Frosthaven

My group put probably two hundred hours into Gloomhaven before this came out, so I went in already knowing the combat puzzle and mostly wanting to see what got improved. The scenario flowchart is the single best quality-of-life change here, it makes it easier to see where you’ve been in the campaign instead of guessing at a paper map, and the redesigned scenario book keeps each room a new discovery instead of seen in advance, which fixed a problem I didn’t realize was bothering me until it was gone.

Where it adds real weight is the outpost phase, managing and building up the town between scenarios. I was worried this would just be a chore bolted onto a combat game, since the road and city events were my least favorite part of Gloomhaven, and for the first several sessions it kind of was, we spent almost as long managing resources and building projects as we did actually fighting anything. It’s grown on me since, there’s a real strategic layer to deciding what to build when resources are tight, but I get why some reviews call the whole thing more excel than game. Some sessions it earns that label.

The characters themselves feel meaningfully different from Gloomhaven’s roster rather than reskins, it’s a lateral power creep instead of just everything in the later edition being stronger, new tools and longer-lasting builds rather than pure upgrades. The game also starts at a pretty high difficulty, and we ended up scaling back the difficulty level on our first few scenarios just to win, we lost our first three at the lowest setting with a group that cleared Gloomhaven’s back half without much trouble, and that early wall put a real dent in the first month of sessions before things clicked.

The story itself, I’ll be honest, fifty-some scenarios into Gloomhaven I never had a clear read on the overarching narrative either, and here I’ve got no real idea of any overarching narrative beyond protect Frosthaven. I play this for the combat puzzle and the character progression, not the plot, and on those terms it delivers.

Four stars, would be higher without the early difficulty wall and the upkeep between sessions.