How To Play Frosthaven?

Scenarios

Frosthaven is very much like Gloomhaven with a few things added to it. Mainly around one phase of the game. In Frosthaven you are going out and exploring scenarios, dungeon crawls, where you are fighting enemies, looting treasures, and sometimes completing goals as well.

This is done through a card play system where you play out two cards. The cards are split into two halves, the top and bottom action. You can do the top or bottom action on either card you play, but you must do one of each. These actions are going to be how you move about the board or attack an enemy, primarily. There are other actions but they are less common and dependent upon what character you are playing. The most common one is that some characters will also have healing abilities.

Town

After a scenario you head back into town where a number of things happen. You activate buildings that you’ve gotten up and running in town. They might have an ability that triggers before anything else. The goal, is, as I talk about this, to not spoil anything.

Then you shop, level up, retire characters, craft potions, and more in town. This might not all be available immediately, but it will come available as time goes on in the game. Each of these actions can be done in any order by the players, so you complete a lot as you go.

Finally, as a group, you spend resources if you want and if you can to build a new building. Building up buildings or leveling them up is how Frosthaven is going to grow as a town. But once you do that, you complete the town phase and are ready to head out on your next scenario.

Frosthaven or Gloomhaven?

This is an interesting question. Mainly, do you need both Frosthaven or Gloomhaven. Or is either game that much better than the other one? I think that thus far there is one that I prefer, slightly. I think that Frosthaven is slightly better. But if you own Gloomhaven, it isn’t enough of a difference to go out and buy Frosthaven and not play Gloomhaven.

Frosthaven gets the slightly nod for me in a few areas. Firstly, the town phase adds to the game. I like what you do in town and I like that you get to decide how you grow your town. That means that how I play Frosthaven and how you go through it are going to be different.

The other areas are around the writing and scenarios. The scenarios are better written. But it is more than just that. There are more scenarios with other objectives. In Gloomhaven I kill everything and the scenario is done. In Frosthaven, that is still often the case. But there is more going on, often times, it is kill everything and complete this objective. Or I guard a location or attack a location in order to win. The main mechanisms are similar all the time, but there are more that provide more than just kill everything.

Is It That Much Better?

But what if you find Gloomhaven to just be okay. Is Frosthaven that much better that you need to get that?

No, Frosthaven, at the core, uses the same mechanisms. The card play and action system is the same for your characters. You find that is most of what you do in a game. The scenarios are still the major part. But now the world offers more choices in what you do. So as you play through, you develop more of a specific path for your group versus the game leading the way.

I think that is a major enough difference for me so that I can say that I like it better. But if you don’t like Gloomhaven and the mechanisms, it isn’t enough for the game. It is an extra 10% on top of the game. That isn’t going to cause the game to switch up on how it feels. 100% of the game of the Gloomhaven system is still in the Frosthaven system.

The New Stuff

I already wrote an article on the new stuff. And I even did a review just focused on that. If you want to see all about the new stuff, check that article out here.

Improving Old Stuff

I find that Isaac Childres and team also have improved on some of the old stuff. Mainly around the characters in the game. The balance feels better. And the mechanisms even on the starting characters is more. I remember Gloomhaven out of the box, characters feeling less interesting than the ones that we are playing now.

I think that some of that is there is an expectation that people know the system. Frosthaven doesn’t feel like it needs to teach everything in the game. It just needs to add in a little bit more and provide a different experience. It goes back to the question, do you need both. I think that Frosthaven, even with the characters, wants you to have both.

I appreciate, though, that the game is mix and match. So if I want to bring in a character from Jaws of the Lions, that is possible. If I want to play a character from Gloomhaven, I can do that. Will I do that, unlikely, but it is possible. Mainly from Jaws of the Lions, if we find that we’ve retired most to all of the characters, I think it could happen. But that is not that likely, nor are we close to doing that.

Final Thoughts on Frosthaven

I love Frosthaven. Clearly from what I’ve written about it, I think that it is just as strong as Gloomhaven. However, you won’t ever see it separate from Gloomhaven on my Top 100 Games (of all time) lists. Why, because the core of the game is the same. So there isn’t enough for me to say that what I do changes or that one game is massively better than the other one. Frosthaven feels like a continuation and iteration on Gloomhaven. And I think that is just fine.

