Frosthaven Preorders (Q1 2023)

The passage of time
about 4 years ago – Mon, Apr 27, 2020 at 01:30:56 AM

Happy Sunday everyone! Today I thought we'd spend our Sunday Lore Discussion talking about the passage of time in the game world. If that doesn't fascinate you, well, you'll want to come back tomorrow, when I will be revealing the icons for the ten locked classes in Frosthaven. No spoilers, of course - just the icons.

But anyway, onto time! When you're creating a new world, you have the freedom to do whatever you want with time intervals. This is a different planet, after all, revolving around a different sun in a different way. The more you diverge from how Earth operates, however, the more confusion you're going to get from your players, as it is expected that things will operate similarly. I've always felt like you should try to stick to Earth logic, or close to it, unless you have a good reason not to.

So, to start with, a day still has 24 hours to it. Changing this can have weird implications on the world, and I decided there was no need to mess with it. And if we want to go to smaller units, I decided to leave the second, minutes, and hours system the same, simply because changing that makes it a lot harder to communicate things to players.

If we want to go to larger time units however, a lot of that comes from culture over natural science, so I changed it up a bit in a way I feel better fits within the theme and mechanics of the game. After all, the cycle of a year is 30 "passages of time", so hopefully I can better define that for you so it makes a little more sense.

These passages of time are weeks, which consist of 10 days (instead of 7). Months are still based largely on lunar cycles, which are similar to Earth's, so each month is 30 days, or 3 weeks, and there are 10 months in a year. This makes a year, 300 days, somewhat shorter than an Earth year, but it's not so far off that if I say I am 46 years old, the number's still somewhat close to what it would be on Earth (38).

The ten months are abbreviations of the old rulers of human civilization from when they were still living in caves. In order, they are Aln, Ort, Ist, Erd, Ing, Gow, Pim, Gul, Din, and finally Pan, the ruler who brought humans out of the caves. Each week in a month is given a prefix based on its position, starting with "new", then "mid", then "old", so the first three weeks of the year are Newaln, Midaln, and Oldaln.

There are only two recognized seasons to a year - summer, which spans from Newaln to Olding, and winter, which spans from Newgow to Oldpan - though spring and fall are still terms that are sometimes used to reference the transition periods between these seasons.

This whole calendar system was developed in the formative years of the human civilization living above ground, under the Great Oak, starting with year 1 "in the light of the Oak", or "LO" for short. The events of the Gloomhaven campaign took place in 1957-8 LO, and the events of Frosthaven begin a year later, in 1959 LO.

As always, I hope these bits of lore are interesting to you, and I'll see you tomorrow with more announcements and puzzles and character icons!

Focus on token trays and guest designers The Geek Allstars
about 4 years ago – Sun, Apr 26, 2020 at 12:46:50 AM

Hello! It's been one day, and we've already hit another major achievement: Frosthaven has passed Exploding Kittens to become the second most funded board game project on Kickstarter! Can we make it to the #1 spot? One can dream. I think it could end up close.

I wanted to delve a little more into the storage elements provide in the Frosthaven box, so people could make a better decision about whether they wanted to buy the Broken Token insert. But first, however, let's talk about those new guest designers! Dan Patriss and Chris Kirkman are the hosts of The Geek Allstars, a podcast that marries sports and board games, but is mostly about board games. They have been covering the Gloomhaven since before the initial Kickstarter, and have played the crap out of it ever since, including the digital version.

And if just being big fans isn't enough cred, Chris is also the owner of Dice Hate Me Games and has helmed the design and development of many games, including Fate of the Elder Gods and their own dungeon crawler, Legends of Sleepy Hollow, whose central antagonist I am somewhat a fan of.

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All right, so as I said above, the other thing I wanted to talk about is the component storage that we are planning to include in the Frosthaven box. Obviously the storage capabilities of Gloomhaven leave something to be desired, and so, like many things in Gloomhaven, this is something I plan to improve upon. If you want a high-quality organizer, of course you can add the Broken Token insert onto your pledge, but I want to at least include something in the box that doesn't make something like an after-market solution a necessity.

