Tabletop Tuesday — When the Fun Stops (or, Why We Swapped to Earthborne Rangers from Frosthaven)

It’s Tuesday, and normally I have a nerdy gaming blog locked and loaded, but I didn’t this week, the clock is ticking, and while I don’t often do this, I realized part of what had me blocked was our recently weekly board gaming group’s ongoing frustrating with Frosthaven and…

That’s the topic. That’s the topic that wants to be written about, so even though I do my absolute best around these parts to be pretty “it’s just not for me” about games I don’t connect with, Frosthaven has been this ongoing spiral and I think it’s worth breaking down what… well, broke down.

Starting on a High

My weekly board-gaming group loved Gloomhaven, and that’s saying something. For one, we’d just come off various D&D games that had been going for years, and as the forever-DM, I was ready for someone else to tell the story. One of the other players is a number cruncher who likes figuring out optimal load-outs. My husband doesn’t love the “Be spontaneously creative and role-play your character right now!” parts of RPGs, but likes the stories and settings and the crunch of building characters. The fourth in our group was just kind of done with D&D.

Gloomhaven felt like playing a TTRPG without playing a TTRPG, if that makes sense. Your character is a deck of cards from which you make choices, but you personalize that deck over time, as well as the combat deck (the equivalent of rolling dice), and you also choose your equipment, which further makes the character yours, and there was an over-all story about figuring out what the “Gloom” was, and defeating it. We were all aboard, enjoyed how the “retirement” worked to then unlock new character options, and by the time we got to the final adventures, it’d been a solidly good ride, with only a few scenarios here and there stymying us in any way, and a few hitches (like character goals that required us to back-track because we’d drawn them later on in the game).

So, when an expansion was announced—Forgotten Circles—we nabbed that right up and… had a horrible time.

Oof, Forgotten Circles. I’ve written about that before, and I don’t need to do it again. When we saw a second version of Forgotten Circles was released (with a lot of the issues we’d faced corrected, and an almost entirely re-done character) it still didn’t tempt me, but I’m glad other people won’t have the first version experience we had. Jaws of the Lion came next for us, and was a positive experience, even though it was amusingly now meant to be the game you played before Gloomhaven, as a way to learn the game. Streamlined, shorter, and with a narrower plot-line with a couple of branches to get you from beginning to end. We played Jaws of the Lion and it rekindled the joy of Gloomhaven that had been somewhat soured by Forgotten Circles.

So, when Frosthaven was announced, I was intrigued. I didn’t immediately click a kickstarter pledge, but I did watch and listen to updates, and it sounded like they’d course-corrected from where Forgotten Circles went so wrong, so eventually I did back it, and it arrived, and we broke open the box and started playing and it was fun.

At least, at first.

Maybe Just an Outpost Phase We’re Going Through?

Last February, I talked about our ongoing game of Frosthaven and said we were still enjoying it and continuing to play even despite the list of caveats and that’s… no longer true? Or, more to the point, we decided to take a break with Earthborne Rangers, and said we’d alternate, but haven’t gotten back to Frosthaven because no one really wants to. So, what changed between February and now?

Only a few things, but wow were they impactful.

Two buildings: As you unlock buildings in Frosthaven, you gain access to new things. For example, you can enhance cards, or grow your own herbs, or purchase lumber or metal or hide as different buildings unlock. During the Outpost Phase (which, as I mentioned before, we delayed at the end of one game so we could always just do it at the start of our next session when we gather to play because it was such a slog after we’d finished a scenario and felt more like homework and an anti-climax than a reward for completing an scenario) you can visit the buildings to do whatever it is the buildings do, and they’ve been pretty cool. Except, alas, we unlocked two buildings whose function is to make scenarios harder. Thematically, I’m not even sure of the reason they do this (I’m trying to talk without spoilers here) but for one of the buildings, you have to draw a number of cards from its own little deck of ways to modify your upcoming scenario and then choose (at least) one to affect your next scenario. Perhaps it’s getting pushed every time you get hit, or perhaps the enemy has some other advantage, but regardless, it makes the scenario harder. The reward for completing these cards is slowly modifying the Town Guard deck that you use when the town is invaded by monsters, and that’s already a part of the game we found frustrating.

