Played the first two scenarios of Frosthaven last night. Forgot to take pictures, because of course I did.
The tutorial mission was pretty easy… the reduction in the cards you have available is… weird. But whatever, it was a gentle-ish way to be reintroduced to the game’s systems, and then the next mission (technically mission 1) was brutal.
We managed it, but one of our heroes (the Drifter, kinda the “Heavy” of the group) was taken out by running out of cards (due to being the target of a LOT of attacks). The second area has generic City Guards to soak some of those attacks, but Andy rushed right into the middle of the space. She played a few Retaliate cards (including one that allows Retaliate at range) and so did a lot of damage on the way down, but even so we were running out of cards to do things by the end.
Still, a success, and the game actually rewarded us for protecting the City Guard! That was unexpected, and very pleasant.
The game’s bones continue to be solid, but good golly there’s a lot of fiddly rules to keep track of (including the stupid Elemental Infusions, which again, nobody ever remembers to degrade from one turn to the next). And somehow the game didn’t ship with nearly enough plastic bases… which may be a balancing factor? Because we’re all Level 1 heroes, and there were… oh, maybe 8 summoned Allies on the board (the Banner Spear put out two, the Deathwalker summoned one, I had three out… so I guess 6, plus 5 City Guards for a total of 11). But we also ran out of white bases pretty quickly.
Ah well. The plan is to play every other week until we finish the campaign. In 2018 we played the original Gloomhaven once a week, every week, for 50 straight weeks… I’m curious if we’ll get similar mileage out of Frosthaven. There were far fewer options in 2018, but now… game design has come quite some way.
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, not them.