For some, that might not be enough to come back to Frosthaven. If you like Gloomhaven but just beat it, or want to try a majorly different campaign, or maybe are burnt out on campaigns, Frosthaven is unlikely to be what you want next. It is, as I said, mainly still Gloomhaven. But if you love Gloomhaven, beat that campaign and you want a game that does more, but not so much that it feels harder or fundamentally a different experience, Frosthaven is for you.

My Grade: A+
Gamer Grade: A+
Casual Grade: C

Note, this is not a game that if you are a casual gamer you should jump into. I think once you understand the core loop and system of Gloomhaven and Frosthaven it isn’t bad to get going or continue in. There is a learning curve to that, though. If you play with someone who knows and likes the system, they’ll be able to ease that transition along. Or, grab Gloomhaven Jaws of the Lion which has a tutorial built into the game to teach you how to play.

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What Caught my Eye with Rogue Angels

So let’s talk about the reasons why I am backing this game. It’s another big campaign game, this time set in space, and I already own two games like that, ISS Vanguard and Stars of Akarios. What is it that makes me want to add Rogue Angels to my collection?

Story

I’ve experienced some of the Rogue Angels story and I’ve experienced it somewhat out of order. But the story with this game is just fun. Emil, the designer, refers to it as a Mass Effect style of story and game. One where you are making agreements with different groups, getting back stabbed, possibly turning on groups yourself, and making choices that affect where everything is going.

I really like it when the choices that I make in a game influence that game going forward. That is something that makes Stars of Akarios and Roll Player Adventures stand out to me. Rogue Angels offers that same feeling. I feel like the choices I make, in the end, really do matter and influence how the story goes. Whether it’s in that scenario or throughout the campaign.

Scenarios aren’t Kill Everything

Speaking of scenarios, one of the knocks on Gloomhaven, a game that all campaign games get to compared to, is that you just kill everything. Well, Rogue Angels is not the same game, and Frosthaven even learns from the mistakes so it’s not a kill everything, the follow up to Gloomhaven.

But Rogue Angels actively doesn’t want you to kill everything. Maybe at the end of some scenarios that is the case, but part of the puzzle is that you can’t. Enemies activate in two groups. If you kill all the red enemies, groups are red and yellow, the yellow enemies activate every time. So now you’re dealing with a group that’s harder to avoid because they are coming faster. So even when you want to kill everything, you need to be strategic about it.

Other times you really don’t. For the game reasons as before, the other group might activate faster. But your goal, and you have a limited number of turns, is to move a box of goods in a pick-up and deliver scenario. Now you have bad guys shooting at you, but if you stop to kill them, or have everyone stop to do it, you won’t win the scenario. And that is just a simple example of different scenario types.

Card Play

Card play or something interesting and unique that you do with your character are important for making a campaign game feel different. I think that there are a good number of dice chuckers out there. And I wouldn’t mind another, but I prefer it when a game does something unique. And Rogue Angels offers something different.

You get to play out two cards, or up to, each round, that do actions. It might be as simple as a basic movement or interaction with an object. Those slot into a cooldown track of 0 and immediately go back to your hand. So you could move twice. Or you might, instead, go and pull out your big gun to try and take out an enemy in a single shot. That has a cooldown of four. After four rounds you’ll get that gun back, so make that shot count.

But, if four is two long, you can hurry it along. It cools down one each turn, and then you can also not play a card to cool down again. And sometimes that is the best action, but it isn’t getting you closer to your objectives. Do you wait or do you really need that gun back now?

Dice Modifiers

And basically every card allows you to roll dice. Those dice offer some different bonuses, though not work on all cards. By that I mean that some actions allow you deal damage, interact so much, or move a distance, and you roll the dice and you can increase that. You look for +1 or +2 in those cases.

Other times, you can’t do that. The amount of damage you do is fixed, or the amount of tokens you draw on an interact is fixed. But you still get to roll some dice. Why, you can get back shields, your defense, that way, or you can get movement. It gives you, potentially a bonus.

And of course, you might need a +2 to your damage off of two dice and you don’t get it. That’s okay. There is a resource you spend to reroll. Granted that’s a limited resource as well. But if you really need to deal enough damage to take out an enemy or your cooldown track will fill up with damage, it’s a good plan.

Damage Cards

Finally, let’s talk about how you take damage, because I mentioned it above and I really like and dislike it. I dislike it because I take a lot of damage in Rogue Angels, sometimes that is even intentional. Other times, the enemies act in a way that I just can’t avoid them.

But when you take damage it goes into your cooldown track. There are some interesting things it does though. When I play a card to the track if I can’t play it to it’s cooldown slot, I can always go to a higher one. With damage, I just get that card back. So you might get back a really powerful card. But now you are trading that off for having less space in your track to play cards.

