Frosthaven | Shelfside Review

[Music] foreign [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] help help I'm being attacked [Music] what the [Music] Frost Haven a tiny settlement carved out of the Frozen Wilderness isolated by towering unbreachable drifts your skin is thick nothing is for this [Applause] 70-something scenarios into a frost Haven and the campaign is done every envelope has been unlocked and now it's time to review Frost Haven in its entirety spoilers will be forewarned through timestamps on screen yes this very screen you're looking at right now which also happens to have the like And subscribe button somewhere on it I'm gonna need you to click those onwards with the review frostaven is the big box sequel to gloomhaven the former number one game on Board Game Geek as such Frost Haven is mechanically identical with some touch-ups and new additions to the formula meaning it's still a massive one to four player campaign Dungeon Crawler containing an absurd amount of content where the campaign Loop consists of picking a scenario to do getting sick loot coming back to town to use loot for progression rinse and repeat for eternity actual gameplay Remains the Same with scenarios having specific objectives to complete unique enemies to defeat new tile layouts to beat on spitting mad heat everyone brings in a hand of class specific ability cards with hand size listed on their match every round you all play two cards face down simultaneously reveal everyone chooses one of their cards to determine their initiative take your turns in order from lowest initiative number to highest when it's your turn you use one card's top half and the other card's bottom half to perform your moves attacks and abilities before discarding them if you're out of cards your character can rest to recover everything in discard except one card gets lost for the scenario enemies have their own ability decks they play from to take their turns in initiative order and the gameplay is fundamentally you carefully managing your hand of cards on top of outmaneuvering enemies on the board so that you don't lose the scenario from running out of either cards or Hell Frost saving Gameplay at its core is identical to gloomhavens and the changes are from introducing new mechanics plus updating old ruling nuances which would take forever to go through and not worth covering in an overview and on that note because frosting is so mechanically similar to gloomhave and this review is going to do the pros and cons a bit differently since we already have an in-depth gloomhaven review there's no point in retreading Old ground by diving deep into the same points like why the card play is excellent or how the progression systems are masterfully designed to create player modulated difficulty naturally through gameplay and not just through strict easy normal hard modes for all intents and purposes Frost Haven inherits all the same Pros as gloomhaven Instead This is review highlights what's changed because a lot of frost savings Pros include improvements that strengthen gloomhaven's pros and even fix gloomhaven's cons so if you don't really know anything about gloomhaven's gameplay system we highly encourage you to check out our gloomhaven review for a more base level understanding but if you're already familiar or you just don't care and want to listen to me talk about with the new stuff you are in the right place last disclaimer shelf site is pretty buddy buddy with cephal Affair the company behind gloomhaven like our names are in the Frost save and play tester credits obvious conflict of interest for this review super cringe time for some transparency the work that was done on our part was literally just play testing the locked classes and primarily Coral plus kelp so yes I will take all the credit for those two classes making the top five most fun classes poll on BGG but what this also means is that we literally didn't play test anything else so no campaign mechanics unlockables or any other new systems introduced in Frost Haven I went into this game knowing nothing that was going on minus the locked classes and even then they still surprised me sometimes because I didn't stick around long enough to see the final versions or anything else about Frost saving because once big bad Isaac children's was like all right we're making good progress under glasses let's introduce the campaign into play testing I was like oh nope nope hey I'm not a contractor or employee of cephalifer I can off whenever I want because that way I can bring you this Frost Haven review with my honest opinion going into this game blind and oh boy I got a lot to say starting with the pros components visually the entirety of frost Haven is a massive aesthetic overhaul over gloomhaven and pretty much any random component you grab looks better than before you look at the art there's more variety of backgrounds more details in the background and crazier looking enemies like just look at this sleep paralysis demon what the hell the ability cards all got this Sleek overhaul with art in the background instead of this broken concrete looking thing the mapped House have a unique looking art instead of four generic templates and then the big map board is incredible because of how Vivid the world are is I can't show our campaign map due to spoilers because there's stuff that affects the world in your town but whatever here's the timestamp to skip this because I'm showing it anyways for those of you who don't care since you gotta see this oh look at these out of contact spoilers hopefully you're trying not to read the names of any of these stickers what's up with that massive Spire in the Frozen waist you have no idea but it's pretty freaking cool isn't it that's just the top half of the map the bottom is your own little town of frost Haven looking at all these random buildings we built anyways yeah Friday has improved Graphics design and it's not just the art that's looking clean as hell look at these monster ability cards Frost even made their colors pop by darkening backgrounds and saturating slash brightening the colored bits boom color correction is better on all of the components than the class and monster ability cards all got simplified iconography so it's super easy to parse what's considered an ability modifier and generally more complicated abilities and crazier attack patterns are enabled thanks to this change also I'm aware that some gloomhaven veterans are salty over the ability card layout changes since the icons don't have words anymore but sorry this change literally just functions better and in my honest opinion also looks better like you can vocalize all you want that the old format looks better your opinion is valid because arbitrary aesthetic taste is a thing sure but you cannot and good face argue that the old system would work for classes like link bite because then the cards would look like untreated schizophrenic episodes which isn't cool go get professional help taking care of yourself is badass but yeah please don't be in denial over this because you can't say that these locked class cards or these boss stat cards would be okay with the old format and besides summons in gloomhaven also had only icons you've already done this before trust me it's better this was a pro you'll survive stop freaking out over change and yes newer players parse the cards just as fine if not better than before both anecdotally and from Reading play tester plus convention demo feedback online moving on sorry for the deranged tangent for those of you not in the know how to get that out of my system because oh my god there were a lot of unbelievably stupid comments when this card layout change was announced glasses and frost Haven also have actual unique components specific to their mechanics death Walker can put down Shadow Towers everywhere and interact with them bone taper and banner spear have a ton of summon standees blink blade As Time tokens lock classes have Bobby Boo this adds so much gameplay Clarity plus table presence to all the the classes and is such a huge step up from gloomhaven summons which were these numbered circles Frost Havens plastic wraps for holding class cards are also bigger than Gloom Havens allowing you to slip in a few tokens so that there's less loose stuff dangling the envelope which is particularly important for any tiny tokens not falling out the bottom and you might have noticed that there's standees for the classes for those of you who don't want to use the minis character mats are also way more useful in Frost having for giving you gameplay rulings and tips pertaining to your class instead of gloomhaven's round summer which stopped being useful like two scenarios in and is much better relegated to a player raid card seeing class specific info makes way more sense on the component that you know details the class you're playing then there's these initiative tokens for every class and monster so that once you determine turn order for the round it's super easy to track who's going next granted these were first introduced in Jaws the line but in Frost Haven they've been made way bigger so you can actually read them from a distance and for the last class component Pros The Minis also got a quality bump with more details on the models and unique bases with their own terrain and class icon on the bottom the mode lines are also better hidden whereas in gloomhaven you can clearly see that run across the base and up the models next up Pro is involving the other non-class components used in combat the health exp dials now have notches to make them easier to spin element tokens have prettier designs there's more damage token denominations the overlay towers are no longer double-sided thank God because it was super annoying to set up blue maker scenarios we also got four different standee base colors white and yellows are still there for normal and Elite enemies but then there's blues for your character summons and reds for Unique enemies and bosses enemy standees also got bigger so it's easier to see their numbers and beautiful artwork their building cards are all named bright change brought over from Jaws of the line very evocative and the monster stat sleeves are double-sided now no more annoyingly grabbing a bunch until you find the correct six slot or ten slot every sleeve now just has them except the boss leaves which are clearly boss leaves because they're only covering half of the monster stats oh by the way bosses now have halves instead of a quadrants since there needs to be more space for more crazier special boss abilities really makes bosses stand out plus makes their stats and abilities more clear time for random campaign component Pros like how there's a stupid amount of unlockables this time around there's still 11 classes to unlock but now there's 17 envelopes that and there's multiple charts where you can peel off covers to reveal what's underneath the Alchemy chart for revealing new potions to craft and the scenario flowcharts for unlocking new scenarios and plotting your campaign pack there's a locked puzzle booklet and to top it off a million stickers to slap onto everything carbs rule book boards you name it frostaven definitely doesn't skimp out on stuff to tear open throughout your adventure and straight up you gotta have some sort of recycling bin at the ready when playing this game which is absolutely incredible a majority of that comes from stickers which were always fun to stick onto things but the experience has gotten even better part of that is the improved map art because it's incredibly satisfying to line up the stickers with the artwork when there's more details to use as waypoints but then on top of that it feels great when seeing a sticker perfectly blend into the artwork and add entirely new features to the map doing this in gloomhaven was pretty cool for just slapping new scenarios on but Frost Haven has huge story unlock stickers that straight up changed the landscape which you then put more stickers over plus having the map split into the Overworld and the town means twice as many stickers overall on top of that getting to see your personal Frost saving settlement grow from a shitty little Outpost into an actually prosperous town after steadily populating with building stickers is super satisfying and really helps get you personally invested in growing Frost Haven but the coolest sticker feature comes from the scenario flow charts this is such a good idea not only do these flow charts track where you are in the campaign but they're also wear to stickers for scenarios are located so whenever you unlock a new scenario you peel off its number and inside is a sticker that you then put on the map extremely easy to see what's been completed so far and what to do next cool Maven was dog with this because it only had sticker sheets for scenarios so you had to look at the map to see what scenarios you've done and at a certain point you just can't track what the hell you're doing in the campaign also on that note it's much easier to track campaign achievements because there's only one spot for campaign stickers your campaign sheet instead of a gloomhaven's weird writing down party achievements plus putting Global achievement stickers on the map even though they effectively serve the same purpose yeah make you track two different things for no reason alright time for room book improvements and finally a board game with an actually good rulebook which is crazy considering it's an 83 page rulebook that's massively improved over gloomhavens it is organized so much better with such a strong flow of information when read front to back it immediately explains the core frostaven Loop of progressing the campaign via doing scenarios and then return to Frost saving for upkeep then you immediately create a character great that's always the first thing you do when playing a Haven game super funny how in blue Maven they fragment this process across multiple sections for no reason but also immediately making a character allows you to have a frame of reference when learning about gameplay rules because now you actually have personally applicable components to comprehend then the rulebook immediately gives you an option to learn via super comprehensive rules videos with timestamps and examples everywhere brought to you by pause gaming rules absolutely incredible option if you're rulebook averse but if you're still going by the rulebook it then drops two amazingly helpful tidbits how to read the rules if you're a new or returning player and what to do if you're ever unsure about anything if you're a new player or have only played Jaws in the line you should still go through all the rules but if you've come from gloomhaven instead you only read the updated rules and the gameplay sections that are highlighted in blue then the entirety of the campaign section which is all new rules but remember it's also doing this while retaining good logical information flow if you're a new player you can literally follow the rulebook Page by Page setting up the tutorial scenario zero on the way stop once you reach the campaign rules and then try out the gameplay you can't like play as you read this isn't Jaws the line but you will 100 understand oh I'm setting up the scenario we got map tiles there's enemies to set up there's stuff like obstacles oh here's how the card play Works here's how my items work here's how enemies behave I'm probably not gonna remember every little detail but that's okay it's easy to refer back to anything via table of contents or the index that wasn't in gloomhaven And to clarify I'm not saying Frost Haven is an easy game to pick up and learn more than there's no needless obstacles caused by rulebook Jank oh and also that tidbit when unsure about the rules that I mentioned earlier directs you to the index and official online FAQ plus tells players to not worry about it if there's some ambiguous interpretations resulting from a game of this size with all its possible interact points because ultimately players decide uncertainty for as intimidating as Frost Haven's scale is you're in good hands and it's encouraging you to have a good time with it and not get too caught up on minor rules hiccups because it's super feasible to look up extremely obscure rules or even just decide ambiguity yourself anecdotally speaking though has been extremely smooth looking up rulings because the index is great and the rulebook is really comprehensive with its wording which is only slightly annoying when reading for the first time but a godsend when referring back to the rule book like look at the Allies enemies and self section you'd think these terms are stupidly obvious and don't need explaining but no it's actually important to understand the nuances of you not being an ally to yourself and abilities that Target all only affect allies if it's a positive effect and enemies if negative unless otherwise specified on the ability on top of all that the rulebook is just nice to look at because it adopted Jaws colorful layout with tons of pictures and examples in comparison gloomhaven's rulebook just looks drab and illogical oh and there's a better quick reference on the back because it has checklists for everything that requires upkeep like scenario setup teardown or end of round effects and then there's the timing of attack effects these are great things to constantly refer to in comparison to Gloom Havens which was basically a mediocre index and not exactly a quick reference since we're talking about books the scenario book is color coded to easily distinguish what's the scenario's goals effects story text special rules boss specials and section book links which means as you play certain actions they Trigger story beats in Progressive scenario plus the scenario key is way more vibrantly colored and actually includes doors and corridors this time so now you can be