Frosthaven Preview
I love strategy board games, at least in theory. It’s hard to gather like-minded local folks for a leisurely evening of gaming, so I often have to wait for digital versions to get ported to one device or another. This was the case with 2017’s Gloomhaven, which finally made its way to PC in 2021. I gnashed my teeth in 2022 when Frosthaven appeared, knowing I’d have to wait patiently again. But the wait is almost over and Frosthaven is poised for release this year. I had the chance to play at little of the game with the developer one-on-one, who led me through a small slice of the campaign.
Turns and More Turns
Both Gloomhaven and Frosthaven are turn based RPGs with a card battle mechanic underneath. They’re densely structured, so I won’t dive too deep into the ruleset. Basically, for each turn and character the player picks two cards from the deck. Each card has a top set of actions — usually attacks, heals, buffs and debuffs — and lower section with movement points. Each turn will use the top of one card and the bottom of the other. When a character is injured, players can either accept the injury or “burn” (discard) a card from the deck to heal the injury. There’s a lot more to the mechanics. The point of my preview session was really seeing how Frosthaven works on PC.
Well, it works great. The PC version of Gloomhaven was a faithful version of the board game. It had an engaging art style that literally suggested a tabletop experience. Frosthaven leans much more towards being a graphically rich RPG. Environments, lighting, character design and animations are considerably more detailed. In other words, it feels, looks and plays very much like a game that’s right at home on PC.
Going with the Flow
I played through the game’s succinct but enlightening tutorial and then a few scenarios from the campaign. Both Gloomhaven and Frosthaven have an easy-to-understand hook but incredibly deep strategic depth. In other words, the flow of combat comes easily enough, but succeeding consistently requires a lot of practice. Even veterans will have some cool new mechanics to explore. One of them is base building. Part of Frosthaven is constructing a sprawling city with dozens of specific game-related structures and even defensive walls. The devs showed me what the fully kitted-out city looks like. It was impressive.
Like a few other games in the genre, players can see what the opponent is planning to do, making good strategic choices a bit more likely. Every action is accompanied by a well-done animation and very effective spell or combat effects. The dungeon environment that we explored was atmospheric and filled with useful loot.
I only had a few character archetypes to choose from and no real opportunity to run through the all-important character creation steps, so I’m looking forward to exploring those elements when the game enters early access. Even though I’m a relative newbie and it was a bit intimidating to play alongside the developer, I can tell that Frosthaven is going to be a winner. Gloomhaven players can obviously jump right in without too much trouble. Strangers to either board game or the PC version of Gloomhaven will have a great time, too.
Thank you for keeping it locked on COGconnected.