So, to start with, at the bottom of the box will be something similar to what is in Gloomhaven - a plastic insert that will provide a place to store all the cards, envelopes, and boxes in the game. I think this part of Gloomhaven worked about as well as it could, so there won't be a lot of changes here. All the cardboard stuff is where we really ran into trouble.

So what we are working on adding to the box are two token trays with lids to hold a lot of the cardboard bits. One tray will hold all of the counters that you use in most/all game sessions - the damage tokens, loot tokens, condition tokens, numbered and lettered tracking tokens, element tokens, plus your treasure and trap tiles. The other tray will hold the assortment of overlay tiles (which, side note: will still be double-sided, but will be more organized about what is on the other side of what).

I'm honestly not sure at this point whether we will have any more space in the box to include a tray for the monster standees. Doing so would likely increase the height of the box, and it will already be higher than the Gloomhaven box, which is concerning. We'll have to look into it more, but, at minimum, there will at least be provided zip bags to store all of the monsters types separately.

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And, hey, here's another thing! I did a Twitch stream playing Frosthaven with Matt from Shut Up & Sit Down last week, and if you missed it, you can find a nice version here, edited down to a more manageable 2 hours (the original stream was, like, 4).

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I'll be honest, I wasn't paying too much attention yesterday (but thanks for all the birthday well-wishes!), but both #TeamAlgox and #TeamUnfettered had big gains in activity and in the poll, so it is somehow still neck-and-neck. I swear I am not rigging this. I'm not sure what is happening, but it is exciting!

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And here is you Tinkerer puzzle solution!

Next up is the Spellweaver, who has here own problems with those pesky Lurkers.

Guest designer David Turczi and a birthday surprise
about 4 years ago – Sat, Apr 25, 2020 at 12:55:35 AM

Hello! We've got one week left on this crazy thing, and we've just entered the top 10 most funded Kickstarter projects of all time! Thank you all so much for your support! 

So first off today I need to introduce our newest guest designer, the incomparable David Turczi, designer of Anachrony, Kitchen Rush and many others. So many others, in fact, three of his designs are on Kickstarter right now. Three! We've got Rush MD ICU, a real-time cooperative worker placement game, Excavation Earth, a Euro with market manipulation and set collection, and The Defence of Procyon III, a big minis-heavy 2v2 wargame with low randomness.

And now he's guest designing on Frosthaven! At this rate, he'll soon be involved in every board game ever made.

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All right, so as I mentioned yesterday, today is my birthday, and my team did something a little wild and unprecedented. Price told me they were designing a scenario for me, but I wasn't expecting something this elaborate. They truly went above and beyond!

There are actually two scenarios and they're kind of personal (particularly the second one), but I still wanted to share them with all of you because I think they will be enjoyable even if you are not me. Now, the one issue is that I can't in good conscience direct you to a print and play file, because the amount of printing and setup for them is extreme. So Marcel, who designed the scenarios, is adding them to the Frosthaven Tabletop Simulator module, and you can play them there, where all of that is done for you!

I hope you enjoy them! If you don't want to delve into the silliness of my personal life, I'd highly recommend starting with "IC-1".

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#TeamAlgox is so close! Within 10 points! Can #TeamUnfettered maintain their lead?

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Here is the solution for the final Voidwarden puzzle, which wraps up our excursion to Jaws of the Lion

I thought, with six days of puzzles left, and all other starting characters getting puzzles, it was time to give some love to the original six. And I'm starting off with favorite, the Tinkerer!

Guest designers Robb Rouse and Christian Wakeman, plus writing from Andy Nellis
about 4 years ago – Fri, Apr 24, 2020 at 06:28:45 PM

Hello all! It's Thursday! Normally I'd be giving you a link to the latest scenario of the community-driven campaign, but I am taking a week off because it is my birthday tomorrow, and I've been told there's going to be some special bonus content for everyone that I know nothing about. So, umm, yeah, stay tuned tomorrow for that!