sure that getting out everything here means you're good to go for the rest of the scenario when setting up enemies the player count indicators are easier to remember than before because it's top to bottom two three four instead of gloomhaven's I don't even remember which ones are two three four there's also this useful complexity gauge that goes from one to three so we can better estimate how crazy the special rules are and or if it takes more time to play moving on to the section book first of all it existing in the first place is absolutely goated because now anytime something happens in the campaign and there's a need for some story drops boom there's a section for it and similarly to secret section books and other campaign board games everything here is in minimize order so you won't spoil yourself as long as you're only reading the parts you're instructed to yet despite the randomized locations of sections they all say where they came from to really prevent you from reading the wrong section furthermore scenarios are designed in such a way that whenever you go to a section to see what happens next there's sometimes more special rules but they never cause you to have to constantly flip back and forth between different pages usually new sections introduce one-time effects like spawning more enemies or objectives and if there are new effects It's contained just one section and turning to different sections afterwards will either override the old rules or just do some one and done effects plus conveniently noting the previous section if you need to refer back to it if there's ever situations with rules across multiple sections they're kept pretty brief and still note the previous rule section anyways basically it never felt like a hassle using both the scenario and section books during gameplay it's pretty much always just leaving two books open on the table and sometimes a thing happens so you turn to a new page on a section book and continue playing like usual oh plus a section book has the same color-coded text as a scenario book for further Clarity last but certainly not least for component improvements is the in included insert and just like with Jaws the lion there's a getting started guide that tells you to stop and follow its instructions to organize everything before you start playing I followed it step by step and found it to cover literally every component in a clear and succinct manner that also heeds the order you'll be seeing the components as you pull everything out of the box when you're done it all works surprisingly well which is such a massive improvement over gloomhaven where basically nothing was provided so it forced you to find an external storage solution meanwhile in Frost Haven there's trays for all the tokens and overlay tiles plus slots and dividers for all the card types and extra space if you want to sleeve the commonly shuffled cards and leave stuff like spin down dice or pencils in the Box more importantly though that extra space is going to be necessary as you start opening a ton of envelopes because you'll be frequently adding extra cards to existing decks or even outright ganging new decks of cards not to mention importing items from gloomhaven like this insert is so functional that there's only minor improvements I can think of that will be mentioned in the cons and there really isn't a need to go out of your way for a crazy custom sword solution unless you want a cosmetic upgrade or want to sleeve every single card even then I highly advise against leaving everything unless you have a solution in mind for where you're gonna put the extra cards from the envelopes after leaving them plus any gloomhaven cars since current third-party inserts are designed to be really tight fits with sleeving only the cars immediately available post unboxing also it's ridiculously expensive and tedious for a game already this big and pricey hence why I only sleeve the stuff that actually gets used a lot final component Pro the box is way tougher this time around gloomhaven's box Corners would randomly start to peel and the walls are definitely thinner than crossavings because the box has a tendency to become slightly oval shaped whereas Frost savings box is so sturdy that the lid is noticeably tougher to take on and off if I had to use a board game to murder someone Frost Haven is definitely my weapon of choice gameplay Pros by the way for context pretty much all of these scenarios were done two player for the sake of finishing the game faster because gloomhaven took us like a year and a half doing four players shout out to our boy pernav for playing with me you for almost all of it because he's an absolute Giga chat for being able to say that he's like the one percent of one percent of people who've beaten Frost Haven without playing gloomhaven he may be an endangered species right now but hopefully players like him become more common when frosting has been out longer first on the chopping block the classes in Frost Haven are nuts the way that class identity is so front and center here really lets the design start to go in super unique directions like even if we were to strip away the updated visuals it'd still be super clear that these are a sequel games glasses just through their mechanics alone the easiest star of the show to point to from the starters is Blink blade where every card is essentially split into four quadrants instead of two halves this class could never exist in gloomhaven not just because of the updated look so that everything can even fit into the cards but also because the design philosophy here is so cohesive and fine-tuned to an absurd degree that and there's mechanics that wasn't really a thing in glue Maven like adding range to a melee attack to turn it into a ranged attack so what do I mean by the design being so cohesive and fine-tuned well first of all the class glasses and Frost save and have gimmicks that are extremely game altering being a class that basically just stats on a stick and engaging in vanilla combat like the brute and gloomhaven isn't really a thing anymore I mean you can sort of play the banner Spear and Drifter that way but they still have some class gimmick you need to be interacting with it isn't just standard glooming combat that's running up and attacking them disengaging at the right moment it's more like running up and attacking while asking your teammates to be in a hyper-specific spot or juggling limited use Buffs in their refresh timers and I know that mentioning The Brute is the most basic example from gloomhaven but even then so many of gloomhaven's classes still have gameplay that boils down to just repeating fairly simple attacks by Frost saving standards because their uniqueness hinders on what conditions or elements are attached to them it's of class mechanics as a result there can be a feeling of this class is just a better version of that class that exists in gloomhaven whereas in frostave in every class feels absurdly unique so even if one class fulfills a certain role better it matters less because the gameplay patterns are all incredibly different and fun to play regardless if I had to describe this to a gloomhaven fan it'd be like if every Frost saving class took a page off of lightning Bolt's book and design philosophy this was a blue Maven class that had a super clear identity and gameplay gimmick to manage and when played well could basically do anything with some hugely rewarding turns way more Frost saving classes are like a lightning bolt not in Sharing its specific image but in that they encourage engaging with Unique Mechanics that play out almost like a mini game within the actual game and when done well you can basically do anything with your massive payoff turns then on top of that these classes have really tight balancing that never feel like they're too weak or strong all while remaining within the confines of the class gimmick and there's a more versatile tool set as a baseline for every class meaning you're never going to be put into a situation where you're extremely favorite slash unfavored against the scenario goal and its enemies all the classes are way more flexible and that they have higher power floors in all types of efficacy meaning that if you need damage or heals or tanking or movement or car insurance you'll find that you have some means of doing those things at an okay level even if your class specializes in something else this also means everything is better balanced for all player counts like sure this AOE is basically useless for two players but the card as a whole is still ultimately useful adding additional upside for four players on that note there's like no dud cards they're just strictly bad while I was playing I could see a strong use case for literally every single card and normally I'd be swapping around the cards I'd bring in for every scenario in gloomhaven that was borderline heresy if you've ever read a gloomhaven class guide there were a lot of optimized hands from Strictly choosing certain cards and never changing them out because they were clearly better than everything else that's not going to fly in Frost having because all your cards are good so if you're not learning how to adapt your gameplay to the situation you'll struggle more than you have to you really gotta learn to bring the best tools for the job the same gloomhaven where you happen to have a hammer that turns all your problems into nails from just spamming a bunch of powerful cards stamina potions and stun slash disarm straight up I don't think I've seen a single card that has an effect to outright kill an enemy plus stuns and disarms are now incredibly premium abilities like you are lucky if your class can do one of those without losing a card speaking of lost cards they feel much better to play in Frost saving it consistently feels like whenever you do a lost action you're getting huge value over your next few turns or immediate swinging the combat back in your favor on top of that there's almost never any double loss cards like every single loss nowadays is usually paired with a good other half and or a great initiative basically lost guards have generally been buffed and there's less of the feeling that you're throwing the game for using them you know what all of this is just a product of better stat balancing as a whole in comparison to gloomington because there aren't as many busted non-loss actions of spam that make you question why you'd even bother playing the Lost cards and since I'm talking about balanced stats initiatives feel more thoughtful in that you can't just constantly go faster slower than enemies as you please without sacrificing some efficacy because most of the strongest actions are on terrible medium initiatives that and cars that are less than 10 or above 90 are way more premium and don't really have the strongest abilities so now you have more interesting hand building and level up decisions to make where you could bring in all the good initiative cards but then you lose some amount of power or you could ball out just accept you have bad initiatives oh right level up cards are always such a difficult thing to decide on in Frost saving since there's no dud cards anymore like at most the only times you quickly dismiss card is when it's pretty clear that it's for three to four players because it's a big multi-target but you're doing two player where big single Target stuff tends to be better if you're doing three to four player though the choices are always going to be tough since both High single Target damage and good AOE damage are useful of course you might also quickly decide on level up so if you have a clear idea of what type of build you're going for but if you're really just trying to go off of whichever card is better you can't really do that anymore and when it comes to build crafting oh oh my God Frost saving provides so many crazy options that come from not just level up cards but also items perks and enhancements when you have 240-something items in Frost haven over gloomhaven's 140 ish you get a lot of wacky possibilities that one combined with how the Frost saving classes are more versatile in the first place means that you can do some really bad builds without the items interact with class abilities unfortunately this isn't super gonna be a thing early game but trust me there's some extremely funny play patterns later on can't really outright Show an example without spoilers so for now I'll just tell you that I've seen a way to trigger a move whenever you're healed but you also always an adjacent enemy after you move so then your allies end up wounding enemies by healing you with both of those being indefinite passive persistent effects I guess that's also a team Synergy thing and not just a build but it's still really goddamn funny though of course a ton of builds existing does mean some are going to be better than others but it doesn't really matter when wacky bill is gonna 100 still get the job done on normal and hard difficulty so long as there's an actual Synergy going on not just a hodgepodge of random stuff thrown together and even if you're not into Min maxing to take on insane difficulty like plus three there may not even be a strictly best variant of a class just because of the variety of situations you have to play against and it's still worth having certain items or cards on reserve to swap around for perks they've been reworked and balanced and in function because not just can you improve your attack modifier deck there's also new effects that basically work like items except they're class specific Banner Shield can activate their perk to gain two shield for a round Drifter has a passive perk that lets them bring in an extra arm item blink blade can get a head start to attack immediately like these are all really cool effects that add a ton of fun mechanics and personal Audi to the classes beyond that though the attack modifier perks have all been substantially rebalanced so that there isn't a super obvious perk selection order where you clearly just Mass remove negatives because why wouldn't you now it's much more common to see attack modifiers being replaced which is not only more balanced so you aren't just quickly thinning down a deck into only good stuff but also means that they had to design more actually unique attack modifier since we need something to replace with if we're not removing as everyone starts to level up their attacks get so much more personality because everyone has some way of getting class relevant effects slapped under their attack modifiers so now replacing negatives first is definitely still really strong but because certain perks can further enable your class's Unique Mechanics there's now an argument for starting off on other perks if you want to enable certain class benefits though obviously when the now rare remove negative perks throw up you should probably still get those out of the way first but don't worry you can more quickly get some perks going thanks to masteries every class has two masters they can do and each one rewards an entire perk some are not going to be feasible at level one but pretty much all the classes have at least one that's doable early and some of them have both possible at level one masteries are a hilarious various new addition that not only feel great for achieving because you feel like you well mastered the class but also because they tend to cause hilarious theatrics at the table for making someone play their class in a hyper-exaggerated way oh right one last thing that's important for builds enhancements just like in gloomaven these will only be unlocked via campaign Shenanigans and once they're unlocked you get a whole new world of classical summarization but unlike in gloomhaven enhancements are actually balanced now costs have been heavily changed across the board and there's a new shape system on the cards Diamond works the same as gloomhaven dots where you can basically slap on whatever Circle means you can only do elements plus ones and jump if it's a move and then Square means only plus one and jump if that sounds annoying to remember the enhancement stickers are all shaped accordingly to make it really obvious what's allowed boom secret component Pro in the gameplay section this new system is so refreshing because in gloomhaven you'd mostly only do the busted enhancements like strengthen or curse and just ignore everything else not very friendly towards Theory crafting or some options where obviously above and beyond everything else but now you can no longer be strengthened by just healing yourself or max out the enemies curses by slapping curse onto all your multi targets unless there's a diamond there this change may sound restrictive at first but it also gets you to pull the trigger on trying out all sorts of random other enhancements you normally wouldn't prioritize in gloomhaven plus it also means there's more enhancement Pips thrown on cards since the designers didn't have to worry about players making something busted via conditions if that something is restricted to a circle or Square also enhancing Frost Haven is no longer tied to Prosperity you can just enhance as much as you like which feels super liberating because now you don't mind doing a bunch of random plus ones all over the place so it's in gloomhaven you are really incentivized to only save up for stupid big enhancers because of the one card per Prosperity limit and for the changed enhancement costs they are a godsend for actually reflecting the power level of enhancements better strengthen curse blast and immobilize have all been nerfed because of the insane Shenanigans they can enable and the disarm enhancement has been outright removed from the game meanwhile poison is now the same cost as attack plus one so there's a reason to get it instead of wound which is better in like a 90 of situations for being both a media and