We finished Gloomhaven about five years ago, and Jaws of the Lion about three years ago. Aside from the solo mini box, Buttons & Bugs, we hadn’t gone Gloomhavening for quite some time. I backed the Frosthaven Kickstarter fully expecting we’d play it as soon as it arrived, but there was a bit of malaise around the Haven games at the time, and we decided as a group to try other games — Skyrim, Jurassic World, Tales from the Loop and so on.
It would be Frosthaven time, some day.
Well, today is that day. I’d gone through the initial setup for the game a few months ago and started printing some of the ‘Haven terrain I didn’t have from the previous two games, as well as the wolves for the “Scenario 0” that we played tonight.
It was good to start with an easy scenario, since it had been a long time and we’d kinda forgotten how to play.
Frosthaven comes with the cardboard tiles, same as Gloomhaven, that let you construct the dungeon on the fly. We came to love Jaws of the Lion’s quick setup book, and I bought the complete set of scenario books at Origins last year. No digging through a box looking for that one tile — just open the page.
We’d picked our starting classes a few months ago, so I had a chance to get them painted. I chose Banner Spear; this is a tank who can summon minions to stand in the best spot for her to get off her AEs. That’s her new thing: she can only unleash her area-of-effect abilities when standing near an ally, and the card shows where the AE hits based on the relative positions of her and the ally.
I wasted a couple of moves before I understood this mechanic. Ally played the Deathwalker, a character who drops Shadow tokens and then can attack through them, heal with them, lots of fun stuff. Kasul played the Boneshaper, basically a necromancer that can provide buffs and heals to allies. And Drew played the Blinkblade—if there’s a rogue class, he’ll play the rogue class, no worries there. It took him a little time to figure out the go fast-go slow mechanic, but by the end he was stealing treasure chests and loot tokens with the best of them.
Scenario 0 takes place just outside Frosthaven, as we deal with some suspiciously aggressive wildlife and try to remember how our cards work. It’s a gentle reintroduction to the system—but with one big twist: instead of dropping gold, enemies now drop crafting components. Looks like we’ll be trading merchant trips for item crafting once we get into the town proper. We haven’t reached Frosthaven yet—that’s next session, in Scenario 1—but once we do, we’re expecting to start managing the town’s development and defenses. From what I’ve heard, things aren’t exactly going smoothly in there…