More to the point, this is just one more thing to remember during a scenario—”Wait, did you remember that you get pushed when you get hit? Because if you stay there, you’re going in the trap when it’s the enemy turn.” “Aw crap, I didn’t. No. Okay, I’m not going to do what I thought I was going to do, because you’re right, that’s a bad move. Hold on…”

It got to the point where when we weren’t allowed to go back to town between scenarios, we were excited, because it meant we didn’t have to draw one of those damned cards.

Then we unlocked another building, and it, too, handed out little cards (this time one per player) that—I’m sure you can guess what’s coming—made things more difficult. Or at least, that’s the reaction most of us had at the table, since they’re kept secret from each other until you fulfil the requirement. They’re all different. Also, fun-fact, there was errata with the deck: it’s set up backwards, but we figured that out quickly enough. So now I have this “Trial” card I’m carrying that (spoiler) means I’ll take damage every time one of the other players loots a token—that’ll be fun to keep track of, he said sarcastically—and making my gaming session that much more un-fun as I try not to die because the other players are picking up loot. Which hurts me. Because… uh… trial, I guess?

And when I survive a scenario where we succeed, then I get to… draw a new trial card. Yipee.

The Puzzle Book: We realized we still had a few character classes locked after we retired the last new-to-us character from Frosthaven, and in frustration, we decided to look online (at spoiler-free posts) to see the scenario paths we’d need to follow to finally unlock said classes. We’d actually been pretty much on the right path, it turned out, it’s just a long freaking path and by design that you don’t get to unlock the character classes earlier rather than later, but we course corrected a little to get ourselves there faster and… oh. This unlocks a “puzzle book.”

One of the four of us doesn’t mind puzzles, so we handed her the first pages (which was a cipher) and then she translated it and got back to us and it told us to turn the page and it was another puzzle and repeat a few times but—and this is important—with multiple missteps because there are errors in the puzzles. Now, I’m Mr. Forgiveness when it comes to game errata because I’m an author and I know how that shit gets past dozens of eyes, but oof, this did not bring the fun.

It also started to become harder to keep track of, and the puzzles don’t just have errata, they’re also—to be blunt—poorly designed. The kerning makes them harder to decode, things that involve drawing lines to solve don’t line up correctly, and that’s just the first few we’ve gotten through before we just… stopped. They look or read like escape room puzzles, but worse. Then we hit our limit when it turned out one of the solutions involved remembering text from a scenario we now played over a year ago. We play once a week, and yes, sometimes skip a week to play something else, but there’s no way we would have recalled that information (and there’s only a vague image in the puzzle book to guide you back to it), and it’s beyond unrealistic to assume your players are so involved in your game that they’ll notice a background image kinda/sorta might relate to one of those scenarios we played and maybe we should try and find the conclusion text to that scenario and re-read it?

Hell no.

That’s when we decided the puzzle book wasn’t worth the frustration, and went online to just find the solutions, skipping it entirely. And at that point, my husband said, “Maybe we should just play the scenarios, and skip the whole Outpost stuff all together?”

We all eyed our “Trial” cards and decided… yeah. Let’s just do that.

And then we didn’t. We started playing Earthborne Rangers instead.

Will You Finish Frosthaven?

I don’t know. At this point, it feels unlikely. It’s unfortuante. It went from being a game we were enjoying to a game with some frustrations, then more frustrations, and then even more frustrations. And none of the added complexity that the game rolled out to us as we played landed as more fun for any of us. We are four different gamers who enjoy four different styles of games, but somehow, the longer we played Frosthaven, the more it managed to find new ways to disappoint all four of us.

We still have four locked character boxes, and a lot of side scenarios and the like, but when we gather and talk about setting up a game and we consider Frosthaven? Mostly we just sigh, and then suggest other games.

Maybe we’ll circle back when we feel like we’re ready for the frustration. But that just doesn’t feel like the way you should be approaching a game, no?