Too long passes between our Frosthaven games, what with various sickesses, people being elsewhere at the time, and just – you know – stuff comes up. But we finally able to meet last night.
Our continuing goal is to get our characters retired as quickly as possible. My Banner Spear just needs to reach level four, so any scenario is good for her, as long as it brings experience. Doom Shaper needs to build buildings in Frosthaven itself, so there we just need to do outpost events. Blink Blade needs to kill a particular kind of enemy called a Robotic Boltshooter, and we currently do not have any scenarios dealing with ancient ruins unlocked. Death Walker wants to travel to scenarios by conveyances five times, and we had just one of those unlocked — #10, Crystal Enclosure, which we reach by sled. And so that was our plan.
On the way to the tundra field, just outside Frosthaven, we met some inebriates with a Drinking Donkey — a donkey with two casks of sketchy liquors strapped to its back. Our choices were to lead the drunks back to Frosthaven, or to buy some drinks. I voted to just lead them back to the outpost, but I was outvoted and the others opted to dip into our outpost reserves and feed the donkey. Which lost us two cards for the next scenario. We rapidly remembered that there was no way we could have run to the outpost, gotten our herb stash, and run back, and in fact we didn’t have sufficient herbs on us, and so we could not drink!
Turns out leading the drunks back to Frosthaven would ALSO have cost us the two cards, and some gold for some reason. So we were just not going to get out of that any other way than retconning.
We would have had to just reach the scenario, turn around and go home, as the scenario effect for Crystal Enclosure is: discard a card.
Three cards down? That wasn’t ever going to work.
We read the scenario effect carefully. Discard a card? Okay, it didn’t say lose a card, just discard a card. So we would get the card back when we rested. Fine.
In this scenario, the ice pillars add 1 shield to all enemies within range four, and this shield stacks. In the first room, this meant two of the three mobs would have three shields, plus whatever shields they raised themselves, and the one at the edge would just have two. The Algox priest in the room was also itself shielded and would happily sit at the edge of the room healing itself and others, so any minor chip damage we could do that got through the shields would be soon erased. We had to smash the ice pillars.
We were levels 2 and 3, and we played the scenario at level 1, and there were four of us, so the ice pillars had six health each. I burned a loss card right off to destroy one of the pillars — it was my new level 3 card, and I didn’t notice it was a loss card until I played it.
The others were better with their cards, and we eventually cleared the room, unlocking the doors to the next, much bigger room.
Our plan for that one was to open the doors and lure everyone out of the range of the ice pillars and kill them all as they entered the room, shield-free.
The game had other plans for us. When we opened one of the doors, we were instantly teleported into the second room and all three doors locked behind us. We weren’t going to be able to do this the easy way. And now, most of the mobs had four shields from ice pillars in range, plus whatever they brought. I brought out my banners and my helpers and did what I could — destroying a couple of ice pillars along the way — while the others did the same.
I was on my very last turn when we finally won, and everyone else was there or one more turn away. If we’d played this scenario one level higher, we’d never have had a chance.
Our quarry turned and fled, and we gave chase until it lost itself in a forest of these runic ice pillars, stretching as far as we could see, like a river of ice magic. There was no way we could take this fight on.
A close victory is still a victory, and so we returned to Frosthaven triumphant, but we know that encounter is still waiting for us, out there.