constant damage brutalia gets a huge buff so it's actually worth considering now and summon enhancements are cheaper as well enhancing lost cards has the cost have but if it's a persistent effect it's instead tripled all these make so much sense and it's great that it doesn't feel bad putting the cheaper enhancements on abilities because of both cost bouncing plus the shape system and it's not like certain busted enhancements don't exist anymore because you can still find some hilarious diamonds that allow those overtuned strength and incarcinating so just way more premium and usually on losses to better reflect their power level lastly I want to bring up two ability types that have gotten buffed looting and summons looting is fairly simple most classes have other abilities packaged with the loot action or allow you to do it while still attacking which makes looting way less of a greedy dumb thing to be doing this change makes a lot of sense when considering that looting is something that's NOW essential to the campaign progression instead of just something that strictly benefits yourself because the resources you pick up help both yourself and the town summons on the other hand have undergone some substantial changes and are significantly improved first notable thing is the existence of non-loss summons which are so much more forgiving to use second they tend to have slightly better stats like I never see melee summons at our move one third there's two very important Rosary Works granting actions and being able to focus on the Summoner so in Frost Haven whenever you grant an action to a summon you always get to control how the ability is performed no more of that where some cards do and some cards don't summons can also focus on the Summoner when there's no other valid targets which cleanly addresses the annoying issue of summons being left behind in rooms once all the enemies are dead so yeah all that comes together to form classes that are super cohesive thematic and fine-tuned at the moment I currently have no interest in going back and trying the gloomhaven classes I didn't get around to and would much rather try the frost Haven ones instead but with 17 classes while also having mostly played these five during our campaign I'm not sure I'll ever get around to playing the last 12. moving on to scenario Pros which are actually closely tied with the class improvements with more versatile better balanced classes that aren't going to break the game scenarios have been allowed to reach crazy new designs scenario is where the goal is simply to Kill All Enemies and then there's maybe a basic modifier or two are really rare now after the 60-something scenarios I've done of gloomhaven the gameplay was getting a little stale towards the end but in Frost even after 70 scenarios I'm just as eager to play as I was at the star and I'm eager to keep seeing more unique situations with the newer classes but yeah scenarios didn't have crazier goals or have a lot of hilarious contextual modifiers going on even if their goal is to Kill All Enemies this is all enabled thanks to the section book which keeps scenarios being super suspenseful and surprising thanks to hiding information and even allowing branching paths mid scenarios there's even scenarios where the goal is unknown at the start so you play a little cautiously but then like halfway through you stumble upon the objective and suddenly your game plan fully solidifies as you shift your abilities towards the goal here's a made-up example to better visualize these crazier scenarios say the goal is to kill a named enemy but then what the it's not on the board okay scenario rules say you're allowed to attack these macguffins to receive objective tokens to carry on your character which allowed to freely exchange between adjacent characters no action needed you don't really know what they do yet so you opt to evenly split them up among the team also during this whole time a specific enemy spawns every other round that upon hitting you caused you to drop one of your tokens which can be picked back up via loot the scenario has a section link that happens once you grab five tokens and boom the named enemy spawns but wait it says it can only be damaged by someone holding at least five tokens and then there's another section link once the named enemy reaches half health so now your team is scrambling to meet back up in order to allocate all the tokens to one person maybe you start arguing if you should juggle the tokens back and forth constantly to maximize damage or to have just one percent damage and everyone else deals with the baddies that are able to drop the tokens on hit the named enemy hits half Health you go to the next section and boom crazy story thing happens big bad does a magic explosion that kills all enemies in a room and also destroys all objective tokens currently out on the board and characters then since there's no extra rules to add it says you can turn back to the previous section but now everyone's in a Mad Dash to hit the mcguffins again to quickly get five tokens in order to capitalize on the time they have with no enemies because they'll eventually be back in droves you're all running out of options but it's fine cause you kill the big bad before the room starts to look too scary scenario gold complete go read the victory section link and get your rewards now that might all sound like a lot to manage while playing but it's really not explaining board game rules just as a way of making everything sound really complicated all you're fundamentally doing is hitting these objectives to get tokens while avoiding slash killing the spawned enemies then make sure that if you're attacking the big bad that you have a bunch of tokens I'm sure that all fits easily into like two or three paragraphs total and it's split up between two books so you're not even being front loaded all at once which is a super Pleasant gameplay flow because if this were gloomhaven all the special rules had to be explained right off the bat which not only spoils cool moments but it's also annoying to remember rules for stuff that's only going to happen much later in the scenario here you're being drip fed as you need them in a surprisingly smooth fashion it really is just like turning the page and going like okay story thing we set up this stuff and uh yeah you need five tokens to be able to damage this dude and something happens when it hits half Health then boom you're right back in the gameplay but yeah all this amounts were really fun problem solving on the Fly since you can't just plan out everything right from the get-go by fully knowing the special rules and the scenario layout like in gloomhaven and a key part of this is also paying attention to the narrative because even with unclear objectives it's usually possible to mostly guess correctly what happens at certain section links especially since you know the general room layout what leftover enemies and overlay tiles haven't shown up yet and especially if there's a scenario a token somewhere that hasn't come up yet like I remember after already playing a bunch of frosting with pranav I then played with one of my friends who was used to gloomhaven and the scenario layout we played was like this that detached room clearly me means you're either going to teleport there or thematically it's on a different floor we're playing and he's running ahead expecting a typical three-room layout kill everything blue Maven gameplay where you hide behind doors and never play losses yada yada but then we hit a section that's like go downstairs the bad guys are tearing up the structure and will bring the whole thing down if you don't stop them in time he gets kind of miffed and caused the scenario because he's super out of position and we end up losing from not getting downstairs fast enough because they're supposed to be a scenario a token in the middle of the room the whole time that represents a hole to jump through meanwhile as I'm reading the section I'm going like what the hell why didn't you place the marker down during setup we're supposed to know about it the whole time and for context I was in the bathroom while he was setting up the scenario but also for even more context but you know what I almost never set up scenario Aid and objective tokens unless the scenario has a ton of tokens I need to set up I don't even bother but thankfully most scenarios only have a handful of these they usually just Mark spots for something to spawn from so I can typically get away with just looking at the scenario book instead yeah and goom Haven that almost never mattered but in Frost Haven they're legitimately useful also to make this whole situation even more stupid the story of the scenario is that we're literally defending this place so if my friend had set up the scenario a token or I guess if I was being overly meticulous and looked at the scenariable to double check his setup like a weirdo I would have 100 stayed around the token the whole time because I'd assume something would happen there that we need to you know defend I don't really blame him though because he was gloomhavenbrained and also not really paying attention to the scenario narrative but I bring that up to show just how much the gameplay Tendencies have changed despite Frost having still using fundamentally the same rules as gloomhaven which is also just a testament to how Timeless Gloom Haven's combat is since it can be designed around in so many crazy ways and don't worry you'll get the hang of the new scenarios because the early ones ease you in so you learn very quickly that you should be going out of your way to do stuff that seems like it would be thematically beneficial like literally the first scenario there's a bunch of friendly Town guards and a scenario goal is only to Kill All Enemies so it's totally fine I'll let the guards die but I'ma tell you right now that you very much should save as many of them as possible it doesn't explicitly say that anyone rules wise but thematically you should and there's an actual slight benefit to the town for doing so I'm assuming that ends up blindsiding a number of fresh new Frost saving play groups out there but it's such a clean way of really getting players into the mindset of what they can expect from few scenarios so the classes are better the scenarios are better but what about the monsters Yep they're also better 48 of them too definitely more than glue maven's 34. part of that comes from how you can't just stun disarm spam though like the monsters actually get to play the game now too and another part is that they have way more interesting abilities now we got dudes who can mind control you to hate your friends due to Target the person in the back Shield Breakers more overlay Tower Shenanigans guys run through the middle of everyone attacking them on the way you name it that one combined with bizarre scenario specific situations it leads to a lot more memorable moments where suddenly the monster's unique gimmick can cause some of the most interesting game States I've ever seen like look at these eels they can only exist in water and they're really fast they can also sometimes stun you via lightning shock from consuming light fairly dangerous but scenarios are usually designed in such a way that you can carefully play around them by just staying away from water until you're ready to fight them on your terms pretty cute gimmick enemy all right but there was a scenario where we're in a flooded room and he'll suddenly become an entirely new enemy since they were allowed to go basically anywhere and it becomes a cool puzzle of positioning around the few bits of of land that existed so you can create these little islands of safe spaces also in case you're wondering no this wasn't a nightmare to set up when playing because I just have all the water tiles out as an example the scenario rule is just said the tree all hexes as water and the random debris as corridors last bits of random monster improvements there's now no range stat which was something that was introduced back in jaws of the lion range is now just attached to certain ability cards so there's less calculations to make and decision making involving ranged enemies becomes a thing again at high levels because back in gloomhaven high level archers could pretty much always attack the whole room and finally bosses have been improved via the section book Shenanigans because now there's usually way better scenario specials that interact with the bosses specials in cool ways but in cool Maven most of the time you were just fighting the boss's special moves and that's it meanwhile frosting is doing that thing all video game sequels do where all the bosses are suddenly just like second phase all right moving on to some updated rulings Pros aren't you excited to listen to me talk about rules I already covered summon changes so you better strap in for all the other lines of blue text in this rule book nah that just know that there are clarifications about clarifications that really cover all of the gloomhaven FAQ nonsense caused by vague wording or leaving out details for now though I'll just cover a few of the really nice rules updates that come up a lot and really do change the game for the better for instance now there's defined terminology for if a hex is empty featureless or Fearless when there's abilities that do stuff with obstacles terrain traps Etc they specify these terms to make it Crystal Clear how it's allowed to be placed also no more of that annoying crap where you can't summon or play stuff down just because there was a loot token there because tokens are not considered overlay tiles so you can have Loot and a death Walker Shadow on a hex and it's still considered empty plus there's definitions for all the ways you can manipulate tiles like create destroy relocate move replace and spring oh yeah and to the new conditions like Ward slash brittle in pair and as well as icy terrain for introducing even more unique gameplay situations to play around shoving a dude who's brittled through a bunch of ice into a trap for double damage is some Peak frostave and goofiness Frost Haven also has everyone drawing three battle ghost scenario instead of two very nice change that prevents those situations where you have nothing but impossible options because of whatever scenario or character reason also I should mention that there's Now 60 battle goals instead of 24. so they definitely don't get repetitive in Frost Haven and here's a very nice clarification besides actions clearly having lines between separate abilities the rules actually go over these terms early on so newcomers shouldn't be super confused by how their most fundamental interactions with the game get affected by stuff like items and Buffs also to make it Crystal Clear when something is a mandatory thing that can't be skipped there's an exclamation mark this one is probably the biggest game changer how rolling modifiers interact with Advantage slash disadvantage it's fixed now you actually want to put rolling modifiers in your deck now if you roll with Advantage it's always going to end on two cards and you pick one of them to apply all the rolls on thank a God you can now never miss with Advantage unless you're cursed this Advantage is pretty similar you keep rolling until you end on two cards but then ignore all the rolls and pick the worst of the two okay but what if the second end card is another role do you just create a second stack nah you just ignore the roll icon very simple super clean to play with love the solution was kind of a head scratcher when reading it but makes total sense when you play final rule thing I want to bring up is a fun one now when you find an item mid scenario say from a chest you're allowed to immediately equip it ignoring item slot restrictions so yes you can now get an immediate benefit from diving into the back of the room to grab a chest so for All You Luke gobbins out there have fun being stupid you know you could design a scenario around that mechanic but yeah I really want to reiterate that there's a ton of rules updates like you can basically find blue text on every page leading up to the campaign rules which brings us to the last spot of Pros the campaign I'm not even sure where to start with this it is a massive improvement over gloomhavens the writing is more clever the pacing is better the story is stronger there's more branching paths the town management system is awesome and gets you super invested there's actually a satisfying ending so for writing there's a lot more more clever bits that come up in addition to being a little more evocative with detailing what's going on like right off the bat there's a cute little joke about how your characters are freezing and hoping that there's a warm fire going when they arrive in Frost Haven and then the town's on fire because of algoc's Raiders so careful what you wish for and then my favorite line ever I guess is a spoiler but come on it's just one sentence when you're later on attempting to negotiate a peace deal with the algox they're Chieftain is yelling at some of the warmongers like no adding water to ice only creates more ice absolutely brilliant algox literally have no concept of adding fuel to the Flames because they live in the North and use ice powers it's so funny I mean clearly they get it but of course their imagery goes straight to ice oh right I should probably explain the story so the rich and Powerful interests of the capital want to expand up to the Frozen North for resources and eventually someone had the bright idea to build an outpost because previous Ventures were super unviable given the freezing weather conditions meanwhile you're all a bunch of mercenaries set up to check on set Outpost Frost Haven plastic setup you've all seen it before where a bunch of Merchants go ham funding Expeditions and expansions but