actually “reset” the game by removing all the stickers, because the rulebook will have all the stickers you need to add throughout gameplay, and the only option for those are the permanent stickers that came with the game. Annoying.
But Are you Enjoying It?We’re still playing it, so yes.
I know that list above seemed very heavy on the frustrations—and they did frustrate us—but some of those have faded (we’ve now unlocked a wide range of potions, figured out how to home-rule the Outpost phase so it doesn’t feel like post-game homework, and most of us ignore masteries). The still-locked new characters is still annoying, but we’ve replayed some and also used some of the original Gloomhaven characters (for which there are also updated character sheets for using them in Frosthaven, which is nice).
We’re enjoying it enough. But unlike the original Gloomhaven, we also take occasional weekly breaks on Tuesday Gaming Night when we’re not feeling up to it—we’ve played some other board games, some Pathfinder, I also have my Star Trek Adventures groups—and then we go back to Frosthaven again after a week off.