And the damage cards also are one of the ways that you can set your difficulty level. They have three different groups of bad things that they can do to you. You pick, as you start to play, what level you want to be at. It might be that you want a more casual story driven experience. So you only play with the first bad thing, and sometimes there isn’t even anything in that section. Or you play on hard core mode, and now you’re dealing with some really rough things. It’s a nice simple system to set your difficulty.

Back or Brick?

You already know that Rogue Angels is a back for me. I said that at the beginning, this is a game that I just have way to much fun with. In fact, it was my #1 anticipated crowdfunding game for the rest of the year. And now that it is live, I am even more excited for it. This is really a great game that has just enough luck an randomness that it might mess you over. But there is also a lot you can do to mitigate that, if you planned it well.

If you like campaign games, if you like fun story, I really recommend checking out Rogue Angels. Again, you can find the Kickstarter project here. Hopefully I haven’t oversold it or built up the hype too much. But don’t just take it from me, checkout other previews out there as well.

And there are more out there. Just two of the previews that I really like. And let me know if you’re interested in backing this game? What drew you in to back it?

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I’m going to try and do this review with as few spoilers as possible. So I will not be talking about the plot that comes from the scenarios, but the mechanics of the scenarios and the new character show up before you get into any of that, so if you want a complete surprise those will be getting “spoiled” but they aren’t really a “spoiler”. The only thing I’ll say plot wise is that Gloomhaven: Forgotten Circles picks up immediately after the final main quest plot for Gloomhaven.

There are a few notable changes for Gloomhaven: Forgotten Circles. The first, and primary one, is that scenarios have changed. Now, the basic structure from the original game is having an Introductory section, then special rules, and a conclusion, but when you have doors that trigger more text, that is in another part of the book. So you have to flip through and look on a certain page and a certain section to figure out more and additional layout for the scenario, when the time is right. This normally triggers off of some action that you take in the game, commonly opening a door, but also stepping on a pressure plate can at times also trigger the next session. And a lot of the scenarios now have several of them that are tied together, so you are going to be setting up new parts of the scenario throughout.

This is both a lot of fun and annoying. Let me talk about the annoying part quickly first, this causes scenarios to go longer, normally when we’d set up a scenario we’d lay things out and then only put monsters on as we got into new rooms, and we already know what was going to be in those rooms. In the new set-up, you don’t know that, and while you know the main pieces that you’re going to need, the room layout is going to be a complete unknown. This causes these scenarios to go much longer than the ones from the base game. We could generally get through two scenarios in a night from base Gloomhaven, with the Forgotten Circles expansion scenarios, one generally takes the same time as two, because of some of the start and stop of set-up. However, while that is a negative and annoying, especially for people who feel like set-up is too long or solo players, I do like the fact that the story of a scenario can unfold the way that it does. Hidden information also makes the scenarios harder, and while we have a completely new set of characters which is interesting and the scenarios more challenging, if we had come in with characters we were familiar with and knew the map set-up, the scenarios wouldn’t be much more challenging. I do think that the story in this is better written than in the base game, and some of that is definitely having it unfold.

The couple other new things are abilities that are added into the game. The first being that teleporting is a thing now. Everyone can’t teleport, but the abilities from the main game that cause you to teleport are now getting cards to replace some in the character decks to keep some consistent wording. Having a character that can, if chosen to be played that way, move around the board and ignore terrain is interesting. The other ability added in “regenerate” this is the opposite of “wound” where that one causes you to lose one health a turn and can be healed away, this one causes you to gain a health per turn and if you take damage it goes away. This has been key for us in some scenarios as we don’t have a tank or heavy healing character in our party. I like that trickle effect healing as something to kind of counter wound which can take out a party if you aren’t careful, this can keep you around a little bit longer or a lot longer.

Finally, I should talk about the new class that is added, the Diviner. I’m not considering this a spoiler because when you get the expansion and even if you aren’t playing the expansion scenarios, you gain access to the Diviner class. This class has a few new things that we haven’t seen before, besides being where we get teleporting and the cards that cause regenerate to be placed, the Diviner does a couple other new things. First, they can do a build that allows them to manipulate decks. It’s something that’s very odd, but they can sort the top of the monster attack deck or the top of an allies deck. This is not the build that our player of the Diviner went with, but it’s definitely something new. The other way you can build that character is by using rifts. Rifts are interesting because they can either have a negative effect for the monster, such as disarm or immobilize or they can have a positive effect on the allies such as giving them regenerate or strengthen (not sure if these are 100% accurate examples, but the basic idea is there). However, the rifts come into the play and stay in play, but they are only active for an ability for a single round, and we’ve found with our Diviner because of the speed of the other characters in terms of initiative that the negative ones work better since the other two characters are almost always going ahead of the Diviner.