then it causes problems for whoever the hell was already there fairly cliche but done pretty well in this case because there's actually proper motivations set up and payoffs lined up so yeah there's three main factions of enemies who are pretty pissed off at Frost saving understandably so but their ire is misdirected because Frost Haven is actually pretty chill but obviously those previous Expeditions before Frost Haven was a thing weren't chilled in fact Frost Haven's residents are generally really pissed off at the capital calling the Nobles and merching Fields ink stains 10 out of 10 slur by the way because they do not supply Frost Haven well enough from both not sending enough but also the they do send is basically useless since they don't understand what it's like to live in the cold hence why the people up here learned to fend for themselves cleaning up the problems caused by the capital and why you as the player now got to interact with crafting systems since you're surviving off nothing anyways you're introduced to the algox right off the bat who are basically Inox but with extra B beef and fur and once you resolve the immediate issue of them attacking you which happens fairly early and is just a temporary ceasefire because they're so pissed with you the scenario flowchart opens up to the lurkers who are giant sentient crabs and also the unfettered who are robots that thought it would be cool to call themselves The unfettered you can jump between these three story arcs as much as you want or run through them one at a time till completion totally up to you super straightforward and much less confusing than gloomhaven where there's a number of seemingly random and unconnected storylines that may or may not flow into one another before it finally funnels into what the main story actually is once you've already forgotten what's going on and given up on a cohesive train of events so yeah story is pretty good and the writing is better let's talk campaign progression which is heavily tied to your own Outpost and putting your material resources into it in order to construct and upgrade its buildings but first I gotta explain the Outpost phase which you do between scenarios because you return to Frost save just like how you return to gloomhaven except this time around more stuff happens organized in five steps now before I explain them it's important to understand buildings which are the main ways you interact with you can think of them as the town's skill tree since you can upgrade them with each building increasing Frost savings Prosperity plus enabling new and or improved benefits during The Outpost phase first Outpost step is time passing you just check off a box to show a week has passed in game which may trigger section book story beats second you do an outpost event which are basically City events except it's also possible to be attacked in which case the event says what buildings are targeted before you flip attack modifiers from the town guard deck to modify Frost savings defense value and much like multi-target attacks in normal gameplay you flip a town guard modifier for every targeted building for every building that fails to meet the attack value that building gets damaged or wrecked depending on the attack damage just means you're forced to either collectively pay some resources or lose one morale right then and there by the way think of morale as kind of like reputation from goom Haven except that it actually has a use as a premium resource but then wrecked actually flips the card and causes persistent negative effects until you fix it also the defense value is default zero but gets improved by raising morale building walls and spending soldiers from your barracks third step is building operations where you go through the buildings you have look for any text boxes with this sun icon and activate them which just means do what it says these are all beneficial unless the building's wrecked step four is downtime which is much more similar to what you do in gloomhaven because this is where you can adjust your characters and similar to the last step there's going to be text boxes on your buildings that have this Moon icon which all enables stuff during this downtime fourth step so unlike before these aren't on the buildings activating it's more that they're sitting there like options on a restaurant menu meaning you can pick and choose as many as you want to interact with for instance say you want to craft and Brew because the rest of these are boring gloomhaven options so instead of spending your resources on the town you can spend them to get items from the Craftsman the crafting cost should be fairly obvious on the item one wood one metal two hide Brewing is like crafting but instead of spending material resources you're spending herbs which are more rare but unlike crafting where you pick and choose what you want from what's available with Brewing you're literally just blind guessing with this Alchemy chart you lose say one ax nut and one rock root and then you tear off the little window thing to see what item you get at a certain point this is no longer blind guessing because like yeah we unlocked every single potion in the game so this is now just the second Craftsman finally the fifth Outpost phase step construction time here you get to improve the town by either constructing one new building or upgrading an existing building you can do two builds and or upgrades if you pay two more out because you're working the citizens like dogs regardless new buildings have their cost on the map and upgrade costs for an existing building is on its card you're not gonna have the card for a building you don't have it back to the pro is about campaign progression it works so Uber smoothly and is super fun to play through it really does get everyone to frantically try and loot their scenarios so that when you return for Outpost phase you'll have enough resources to craft the items you want and improve the town's buildings which not only feels great for being efficient and optimizing your construction paths because let's be real here you should construct the stuff that gets you more resources first but it also slowly but surely gets you invested in your town as you see it steadily grow sticker by sticker plus the buildings all have these one-time effects from being constructed that sometimes give a section link so you get fun little narrative Beats from certain buildings that introduce you to New Towns folk and even certain main story Titans God I still can't get over how amazing it is that the section book exists because having narrative beats happening frequently from contextual actions outside of just scenario storytellects has really made the overall plot come alive and it's something gloomhaven was dearly missing like whenever you unlock side quests there's always a little section book snippet of what exactly causes the scenario to exist maybe you found a map in a treasure chest or someone in town hires you to check up on a friend that ventured out and went missing campaign progression is also smooth in all aspects not not just the buildings and it's balanced pretty well for the expected rate you'll probably accrue resources to improve the town even with two players the pace at which you unlock items certain buildings that give more tangible benefits and increase Prosperity get higher level characters all happens at very reasonable intervals this is because there's multiple systems that are interconnected and form soft locks for each other so like constructing and upgrading will always up Prosperity but then certain constructions have Prosperity prerequisites to make sure you don't get the strong thing too early and certain Prosperity tiers can only be reached with the extra bit of prosperity you can get from retiring a character the reason being that at certain points you'll have fully maxed out your current available buildings but are still just a tick short of the next tier retiring is how you unlock more buildings in the first place and that becomes another Prosperity source as you construct and upgrade the newly unlocked building it's a very clever cascading system that excels at keeping you on the right track with the campaign's difficulty even more so in acknowledging inspiration a new system where you naturally earn inspiration points for completing scenarios with lower player counts which can be spent on additional resources or an additional personal request unlock when you retire Plus at the start of the game you only have access to 10 personal quests with the rest being hidden behind envelopes this means that it's impossible to get any of the particularly Jank retirement goals early on that aren't feasible to do yet because all the starting ones are very much on Pace to complete after like a dozen scenarios what this also means is that it's only possible to get certain buildings early on so the campaign ain't ever going to get whack from you unlocking something clearly made for late game like a resource dump building because yes later on you may have so much that you need better ways to convert it as for how all this ties into your character progression it's bounced beautifully none of gloomhaven's where you're getting items whose power levels are all over the place now you start off with only okay items and then every time you unlock more you're always getting stuff that's slightly better which is such a better feeling of progression because in gloomhaven I rarely changed out items even after unlocking stuff unless I was messing around with different builds still can't get over how many of the strongest items in the game were available super early which is funny because if you own gloomhaven and even forgotten circles whenever you reach those unlock points for new item items you can also bring in specified additional items from those games it's really trippy being super late game in Frost Haven and then seeing an early game gloomhaven item brought in or just seeing endgame processing items that are retrains of early gloomhaven ones also new classes aren't unlocked from retiring anymore since that gets new buildings instead you actually get new classes from The Campaign which is so much more tangible feeling like yeah we do a thing to help someone and now they want to join up with us boom new class unlocked and you have a memorable little story beat to associate with the class but if you're worried you won't do enough in any of the main story arcs by the time you retire you can also unlock classes from upgrading the town enough specifically from those contextual section links what I really like about this is how if you're going through the main story at an average pace what this usually means is that when you retire there's a good chance that there's been multiple new classes unlocked for you to try out instead of just one which gives you more options on the class for your new character if you're someone who just wants to play the fancy new unlocked stuff and never the starters once you retire and the last bit for progression is this really cool narrative shift that naturally happens through the campaign mechanics early on Frost Haven is a crappy little pile of makeshift houses that desperately needs resources to survive and as such the residents don't give a about gold because they want raw material the only gold sinks are from the first few buildings you can build by default which all allow your party to only buy one material resource from but then as Frost Haven prospers there's a greater abundance of resources morale is high there's tons of buildings to interact with and suddenly resources become less valuable and you really want gold to buy all the crazy your town can offer this is also reflected in scenario rewards because when you play at higher levels each individual coin you pick up from loot is worth more whereas the actual amount of resources you get has no inherent scaling I don't know how the hell cephal Affair pulled this off because this is narrative meets Gameplay at the highest level and done extremely naturally over the course of the game it legitimately sneaks up on you like there was a certain point where I was celebrating a great resource Hall like I normally would and when we got back to town I was like wait holy I need money but if you're particularly Discerning you may think wait a minute doesn't that sound awful if you're just random drawing loot cards because you can't focus on what you actually need regardless of whether it's money or resources true but as you get more and more buildings you'll find that there's so many ways to utilize everything that you can basically just straight up convert one thing to another in fact unlike Loom Haven you can actually sort of trade between players and frost Haven it's not free form like Jaws but because buildings cause the party to collectively gain resources you can have someone get all that they need from a different player paying I Can't Describe specifics because unlockable buildings and whatnot but you know that in Euros where you try to figure out the most efficient way to convert one resource into another but it's never straightforward it's kind of like that even right off the bat if you need to transfer gold to someone you can use one of these buildings to buy someone else resources that they can then use to craft an item and immediately sell it of course this is at the opportunity cost of just moving resources around instead of collectively increasing resources in this Outpost phase though that's all just for resources and gold herbs are functionally always tradable since they're more rare so it would be annoying if nobody could craft the specific potions that they wanted without being hilariously lucky anyways the next thing that makes the Outpost phase feel so much more substantial in Gloom Havens besides just sometimes being a resource Euro mini game for five minutes is how There's an actual calendar now to Showcase a sense of time progressing which matters because while it may be freezing year round it gets even colder and darker when it's winter certain things in a game will reference what season you're currently in most notably the events which have way more negative events come winter like you get attacked super often in winter so you better capitalize in summer by stocking up on resources to be able to train soldiers and repair buildings that get damaged or even worse wrecked what's more finishing any of the three main story arcs heavily affects your attacks because a lot of them have symbols on them indicating if you're being attacked by algox lurkers or unfettered so yeah another great way for different narratives and systems of the game tying back into each other Beyond attacks though because of the Season system events in general are more interesting some of them do crazy meta gimmicks some have straight up mini puzzles on the cards and generally across the board the more normal ones frequently check for something contextual in your campaign or party most common your character's traits every class now has three traits that can affect the outcome of events like strong or educated there's also future proofs all Haven games because in gloomhaven sometimes events would check for a specific class in your party but contextually it was never really needing something specific about the class if anything it was asking for something like yeah a tray or if you're a specific ancestry like an idox so this update makes a ton of sense finally I want to go over the spoiler stuff we're talking later unlocks and this puzzle book again not gonna say what's inside any of them just gonna vaguely talk about them so if you want to skip that timestamp is right there don't worry you're just missing me saying unlocks good first off there are so many cool buildings and envelope unlocks that exist and while most of them are things that just affect the town's resources and benefits of the party in some way like there's an example enhancing which just like in gloomhaven is randomly hidden somewhere and you'll definitely get it once you progress enough there's also stuff that's absolutely wild and introduce whole ass new gameplay mechanics if you're familiar with pandemic Legacy adding rule stickers because of entirely new new gameplay modules unlocked you may have noticed Frost Haven also has spots in the rulebook that stickers go in I'm gonna tell you right now that the three stickers you slap here in beginning of scenario are absolutely wild and one of them was even the culmination of possibly one of my favorite most memorable board game mechanisms ever and if you're wondering why it gets meta and is another one of those things that makes clever use of the physicality of board games and the ways you interact with friends and no it's not dog like envelope X though it still has the quality of extremely likely to not make it into the digital adaptation if there is going to be one so if one of them is a post the other two are functionally just additional difficulty sliders that are incredibly fun to play with that allow you to go easier and or harder so it's always great to get more options in that department which does mean that yes you can def definitely play at max level and still be challenged which feels oh so good coming from gloomhaven where no matter what you did it was impossible for the game to be difficult if you were playing at full power nope I still wouldn't recommend bringing gloomhaven classes in because they're still going to have abilities that instant kill and stun slash disarm everything which do tend to bypass the most mechanics anyways yeah those are the main gameplay modifying unlockables everything else is mostly campaign related stuff which either serve to unlock a random cute like a unique events item scenarios Etc or just do something that's fundamentally substantial like more resource generation and conversion options all of which work great at doing what they're supposed to be doing because I wasn't able to find a way to get anything too early or break the economy using existing buildings like sure there's probably certain unlocks I'd prefer to get as early as possible like additional resources enhancing or even upgrading the town guard attack deck and they may seem strictly better to get your town going faster but there's two downsides to consider first because your Prosperity soft locked at certain tiers until someone retires it's possible to be doing too well early on before you unlock key resource dumps so you you may actually end up sitting on a ton of unused golden Resources with nothing to build slash upgrade during Apple's phase until you retire so careful not to play too conservatively with resources and your retirement goal especially since you're going to lose all that gold on retirement if you don't have a gold sink unlocked second having more valuable buildings also means that you have more targets that you actually care about whenever you get attacked because that's more soldiers to spend and if you ever get unlucky with back-to-back attacks while you're still recuperating soldiers you might be in trouble and have to bite the bullet because you can't assign enough soldiers to all the buildings you actually want to protect which ultimately costs more resources so while optimizing your euroing does let you get what you want earlier from what you currently have available the overall pacing of the campaign isn't going to be that much expedited and if anything you'd progress faster just retiring quicker and bringing in bigger loot hauls do it that way you will I just spoiled campaign resource strategy it's basically the illusion of choice done really well if you ask me because once you unlock more buildings Beyond just the early ones the temple really does even out and never lets campaigns fly too far off course for expected campaign progress unless you're like literally failing every scenario and choosing to come back to town on every failure instead of retrying while also never retiring this shouldn't stop you from trying to optimize a town because it's still cool getting the badass new items and whatnot as early as possible it's just nice that it matters but also not in a swingy game breaking way because it's suck if campaign progression was heavily balanced around managing Outpost phase super well since that could easily over anyone who's playing casually or just supremely unlucky but none of that matters anyways once you hit the late game with most of the buildings unlocked and you finish the three main story arcs because then attacks slow down considerably and it becomes so easy to get the resources you want that character progression becomes a joke it's like frost Haven is just taking the reins off because you've already grinded through a ton of characters already and they're just like it when you make new characters you give them full build items in like two scenarios which feels amazing because the game turns more into like Spirit Island where you can switch between classes and builds super frequently and just have fun experimenting with some of the goofiest energies I've ever seen so yeah amazing campaign from beginning to end with super clear design intentions that conform to the player's interactions throughout the campaign incredibly well and while we're here at the end game let's talk about the actual ending you see after doing the main story arcs this just turns into a jrpg where there's actually the final Arc which is locked behind the puzzle book and this thing is a gargantuan improvement over envelope X from gloomhaven don't worry though for those of you who hate puzzles you can just go online and look up the answers boom you're back to playing the final story scenarios but for people who are into puzzles Hallelujah cause the puzzles actually work this time crazy high bar of expectation I know but like a lot of the puzzles here are actually pretty good I say a lot because there's a few that we thought were absolutely and had to look them up and others that were unbelievably stupid and how much you were supposed to dumb down your brain to figure it out I'll come back to more detailed complaints during cons for the really stupid ones but for the ones that worked but we didn't figure out what I think happened when I really Ponder on it is that since this puzzle book is well a book with a ton of puzzles it makes sense that certain puzzles would just click better for us and others we'd completely whiff on because like there's just going to be trains of thought that some people would jump to instantly and others would never consider in a million years anyways unlike in gloomhaven not only is this puzzle book functional a vast majority of the time but it also only works off information that you are guaranteed to have because when you hit certain walls it becomes clear that you need information from a certain main story scenario to solve that puzzle plus like any proper puzzle you can actually properly check your answers this time since all you do is plug in your guests into the section book and see if there's a puzzle solution there I should also mention that just like retiring characters get started on the puzzle book as soon as possible after unlocking it because that way you can hit those puzzle walls earlier at a good Pace don't worry you can do the first two puzzles without needing other campaign stuff don't procrastinate because me and pranav did the dumb thing and got stuck in the beginning for embarrassingly long which then ended up causing us to have sessions later where we did puzzles for hours because once we solved the one we were stuck on we're suddenly blasting through like seven more puzzles all at once since we were already deep in the campaign in reality it should probably be something you do every now and then as you're taking breaks and whatnot if you're eating a meal together this is perfect for that oh and before I forget if you're wondering what certain gloomhaven Secrets do in Frost Haven they let you get stuff earlier in the puzzle book and campaign than you would normally nothing too crazy just a nice little nod so then after finishing the main story arcs solving the entire puzzle book and having basically everything unlocked you're ready for the true end game and I gotta say finally seeing the final Arc to an end after doing all of that is super satisfying because you can kind of few hints of the last big bad evil guy's presence throughout the entirety of the campaign and finally getting to meet them was pretty goddamn crazy especially when you see where it takes place the stakes get amped up to 11 here and while the narrative texts where the scenarios get longer I was sitting on the edge of my seat and pronounced that he had chills by the time we reached the final scenario which by the way awesome scenario super memorable and totally worth the three complexity rating and insane bookkeeping because my God what a crazy epic battle I will never forget how I killed the final boss with retaliate and perhaps one of the stupidest yet also most hype moments I've ever seen but yeah the culmination of all the campaign efforts leading up to that moment and finally completing the game 70 scenarios in left me feeling unbelievably content afterwards just wow and then the final Pro in this gargantuan list of Pros is the tutorial yeah yeah I put it at the end which is funny and ironic but I didn't know where else to put it and also kind of forgot about it so having an actual tutorial with a simplified game state is unbelie believably useful for a game as ridiculously packed as Frost Haven and while it ain't no jaws of the line with five dedicated tutorial scenarios it definitely does its job well the onus of knowing the fundamentals of all the combat rules will be on the players but don't worry this is an excellent area to try out what you've learned because the enemies all act predictably so it's a super forgiving environment to make mistakes and learn what effective gloomhaven gameplay patterns are then on top of that it gives you a bit of a head start on resources for the campaign since you get to keep everything you loot which is another excellent safety measure for beginners once they do their first Outpost phase this is a far cry from gloomhaven's brutal dark souls-esque you get good that throws you into the midst of a normal scenario forever skewing the BGG pose on the hardest scenarios despite the fact that the first two scenarios are just average difficulty scenarios because believe me there are some hard scenarios in gloomhaven Jesus Christ this is the longest Pro section we've ever done anyways time to on Frost Haven cons components all right let's get the loudest one out of the way first there's a shitload of text errors I've seen a lot of angry comments online on cephalofaricas and Kickstarter updates they said they were taking a while looking for typos with a fine-toothed comb commenters complaining about how long the proofing and production process took are failing to see the bigger picture since I don't think they grasp just how much stuff there is to look over not just for human error typos but also Printing and or assembly errors when looking over sample copies which adds to back and forth communication between cephalofair and their manufacturers by the way this was happening last year when there was the Omicron outbreak that caused absolutely crazy levels of lockdown in China which definitely affects this entire process to fix mistakes and produce assemble then ship updated sample copies to look over there were so many Kickstarter updates that basically just had no news from now we're currently waiting on something and there were so many different somethings like confirmation that files were okay to print or receiving the latest sample copy to look over for mistakes or oh logistical going down global Shipping crisis has quadruple will cost but don't worry cephla Fair can cover it holy that was nuts and a reminder that the supply chain crisis is still reverberating to this day no wonder the biggest board game fulfillment project ever was delayed seriously the shipping could have been dragged out for like over a year but somehow several Affair managed to actually get it down to like five months back to analysis it looks like a lot of the more egregious hiccups are strictly just printing errors because apparently cephal Affairs sample copies of frost Haven they checked before giving the okay to start Mass printing didn't have a lot of these issues in fact I don't even remember any seemingly human error titles which honestly is crazy from something this big but I saw a lot more like mislabeling and random production errors which is not entirely the proofreader's fault but unfortunately it's something that has a more tangible negative effect on your experience the biggest deal is how a lot of the unlockable envelopes had their labels mixed up you see they all have these labels that say to add certain rule stickers to the rule book upon opening them somehow five of them got switched around which seems like the type of thing to happen the factory did an oopsie on assembly instructions before posting them up for the workers because something like that is how one of the envelopes has a deck of cards whose order should be reversed but otherwise most of these errors are for really dumb that won't affect you like character sheets missing an eye after the letter F anyways I understand why these mistakes happen but cephal Affair still doesn't get a pass because it does ultimately end up negatively affecting the game intangible albeit minuscule ways thankfully there's a list of all the production errors and typos not only in the official FAQ but also cephal Affairs Frost Haven page lists only the major ones makes sense because if you make the cephala fair website list as long as it is in the FAQ it'll take up the whole page and look way worse than it actually is I can assure you all except a handful of these are so incredibly minor that I never noticed them while playing back in November and December which was way before this FAQ was live to enable us playing without the mistakes like so many of them are just wait this is The Wrong Enemy art for this section that wasn't the scenario setup after beating the campaign looking through it again the only thing on this list that actually dramatically changed a session was the mistake for scenario 28 and that one I'm not even mad about because the up caused one of the most memorable and funny scenarios I've ever played Mix-Ups for what enemies are set up you can definitely blame on cephalfair's proofreading because it's like the icon version of a typo anyway it's not gonna run through all the errors because you get the point but I will note that we've run into minor stuff that's not mentioned here so the list probably isn't comprehensive like scenario is 1945 and 120 there's not enough of certain overlay tiles but that barely matters because you can just use something else too many errors is still obviously bad though because there are some unintended consequences that come with too many typos and printing errors even though most of the minor mistakes are inconsequential so that they're unnoticeable and or easy to spot than fixed having this many errors can cause the players to make assumptions for things that weren't actually mistakes and were instead just obtuse mechanics example there's a retirement Quest that unlocks a scenario chain but the first scenario requires a certain campaign sticker actually acquiring the unlockable isn't an issue you get it fairly early in the lurker Arc but what happened was we didn't think this was a campaign sticker we just thought it must have been an error where the requirement was referring to the personal Quest but was using the wrong name from an earlier draft or something that thought was there because sometimes the game tells you to gain a brummic sticker or a coral Shard sticker but then on the campaign sticker sheet there's only brunics track stickers and coral Crown stickers which are the correct names of what you're supposed to get but it seems like there was a name change at some point that someone forgot to update across all the game's sticker sources so yeah we accidentally cheated by doing something earlier in the campaign than we were supposed to by like a handful of scenarios annoying but also inconsequential because the prerequisite was there just for flavor anyways and didn't break campaign progression at all on that note I'm convinced scenario 45 has a mistake or the prerequisite to have climbing gear supposed to be having a boat instead because flavor-wise you're literally fighting on a boat for that scenario however the FAQ said that if there's ever a mistake between a scenario flowchart and the book trust the book instead but in this case the book and flow chart say climbing gear so I don't know again this really doesn't even matter since it's just flavor I just want it to be a boat scenario for a campaign reason that I will not explain but who knows if that's a mistake or not to the FAQ updates again point is the presence of Errors causes you to be skeptical of unclear mechanics even if they were intentionally the way they are but enough with the typo errors and whatnot the fact that they don't even matter in a project this big is honestly really impressive considering just how absurd the level of overlapping moving Parts is and you know what's literally a moving part the tiles and sheets for some reason character boards map tiles and character sheets have a tendency to start curling I didn't even note this at first until I saw a thread on Reddit where everyone is saying the same thing because I thought we just warped them via constantly turning the heater on and off this isn't the biggest deal but it is annoying when trying to connect the map tiles together and you need to put a door on the connection next up there's a lot of corridor tiles that look extremely similar to the point that I can't really tell which one you're supposed to use by name in scenario Keys though this is inconsequential unless the scenario uses a lot of them it's just an aesthetic annoyance because I want my amazing artwork map tiles have the right overlay tile on it God damn it oh and quick tip if you're confused you don't have a certain overlay Place some of them are just the doors when flipped alright here's some ways to improve the scenario flowchart we complained back in gloomhaven that the game didn't tell you where scenarios were unlocked from Once you already had them making it hard to remember why you were doing the scenario story wise the flowchart takes a step in the right direction nailing it for the main story but for side scenarios only sort of addresses this because there's icons that tell you if this came from a personal Quest or an event or whatever other venue side quests come from however because in Frost Haven unlocking side scenarios usually comes with a quick little narrative blurb in the section book I'd like if there was also the section number or event number you got the scenario from printed here that way once you have a million side quests and don't remember what they all were you can go back and see exactly where it came from the only side quests that Dodge this are the ones from the random side quest deck because the cards all have sections printed on them to really add flavor to the art also the flowchart icon key descriptions could have definitely used a little more description the one explaining banners confused us and we had to look online to know what it even meant and the calendar one needs in big bold parentheses that these may take several weeks before they unlocked because I had a personal Quest that was only four scenarios long so I just assumed I could finish it off