Let me wrap up by talking about this overall. First, I don’t like this as much as the base game. While that was an easy A+ for me, this is more of an A-/B+ range. I’ll break it down below, simply because Gloomhaven can already be a long game and Forgotten Circles makes each scenario even longer. But I do like some of the other things in it. Regenerate is awesome and the Diviner is a very cool character. Plus the story feels more focused. In Gloomhaven it felt like sometimes the through story thread wasn’t completely there or that it jumped around a little bit, Forgotten Circles definitely has a more fully realized storyline. I don’t know, however, that I would say that it’s a must pick-up. With Frosthaven coming out that’s another big box game that is going to improve upon the linked scenario style to reduce the mid scenario set-up, if you aren’t done with Gloomhaven yet and you think you’ll want Frosthaven, I’d skip Forgotten Circles.

Overall Grade: B+
Gamer Grade: B+
Casual Grade: C-

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I knew, going into Gloomhaven that it was a beast of a game but I was up for that. I thought that I’d enjoy it from the get go because of how the combat worked, how the scenarios worked, and how there was story to the game, and it’s been almost two years of playing almost every other Tuesday, plus some long Saturdays knocking out a bunch of scenarios, but it was worth it.

If you’re been following my Top 100 Games, you would know that I had Gloomhaven as my #1 game. And there are a lot of reasons for it, the story aspect, the unique combat, and the giant epic nature of it all really speak to me and have helped me figure out that I like games like that a lot. Also the bit of a legacy aspect to the game is a ton of fun as well. Is it a perfect game, I don’t think so, but it’s the closest that I’ve found.

Let’s talk about it a little bit more in detail, because I think there are two primary things that hold people back, besides the size of the game, and that’s, do the characters feel different, and do the scenarios feel different?

Do the Characters Feel Different?
I think that this is a clear yes for me. We unlocked every character in the base game and we’ve played all but two of them (plus there’s a new one in the expansion), and the characters have felt different. Some of them were great at healing, some of them would boost others attacks, some of them would go fast and do bits of damage, but always been in and out. Others would go in there and tank and even others would do massive amounts of damage, but were a bit of a glass cannon. There were ones that slung spells, and some that played riffs. Each of the characters felt unique and basically all of them felt like you can tailor them a little bit to how you wanted to play. And while I always wanted to find a tank, I didn’t feel like I was missing anything by pretty often playing a support type of character in the game, because how the supported was different for each character. And yes, we all probably had our favorites coming out of the game, but I don’t think any of us hated a character that we played or even disliked a character because they felt weaker or anything like that.

Do the Scenarios Feel Different?
Now, while the characters feel different, I think that this is one of the areas that Gloomhaven isn’t perfect. It’s not much of knock, but there are a lot of scenarios where the win situation is just kill everything, so that part of the scenario feels the same. And we also happened to hit the run in, grab this thing, and run back out a number of times in a row. But, while the end goal most have been similar fairly often, the story leading in was always interesting and helped the scenarios feel different, but more so than that, the monsters made scenarios feel different. A black imp is very different than a drake which is very different than a skeleton archer in what they do. So you had to play now you played each scenario differently and that’s often where you got most of your differences. Plus, then, you have the unique characters. There were some scenarios that we had to wait until we had a better team to come and deal with it, but that was part of the fun of the game that made scenarios feel unique, there were some characters that were just better in different types of scenarios, and generally, even if they weren’t ideal, you still had a chance to figure it out.

Overall, I don’t really have complaints about Gloomhaven. Maybe that some of the scenarios or more of them anyways, could have been goal oriented, but combat is easier to explain and make as a goal than something that’s trickier, and there was good variety in combat anyways. While I don’t think that Gloomhaven is going to be the game for everyone, I think that a lot of people will enjoy it. The combat is a bit more tactical than your standard Ameritrash game and there is more story than Euro games. And while it is big, the game, once you’re into it, isn’t that difficult, it might just take a couple of scenarios to teach someone who doesn’t do dungeon crawl games all the time.

Overall Grade: A+
Gamer Grade: A+
Casual Grade: C+

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