whenever because I didn't know what unlocked my calendar section meant turns out that personal Quest took way longer because you have to do like six other scenarios in between each one so there was a winter where we were pretty behind because I couldn't retire my dumb ass to get to the next Prosperity tier for the scenario Banner thing this is stupidly vague just say that these scenarios require specific campaign achievements found from scenarios with shapes in their Banner because that's all this is and it's barely even utilized the scenario flowchart stickers also constantly do this thing when peeling them off where the outer ring of sticker stays inside the flowchart slot which you then gotta scrape off guess the sticker there is a little too loose or something but then on the flip side the blue lock stickers to seal the envelopes are stupidly tight and frost Haven like you pretty much have to scratch away at them to some degree with your nails and possibly tear off chunks of the envelope in the process okay let's talk about the insert and organization first thing is that the L tray needs slightly more thickness it's honestly fine as is if you just lift it with two hands but I was seeing comments online that people were experiencing tears and there's very quickly we used our default insert for the first three weeks of playing before we got the officially licensed inserts and never ran into this so I tested the old thing by shaking it a bit plus lifting unevenly and yep tear so yeah don't be idiotically waving it around with one hand when it comes to Speedy setup cons there's only two big improvements to be made here getting bigger plastic bags to group the smaller plastic bags and getting an accordion filter with at least 16 slots obviously only one of these is feasible to put in the box so whatever next Haven game there is put in some big bags and have the organization guide give grouping instructions because our first few scenarios were really annoying to set up when digging through like 40 something bags before we grouped them by categories like algox unfettered sea creatures Etc as for the accordion folder seeing how this is probably the best tile sorting solution should definitely be encouraged in something like the organization guide this 20 slot we got here is fine but if cephala Fair had on their website an accordion photo with frost Haven artwork I'd buy that in a heartbeat like come on there's already random merch like laptop cases on here surely an accordion folder would fit right in and yes I'm aware there there's the folded space according folder but that one I found to be unpleasantly stiff because it's entirely cardboard and it had only six slots plus no sick artwork oh and on the topic of third-party inserts I noticed while reading through FAQs that when people unbox and immediately transfer Frost savings components to a different insert they tend to up how they're starting campaign decks are set up since they ignore the default organization guide that's like a totally reasonable mistake to happen though so there should probably be something in the rulebook saying what your starting event and item decks are or at least something in the index where instead of a page number it just says to check the organization guide also everyone online is confused about what their starting outpost defense is so the rulebooks should probably mention that it's just your morale and walls so zero at first also also it should be made more clear that when you use the workshop to build something it counts as one of your constructions during the last step of outpost phase because I was stupid and thought that anything at the top of a building card resolves during step three when buildings activate and everything at the bottom is for step four downtime because that just seemed intuitive meaning I accidentally cheated by technically double constructing for a few Outpost phases because I'd Workshop in step 3 and construct normally in Step 5. you see you're actually supposed to only do stuff that has this sun icon in step three and the moon icon for step four whereas everything else is just a passive effect regardless of where it is on the card not sure if there's a better layout that can be done here because ideally it should be as idiot proof as possible everything on top for one phase everything on bottom for otherwise but then that kind of conflicts because Moon downtime effects can't just be lumped together with passives but whatever there's bound to be some random growing pains for some of the new mechanics because unlike the rest of the rulebook where they were able to incorporate years of feedback in order to describe everything without confusion that's not going to be a thing for the new rules so thank God for the official FAQ being stupid easy to find next up the standees and their bases are much Slimmer for frost Haven didn't realize this at first because I dumped in a bunch of my gloomhaven Sandy bases just because it's nice to have extras for spawn spam scenarios so a bunch of standees were constantly sliding out of their bases and I was going like bro what is happening with these things however apparently this has variation depending on which printing waves you've got of all prior gloomhaven products so just be sure to check your bases if you're pulling them from different this Con has a minor spoiler warning for the first boss you'll face yes this really is a boss component code so another stand D related issue is there's an early boss in this game that's missing its standy punch out however it's explained in the special rules for that scenario and for whatever reason a ton of people misinterpret it to mean grabbing a certain locked classes mini box when the intention is use the mini itself I can kind of see where the confusion comes from since usually the game is very stringent on interacting with locked stuff until you actually unlock it but also come on getting the box is ridiculous also this caused a bunch of support emails to self affair because for people who were particularly attentive while unboxing they assumed they were missing standees for the boss because they only saw the stat card kinda shot themselves in the foot there because Teflon Affair support emails are already being flooded from people asking for all sorts of things very normal for a fulfillment this big but it's also being bogged down by dumb requests like where my shipping notification and please replace my box there's a tiny dent which is slowing down the system for those who actually need their box replaced or really need replacement components like me who was missing a character board for this class so I decided to use the normal support Channel and ended up getting the replacement in 26 days back on topic though there's two fixes for that gimmick boss either make it explicit in the instructions to open the box and use the mini or big brain time you know how every class in Frost Haven includes both the stand D and the mini just half the classes Dandy and The Punch boards with the rest of the monsters instead of inside the class envelope that way people think it's just another boss and then later on they get their minds blown once they actually unlock the class alright now let's complain about the last few random component guns algox guards have extremely Dark Art because it's supposed to look like it's nighttime cool as an art piece really weird looking as a standee that sticks out like a sore thumb amongst the other algox campaign stickers eventually run out of space on the sheet like there's a side quest thing we're following that's going to add more stickers so to leave space for them we put some of the random other ones off at the bottom elements in exp generation icons are separate so that elements are in the middle of the action and exp is in the bottom right corner I get why the design is like this because all the white icons are together now in the bottom right and look better grouped but I'm arguing that exp and elements should both be in the middle because everyone I've played with so far keeps forgetting to get exp from their actions because we always associate the bottom right with aspects of the card like being a loss or persistent whereas the element being more in the middle we associate with having to then physically do something both elements and exp make you have to move your arm to adjust something so it makes more sense to put these both in the middle because bottom right corner is so out of the way and forgettable which is perfect for just labeling the type of action and lastly at the time of this review the four teller narration app has a bunch of mistakes where I'm pretty sure it's using a first draft or something because on rare occasions there will be entire sentences changed but more commonly stuff will have the wrong name like shamans versus priests or like blue orb versus yellow orb not a huge deal because it can just be patch in the future gameplay times first up while for Austin has pretty much fixed all the problems two player had there's still the issue of events that check for traits having a bigger party means more traits means more successes however what makes this not as bad is that sometimes there's negative things that happen for having certain trade but they aren't as common there should be a more even split if we want an easy fix but the less clean better option would be to note on events different outcome and or criteria for different player counts like maybe in four player it checks for two instances of a trait not sure if that's even possible though given limited space on the cards next up scenarios on the whole are probably a little too complex though mostly just the side quests this seems to be the result of having a bunch of guest designers showing up wanting to make really cool scenarios and now admit they are really cool but they also have a ton going on as a result it became the case where main story quests on the whole felt like the more laid-back gameplay experience and side quests we'd have to mentally prepare for instead of treating them as a break from the action granted this doesn't mean that main story scenarios are easier in fact I think the only scenarios we've had to repeat are the main ones it just means that main story scenarios have less mechanical overhead though this does change once you get deeper into the campaign and then everything's complicated which is honestly fine as it is now you definitely get to take in the main story more with less special rules there but process even needed more goofy brain dead side scenarios however no there's plenty of goofy ones that are pretty heavy like genuinely I think all the coolest and funniest mechanics have come from side scenarios for exp generation I've found that it's been made harder on average there's rarely any actions that are just freebies like in gloomhaven pretty much everything in a frost if and you gotta do something related to the class for exp this is totally fine on its own but it's also combined with crazier scenarios where you run into more situations that call for something circumstantial AKA You forego your class thing a little more often however I will say that exp gain has been a lot more consistent and normalized acrossape because in gloomhaven it felt like every class had wildly different exp averages but yeah in Frost Haven I say that most of the time I'm getting a exp every scenario instead of either 4 or 20. maybe if there were more standard three rooms scenarios this wouldn't happen because those ones are always longer which you have more time to do exp actions but uh I'd rather play the really unique and creative Frost saving scenarios which brings me to to a minor flaw I'm seeing in the core Haven combat experience which is the nature of how the length of scenarios plays into the really swingy nature of the attack modifier deck for how much the Haven game's tout low Randomness and no dice I'm gonna be real with you frost Haven is definitely a decently Randomness heavy game like I've played dice games with less Randomness than the Haven games so because Frost Haven has way more interesting scenario design the timing of enemies dying matters so much more than gloomhaven if you're playing standard three-room gloomhaven scenarios you don't have a time pressure Beyond just running out of cards and even if you draw a bunch of crits and misses over the course of the lengthy scenario your damage will usually average out but in Frost Haven the timing of when those crits and misses turn up matters so much more than because scenarios tend to be shorter it's more likely that your damage won't average out plus because the Frost saving classes are balanced way better than Gloom Havens you don't tend to have access to the op methods of bypassing bad luck like instant kills and too many stuns disarms visibility here's an example of what I mean Sega scenario has you defending an object and two extremely threatening Elite dudes spawn every odd round including the first these dudes are really hard to kill in two rounds which makes sense because the scenario would be piss easy if you could just kill everything on schedule it's designed to eventually overwhelm you so that even if you kill two every say three rounds you'll basically be dealing with a handful of them constantly just a few rounds in but it's fine to be overwhelmed as long as that objective stays alive for I don't know 12 rounds most of the time you played a scenario it plays completely fine but there's a decent chance for this whole thing to feel significantly easier or harder solely based on if you draw a miss or a crit in the first few rounds if you draw a straight crit and kill one of them ahead of schedule this isn't just reducing Threat Level instantly you're preventing compounding threat for the next spawn waves you're supposed to be overwhelmed and not have enough actions to deal with everything which usually means there's going to be a dude that was alive since like round three who was able to get a hit in round after round after round in the timeline with an early crit that guy doesn't exist and so you've effectively removed like nine attacks throughout the course of the scenario likewise an early Mist I was supposed to kill means extra incoming attacks throughout the scenario but here's the thing I only bring up crits and misses to exaggerate since they are the obvious examples to point to what about more Insidious situations say your party Focus fired enough attack damage I was supposed to kill one of them but then you guys draw too many negatives that one enemy Staying Alive an extra round will probably end up manifesting as having to lose a card or two down the line because your party took an extra hit early on this is especially bad if you have someone take damage that they thought wouldn't happen from the enemy dying and as a result has compounding consequences like a summon dying Randomness is also at its worst when you're level one because even though this deck on average is a plus zero averages don't matter on small enough sample sizes from shorter objective-based scenarios if your team draws a bunch of early plus ones that enabled an earlier than usual kill getting minus ones later on doesn't matter when the scenario is almost over because those early plus ones took a damage Source off the board that attacks every round instead of an enemy spawned in the later rounds that wouldn't get many attacks in anyways but it's not just that the default attack deck is more random your attack values are also smaller which means slight number shifts are going to feel massive like an attack 3 is technically on a range of zero to six but let's be generous and ignore the extreme ends so two to four instead four is twice the damage of two that is a huge deal an early level is when enemies have smaller Health values like eight where it's not that unlikely when using only attack threes you kill it in two hits or four hits instead of the expected three hits meanwhile at higher levels let's say your modifier deck is basically just an even split of zeros plus ones and plus twos and you usually do attack fives when your damage is consistently five to seven on a leveled up enemy with more Health let's just double it and say it's 16. it's extremely likely it takes three attacks and deviating from that becomes an edge case instead of occasional also note that in Frost Haven classes that can remove all their negatives are much more rare than in gloomhaven this is better for overall balance but definitely with attack timing more however after some level UPS you have so many available sources of extra trip damage from utility like wounds advantage and unique abilities that things surviving at one Health from Bad draws is a rarity anyways because it's way easier to throw in guaranteed extra damage if you need it so yeah this is an issue that never popped up in gloomhaven because the timing of damage didn't matter as much when compared to Frost saving like drawing a crit early on in one room out of the standard three makes that one room easier for sure but it's not gonna make the rest of the scenario significantly easier I'm not even sure where to go in order to address this issue because it's just so ingrained into the gloomhaven combat system which seemed very fine-tuned for the standard three room layout maybe there needs to be some sort of rule change you currently can lose a car to nullify damage maybe you should be able to lose the car to set your modifier to plus zero to avoid misses that doesn't stop the issue of people drawing too many untimely neg ones at a low level though but that only really matters for the frosting scenarios where timing of damage matters more I don't know maybe you can discard two cards to add plus one to the attack if you flip a negative that just sounds super fiddly though ideally the base attack and health value is a level one should just be higher in the first place so that minus ones and plus ones mattered less I'm okay with crits and misses being hilarious and stupid that's part of their charm but the more standard values being unwieldy shouldn't be a thing the Galaxy brain solution to this would probably involve giving each class its own unique starting attack modifier deck so that their attacks can be even more finely tuned to numerical valleys that make sense for them as well as being able to immediately have unique effects on the cards to cause interesting situations because the early level attack mod deck is so Bland compared to later level Shenanigans so much of a class's identity is tied to their attack modifiers so it sucks that if a class has a strong deck that won't matter at all into a few levels and it can negatively impact first impressions of the class if the base attack values seem low and at level 1 if stuff isn't gonna die because of negatives there should at least be some recompense from a class mechanic so that there's an interesting situation set up for next turn besides just having to deal with more enemies than usual plus this would also address the issue of People rushing perks that remove negatives and bring way more viable perk ordering decisions also I should mention that this whole timing of attacks and shorter objective scenarios issue matters a ton for two player but no nowhere near as much for four player last con for gameplay the value of obstacle trap and hazardous terrain generation has skyrocketed in Frost Haven these were already strong abilities in gloomhaven but because of frost Haven having more unique objectives anything that can stall enemies or force them to move how you want is insanely strong there are classes that specialize in these things and holy they all feel ahead of the curve they aren't easy to play because you have to track all the enemies super meticulously on top of managing your own class resources but when you get them down some of the hardest scenarios in the game suddenly start feeling like normal scenarios because of how unoptimally the enemies start sidewinding their paths enemies really need a better solution to that besides just ranged attacks flying and jump Because unless the room is hilariously small those don't tend to be good enough campaign guns all right this entire part is all vague spoilers so skip ahead to the recommender score if you don't want to hear it I basically just complain about the puzzle book in certain unlocks alright so the puzzle book has some really questionable puzzles that make terrible use of the physicality of frost Haven there's one where you're supposed to draw colored lines and then decipher for what the resulting pattern means however the puzzle's gimmick needs these lines to be drawn straight and from the right angles and if there's ever a mistake you're gonna everything up also laying out the puzzle book flat and having to go across the bend in the middle probably up the proportions of the puzzle since on a computer screen as one image it's fine but then when physically put into a book you end up cutting out the innermost parts of the pages not to mention having to draw across two pages is awful we ended up doing this by taking a picture and just drawing the lines in image editing software which is kind of stupid that you have to do that if you want to visualize different layouts to guess the solution there's also another one that requires counting certain bits of something across different artworks in the game but sometimes the art is really small like there was one where you had to count like 20 something tiny green dots on a certain lot classes artwork and there is no way anyone is going to be able to accurately get that unless they somehow have access to a high resolution image what's the design solution be extremely cognizant of the components in the game and don't design puzzles that clash with practical interaction and another thing the puzzle solution sections need to be more clear as to which puzzle they are the solution to like there should straight up be a puzzle page number somewhere in the narrative text because if you're making a guess that happens to hit a different puzzle solution and it wasn't immediately clear that the guess was incorrect that's a up because we've read a little too far into incorrect Solutions like twice which cause slight spoilers next up some criticisms on the puzzle designs they work but some of them are really really dumb hernov is an escape room designer and commented how the puzzable can be extremely blunt with its Solutions since they don't involve figuring out a way around some seemingly logical inconsistency meaning there's not really a lot of a to B problem solving so much as you just have to interpret a vague message correctly and then you have the means to brute for something that's logically unrelated but was thematically eluded there's too much of doing where's Waldo and not enough actually figuring out how something works is what I'm trying to get at the thing earlier about counting bits of something in the artwork is a gimmick that comes up a ton across different puzzles and the Eureka feeling sometimes gets dampened because you try what you think is a stupid idea and then it turns out that was the solution so then you go off counting something wacky if you're used to feeling really smart from playing games like portal where you're stumped but then figure out a unique situation that follows the game's rules and not immediately obvious way you feel great because the execution then tends to be really simple once you understand the answer because everything logically falls into place oftentimes in Frost Haven the simple part isn't the execution it's instead turning your brain off to assume the dumbest possibility and then the execution is difficult because it involves digging through components and trying to rearrange or count them in some way to get symbols to match so a fake puzzle example would be like if the page has a bunch of pictures of random algox limbs from various artwork which you have no idea what it means so you start making guesses as to what you're supposed to do with this like oh maybe because there's only one ups for weapons two ups for legs and the heads have three horns you're supposed to count all the weapon pictures to form the first number all the legs for the second and all the heads for the third or maybe you're supposed to align your standees so that there there aren't matches the limbs on the book and by doing this the standees end up forming the shape of numbers if both of those sound stupid either one could have been the answer and that legitimately could have been a Frost saving puzzle also if the puzzle book is gonna be so heavily tied into the campaign it should be made way more apparent early on that it's required to finish the story because that part wasn't made clear until we were going deep into the arcs and we assumed by then the puzzle book was just a neat bonus until we hit those story walls plus there should be an included answer guide with explanation similar to spoiler tag there's a lot of people who are gonna buy this game and not expect mandatory puzzles or want to do them thankfully the community comes in clutch here because you can just find a post with a bunch of hints and all the answers but something like that should have been linked somewhere official just like the FAQ if it's not going to be included this isn't just useful for people who want to skip the puzzles but also for those who just want pointers in the right direction given the vague nature of the puzzles and for further elaborating as to why these puzzles shouldn't be tied to the story you aren't even doing anything canonically for the majority of them as an example most of them have the section book described to you a problem then and you go and deal with it via some gameplay thing like a scenario but then after doing that there's now something in that scenario you can use to solve the puzzle that isn't actually happening in the story these mechanically function as a progress check but then narratively it will be like there's a scientist telling you to stop the attacks from some Raiders so his experiment isn't Disturbed so you go out and stop the Raiders which from the story perspective means they are now dealt with but for some reason you still have to do this wacky puzzle in real life where you're messing around with monster standees in order to progress which has nothing to do with stopping the Raiders the puzzles in here should all be like the one where you're trying to figure out how to open a sealed door in order to unlock a scenario that one story wise makes sense being an actual puzzle because canonically your characters are actually solving an in-game puzzle last con is how the workshop upgrades are really unimpactful like it's cool that they conceptually exist to give your party more access to scenarios that require specific means of traveling to them but I question why this was done mechanically because only one of them actually does something while the rest are relegated to being scenario prerequisites that don't even always affect the scenario intro text or your road events and for further redundance later on in the campaign you have to build another means of travel that isn't Workshop related but that time it was done by The scenario's Narrative which works fine so why wasn't that the case with the few scenarios that use the workshops gear I don't know maybe they just wanted you to have more things to randomly build early on for Prosperity but you could have just made it so that the early main story scenarios reward Prosperity or something we recommend your score finally it's time to score Frost Haven our recommender score critically weighs the pros and cons in terms of how well the game did what it set out to do while also taking into account how good the game's concept is in the first place Frost Damon's gonna get a 9 out of 10. an excellent game too long didn't watch Frost Haven is ultimately just gloomhaven but everything is done better and there's substantially more things to do if you're wondering whether or not you should pre-order this game for when it's officially out on retail all you need to know is whether or not you like blue maven's combat system and if you want this much stuff if yes then this is an easy buy you'll be absolutely enthralled if you didn't like Loom Havens combat it's fundamentally the same yeah year and there's no reason to come back and check out the sequel Frost Haven is by no means a mechanical overhaul this is just adding more stuff and refining what was already there but if you are someone who's unsure because you didn't hate the combat and so maybe you think these improvements would now sell you on the game I'd still tread with caution because it's hard to recommend Frost Haven broadly if I don't know what specific improvements you're looking for if you are lukewarm on the combat because you wanted even crazier you can do frost Haven easily provides if you got bored and stopped playing because the plot in gloomhaven was weak that also means the combat wasn't keeping you going because if you enjoyed the gameplay you'd probably have kept playing but Frost Haven still has just as much combat as gloomhaven there just happens to be an actual story this time and tons of campaign narratives happening I don't think the story alone is enough of a justification to get Frost having because you still have to go through a ton of combat so you better be enjoying it if you're sinking in hundreds of hours to experience the story at the end of the day the go-to recommendation for newcomers is always going to be jaws of the lion it's Dirt Cheap has a ton of content and is built to ease newcomers into the gloomhaven combat system if you you played it and want more go straight to frost Haven blue Maven there's no reason to go back and play a worse version of frost Haven the exception is if after playing Jaws it turns out you're a die-hard fan who's utterly in love with the combat and you have the time and commitment to what to play through everything if that's the case sure you'll get glue Maven play through it and have a blast then go to frost Haven so your mind's blown even further by the fixes because if you start with frost Haven and go back to gloomhaven everything is going to feel worse in comparison but some of you are hardcore board gamers who do your due diligence and don't need your jaws of the line stepping stone if you're a pro at reading big rule books research the gameplay maybe even tried it out on tabletop Sim then came to the conclusion that you like the combat and are down to just jump right into a big box just go straight to frost Haven unlike Loom Haven I can actually recommend just diving into Frost Haven because it's actually functional right out of the box without needing to do all this insane like fully organizing the game yourself while smashing your head against the first scenario also for everyone who has the classic sequel Warrior oh should I start with the old game to know what's going on despite the new one being better don't worry about glue Maven ties into Frost Haven they're nice and all but totally unnecessary and mostly function as nods to existing fans with minimal references that show up in Frost Haven and as always if you don't want to read any Rule books or want to get games going twice as fast or want to play online with friends gloomhaven digital is always a thing but you're gonna have to wait a while if there's gonna be a Frost save in digital that's all buying advice for the uninitiated but what about if you already got gloomhaven for those of you who are already glue Maven fans let's be real you've already backed this game on Kickstarter and you're just watching this for entertainment but if somehow you didn't back because you're waiting to see the reviews like a smart person then yeah you're safe to buy though if you've waited this long and don't think you're gonna have time to play in the near future you're also in good hands if you wait for the second printing that will fix the random printing errors I guess that advice also goes for everyone if you're going to be extremely annoyed by owning a copy with mistakes then just wait for second printed but trust me the mistakes are so goddamn minor and are super super easy to look up through official channels online also unlike Loom Haven's second printing I highly doubt there will be any balance changes since frosting was so heavily play tested so this first printing version is going to offer the exact same gameplay the only tangible differences I see for the player experience in second printing is not having to look up a production error every 40 hours and maybe extremely slight component improvements like easier to remove Peels and stickers basically if you want Frost Haven right now just go buy it the mistakes are trivial so with all these heaps of Praise why is this a 9 out of 10. the combat and out of combat campaign mechanics are improved there's section bookstorey there's more and better unlocks with God knows how many more stickers so what's the big deal here well I'm starting to think that when board games get this big it's impossible for them to reach a 10 out of 10 because of logistics and player bookkeeping there's a final form that exists for board games and I think Frost Haven has unstably exceeded it when board games get this huge there's just too much of a calling to digitally automate certain aspects plus production and assembly of something this complicated with this many unlockables is absurd for overseas workers who don't even play the game or read the language it's produced in I need you to imagine for a sec that you're someone in a factory assembling this 35 pound board game that you know nothing about and you have to put all the correct character boards cards and sheets in the right envelopes the right Minis and the right boxes the right decks and the right trays like Jesus Christ anytime another locked hidden thing is added into a board game that's another complication added to the manufacturing process because most other board games you're just tossing a bunch of cards and Punch-Out sheets into a box and it's done Frost Haven requires so much actual assembly because boards have to be punched out and then put inside envelopes in addition to God knows how many different unique piles of cards and sticker sheets it's pretty clear that there's a number of things in this game that were supposed to be inside envelopes but just aren't examples like those two weird coins with check boxes the entire deck of challenge cards all of the rule stickers yeah I remember seeing the email from cephal fair to not show the stickers when unboxing because there's spoilers on them anyways I'm assuming putting those in envelopes would have further made the price go up because the manufacturing gets even more and cephyr did not want to make this a 300 board game so they decided to have some minor locked content just out in the open like even the dude who designed the insert wanted the box to be a little taller to have more space for the map towers without slight lid lift but any extra bit of size makes costs go up dramatically shipping containers already hold much less Frost Havens than they do other puny little board games so yeah with this much I think it's not viable to do everything perfectly and get that 10 out of 10. the 9 out of 10 is death by a Thousand Cuts from random tiny production errors plus the minuscule gameplay and campaign cons it's borderline undoable to produce this much without getting some random small thing wrong while designing around physical constraints and once it hits the tables play the whole campaign without ever running into a single small confusion point about a random rule or whatnot is asking for too much Granite cephalo Fair has been getting significantly better about this with the official FAQ in the rulebook plus they even have their own companion app to automate the combat however it's eight dollars and currently more designed around everyone having their phones out and connected together which could Drive the price up to 32 dollars if you're four player ideally you just get one copy of the app and have it on a laptop or TV but they're currently still working on a desktop mode I use the app a bit while I was in Early Access and it was pretty mid but I'm also just more used to fan made companion app uis because I've been using them so long and currently I'm using X Haven which has been absolutely incredible for how many features it has however the official app is also constantly being updated and improved so who knows maybe later this year it will beat out everything else just in time for when Frost Haven hits retail this I believe is the final form of board games on this scale Frost Haven may very well be the Pinnacle of what is possible for a game this big while also being so tightly packed and the level of expertise needed to create this is absurd and absolutely brilliant this really is the clown car of cardboard for how much it just makes other board games look ridiculously wasteful with how much extra space they tend to have in their boxes you really do use all the volume of space allowed in the Box along with every piece of Frost save into great effect and with how many pieces there are inside the possibilities really do get endless God damn Isaac you and the team have created something so special it's like just the Stardust of your dreams have been distilled into every bit of cardboard here everyone who worked on Frost Haven needs to get themselves a pat on the back for continuing to break the boundaries of what board games can be they're so good man yeah good work and I swear to God if you somehow managed to prove me wrong and break the inherent logistical barriers of projects this big if you make the next big box sequel incredulously perfectly functional in every conceivable manner in his physicality campaign and gameplay you're literally the god of games and all board gamers need to make a religion out of you cephalo fair turns into a mega church everything's tax exempt price Johnson the chief operations officer becomes the Archbishop of operations Isaac killdress is a supreme executive pontiff Ashton's personal score my personal score for frost Haven is going to be a I didn't play it I did play Gloom Haven my personal score for that's four out of ten so no need to play this but we did hire uh someone we outsourced our labor to this guy overseas so uh take your Premiere crap all right get out of here all right okay so here we are so for my personal score of frost Haven I'm giving it a 10 out of 10. it's a masterpiece I loved so many different parts of this game I got to play with Daniel which was such a fun experience and I also got to go through all of the different scenarios in here look at all the puzzles I remember spending really really long late nights analyzing all the puzzles in that puzzle book it was so much fun texting Daniel frantically I got this I think I solved this puzzle guys I think I got this puzzle this puzzle book right here was one of my favorite experiences in the entire thing one of the coolest Parts about this book was when we unlocked it we spent so much time just digging right into it and I think that the puzzle book in principle has so many really cool puzzles and stuff in here and I am incredibly excited for other people to try it and talk about what they thought was good about it and I think that while the puzzle book has some places that I would improve upon all the ideas and the concepts that they have in here are groundworks for some really really interesting things and I'm excited to see what come out in future games or just future stuff that cephalofair does with this kind of concept really early in the game it was really really interesting to watch the town like to gain one sticker on the town it was such like a Monumental accomplishment and that was one of the greatest feeling feelings that I got to have playing this game just slapping stickers on here and watching her Town slowly improve really gave the town some character and towards the end being able to optimize your town and always have something to upgrade as you come back from a scenario is really really fun and I think that this is something that a lot of other Campaign games miss the sort of sense of progression that keeps people playing it I think Daniel and I would have been a lot less invested in the game if we also didn't have the physical like depiction of what's going on in this town as for the story I thought there were some really really amazing Parts in it but I'm just going to highlight a few key points throughout it one of the coolest things that I wanted to talk about first was how well this race war between two Clans that you learn about at the beginning of the story was handled I think there are so many ways to sort of like infantilize both of these Clans and find a way to make it like particularly bad but the fact that you got to learn about a lot of the motivations for these different things and a lot of stuff that was happening is part of the story was such an interesting way to in to include a concept and a topic that could potentially be very very dangerous to talk about if you don't know a good about history and about how like our world function I guess what I'm trying to say is it's very clear that they hired a cultural consultant and I think that was a pretty cool idea because it allows for the depth of the story to be significantly more than if it was just sort of like uh haha two things beat the hell out of each other kind of story as for the actual gameplay like the scenario to scenario gameplay I found it really really smooth I played blink blade when we first started I think that playing blink blade helped me really understand a lot of mechanics while it is listed as a really really complex class I never played gloomhaven my experience with this entire universe is a few scenarios in Jaws the lion and one scenario in gloomhaven so coming in playing a character as weighty as bling blade was so much fun with blink blade it felt like every single room you walked into was a new puzzle to solve there were so many different options and tools at your fingertips and because of the complexity all those tools had to be sequenced in like the perfect order to be able to properly clean out a room but sometimes you had it properly lined up for you just when you walked in and you just got the ability to murk the boss in like one clean swing it was absolutely amazing my experience with with gloomhaven was the gameplay was very very smooth however that was because Daniel controlled every single part of the gameplay so I didn't have to do anything outside of move my little rock guy and see what would happen in Frost Haven I got the chance to help Daniel set up the scenarios and when I got a chance to actually sit down and set all this up as someone that's really new to this franchise it was actually really really easy to learn and one really cool thing I actually had Daniel leave the rule book with me for a night and I just straight up read it like cover to cover like it was an actual book I do read a lot of books in general but all things considered this was probably one of the easier books that I've had to read and there's a lot of very useful stuff in here the examples in here are really really good there's a lot of co-op games that would take from learning to this I think that they had a lot of good experience from writing the jaws of the lion rule book and that definitely shows in the frost Haven rule book everything that I remember us looking up and trying to work with was really smooth save for like a few rules confusions that we had that were clarified in the FAQ and other things here and there one main difference between gloomhaven and frost Haven is this big guy right here the section book this was such an essential part of this campaign because being able to go through a scenario and have one main story sort of branching into different paths based off of like your choices in the section book was really interesting there was a few scenarios that we did for one of Daniel's characters retirement quests where different choices you made through that section book actually allowed you to have different paths in future scenarios which were really really interesting as for another thing I really liked how so many things in that scenario flow chart are deeply interlinked there are some parts of the the flowchart that you really can't get to until you unlock other parts which is something that happens in gloomhaven 2 from my memory of what Daniels told me when we first started the campaign just basically followed one clean storyline but towards the end of the campaign because we wanted to try and finish it quickly to get the video out we decided to start merging a bunch of story lines simultaneously and like powering through parts of the game but that actually added such an interesting layer of depth to the game because we had the ability to sort of like interweave our own narrative and that scenario flow chart really really helps not with just with like kind of peaking your interest but also with helping you keep track of how many stories are related to each other and how even like your personal quests might relate to like the main stories that are going on also these were one of the easiest selling points to me for a lot of my non-board gamer friends I have a lot of people that really like things like d and d and really want to get more into board games and just laying the scenario sheets out for them and kind of mapping how these different scenarios can flow into each other was super duper cool for a lot of people that aren't as interested in board games but really want to try something more complicated of course I didn't just toss people that have only played Monopoly directly into Frost Haven I walked them up a few steps before they got here I'm really really excited to try and play Frost Haven with some of my friends that aren't necessarily traditional board gamers and sweaty nerds like me Ashton and Daniel I think that the minis had a lot of character to them I loved all the little terrain obstacles honestly I think playing it with these things the little wooden component trays and everything you can do with or without it for the most part I think this didn't add an insane amount to our experience but what did add a good amount to the experience was the digital companion app and being able to to keep track of all the monsters and everything when we first started we decided to just for lack of better word raw dog it and not play with any of the computer stuff so we ended up just keeping track of everything by hand which was a painful experience so over the last two years I've played a lot of different games it's been two years we've just been playing board games or really at least two and a half so for the last two and a half years I've had a really really fun time playing all sorts of different board games with Ashton so I have like a wide variety of experience comparing it to games other co-op games like Spirit island or this war of mine this war of mine is one of my favorite games I honestly play it but myself more times than I've care to admit comparing it to those games I think that Frost Haven has an Allure to it that's really really cool just like the sheer presence of it like it's so big trying to sell someone on a game like this is honestly easier than trying to sell someone in a game like this war of mine and as for comparing its Spirit Island I genuinely think that I can put together is way just here to do your taxes you're definitely in the shop but I don't like to I'm in the shot that's funny as though all right so ashen's Outsourcing his job to be today Ashton's over there doing taxes well I'm actually doing his job comparing something like frost Haven to Spirit Island the other day I played a game of spirit island with one of my friends teaching it a nightmare playing it a lot of fun the frost Haven rule book though I genuinely think that I can get out all the tiles and set up a scenario for frost Haven and teach the entire game before I could do the same thing for Spirit Island and that's considering that I have the target version that basically sets itself up Frost Haven in that sense is really really fun to introduce to new people also it's one of those games that like if you play it once you really do want to play it again purely for the fact that like you can play a link a set of linked scenarios so you can start someone out you can give them a little T's with like one start of like a long linked chain of scenarios and the next time they come over they might want to play the next one so for the for the rest of this for the rest of my personal score I'm just going to be talking about prism this is just purely prism fan cam hour that's all we're doing now from now on this is all this channel is okay this was one of my favorite experiences of frost David and I feel like I've said that for pretty much all of the games so far but this has to be the top of the charts prism has the ability to give you many many options for what you want to do and I think that its complexity was genuinely way more than blink blade I really love prism and blink blade overall and I think that anyone that wants to play the game for the puzzle solving aspect of it try and go for these two classes I think there's a lot of really fun stuff to do in them and managing all of the stuff that's going on with both of these classes is a very difficult task but it's incredibly worthwhile when you can pull off these things or you just like walk into a room and you just clear everything in there all right so some closing thoughts overall of course the game is perfect I love so many different parts of it I think the gameplay is smooth as butter I think it's super duper cool to introduce to people that aren't board gamers the presence of it alone just sitting in the corner of my apartment people look at it and ask me questions about it all the time I think the rule book is written really well the story works really really well and there's so many intricate and complicated storylines that all mesh really really well together and also playing that final scenario at the end of all of it and beating it was genuinely awesome Daniel and I jumped out of arch hair and were like screaming at the end of it genuinely screaming because it was such a cool scenario to play at the end of such a long campaign it was an amazing experience alright so now that we're done with our closing thoughts it's complexity by circle jerk now do you want to spend five minutes thinking about every single card that you play beating every room before anyone even walks into it well these are new classes for you play Blink blade like I did when I first started and then work your way up to prison like I did all the way at the end these are the only two classes for you oh just play these two classes forever always don't stop playing these two classes I love analysis paralysis my personal score if this could be an 11 out of 10 I'd do it but that's cheating look if I wasn't a board game YouTuber I don't think I'd even have a collection it'd just be all the Haven games and if I ever wanted to play something else boom just go to a friend's place but there would still mostly be frost even happening maybe root too but seriously what is the point of owning other board games if these games are above and beyond while also being effectively infinitely replayable there's still hundreds of scenarios I haven't played yet across gloomhaven Frost Haven forgotten circles Crimson scales the official Community campaigns for gloomhaven the not yet released official Community campaigns for frost Haven I should probably explain what those are official Community campaigns are chains of scenarios made by Isaac and posted on BGG where people can play them and then vote on what happens next in the story which is super cool not to mention there's a ton of classes and builds to play in all these scenarios plus there's even a ttrpg coming out which is gonna contest with DND for me I know very low bar to clear because Wizards of the Coast keeps up but if you want to actually hear me talk about the game go watch the gloomhaven personal score and then assume everything I praised is improved in Frost Haven this video has gone on for way too long I'll just mention that for stuff I like that's new in this game the section book is amazing for narrative I die for a Frost saving town I love the denizens I love the buildings Chief Ellen is the greatest character ever who needs more screen time and I'm addicted to playing the two classes I play tested because after the waves of feedback and changes they've significantly honed the aspects of the classes I loved the most that'll be all please consider supporting us by becoming a patron on patreon.com shelfside or buying merch from shelfside.com see ya [Music] [Applause] [Music] 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Channel: Shelfside

Views: 56,479

Keywords: tabletop, shut up and sit down, dice tower, boardgamegeek, geek and sundry, no pun included, watch it played, prozd board game, rahdo runs through, jongetsgames, 3 minute board games, tom vasel, before you play, quackalope, boardgameco, rolling solo, The Brothers Murph, man vs meeple, no rolls barred, good time society, gloomhaven, frosthaven guide, frosthaven what's new, should i buy gloomhaven, gloomhaven vs frosthaven, frosthaven shut up and sit down, gloomhaven second edition

Id: OLib0agBX6s

Length: 111min 53sec (6713 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 01 2023