What I do have for you today is two new guest designers! So, as you may know, I've done bonus scenario content for a number of media creators - No Pun Included, The Dice Tower, Man vs Meeple, The Secret Cabal - but the first people I actually approached about this was my favorite podcast, Blue Peg, Pink Peg. Bonus content is a little hard to implement with a Patreon campaign, so they opted to play the very long game (this was three years ago), and we eventually decided that I would feature their mascot, the Piranha Pig (a creature that I love) in my next game, and they would create some content centered around it. 

So that's what we did! Robb Rouse, one of the co-creators of the podcast, is teaming up with his friend Christian Wakeman, data specialist and all around intelligent board game lover, to create a series of scenarios in which these lovable creatures will tear you to pieces!

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One person we haven't talked too much about in the project yet is Andy Nellis, the professional writer I've hired to get all the scenarios written. All the writing from Gloomhaven was done by me, and while I am a perfectly adequate writer, now that Cephalofair Games has more resources, I decided "adequate" wasn't what I wanted to strive for. Plus I find writing to be very time-consuming and draining, and I figured my time could be better spent elsewhere.

I met Andy through my wife's creative writing graduate program, and I really liked his style and the tone of his work. He agreed to join on the project, and so now everybody wins! You can see his writing on three of the scenarios in the various play through videos made for Frosthaven, and the Tabletop Simulator module, but here is another excerpt from a different scenario. I chose it because I think it is generic enough as to not provide any real spoilers for the game.

"Approaching the ruins on the mountain slope, you discover a copse of carved stone, vestiges of some forgotten past. A number of broken or otherwise time-battered pillars stand in your path, and following them, you arrive at a pair of large stone doors. On them, you make out an expansive mural, still quite clear despite however many years it’s been buried. It depicts a history. It shows a village, small and wooded; then, a vast city with tall buildings and wide roads; and last there is only flame and ruin. Above these three depictions there is another set of carvings: that of man aging in reverse. First, there is an old man above the town as it’s being built, then an adult over the flourishing town, and finally a baby hanging above the flames.

"Your curiosity is too much to resist. You push on the doors, and with grinding stone and cracking rust, they give in. Peering into the entryway, it’s clear that what’s inside this place has not been well preserved. Corroded columns and scraps of metal litter the floor like an ancient junk pile. But sometimes treasure can lay hidden in unlikely places.

"Ten steps is as far as you get. Far enough for the coldness of this ruin to seep into your skin and then the ground stirs. Those scraps of metal which you took for junk lurch upward, filled suddenly with life, and a slew of dented metal faces turn towards you, ancient automatons. They don’t seem like much of a threat, these ruined things, but there are a lot of them and there’s no knowing how deep this room goes."

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#TeamAlgox is within 20 points! How is it this close?

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Here is your Hatchet puzzle solution.

And then another tricky puzzle for the Voidwarden. The Hatchet barely survived that last fight, and now she's got to carry him out of the next one, after she has him do all the work of killing the monsters, of course.

Focus on Broken Token, more community-driven content, and guest designer Paul Grogan
about 4 years ago – Thu, Apr 23, 2020 at 01:25:50 AM

Hello! The first thing I want to do today, because a lot of you have been asking for it and anticipating it, is provide you some more information on the Broken Token wooden insert. Now, the components for Frosthaven aren't yet set in stone, plus everyone at Broken Token is working from home because of the pandemic, so we don't have a lot of specific information on what it will look like, but I asked them from all the information they could provide, and they shot this video:

If you still have any unanswered questions, Greg Spence, the CEO, has agreed to hang out in the comments section of this update to answer anything he can.

One other thing to mention about the insert is that we wanted to do some special engraving on it exclusive to the Kickstarter. So if you bought the insert through this project, you'd get something a little extra as a thank you. We've got designers working on what those engravings would be, and we'll probably end up with multiple designs and ask you all for which one you like best. So look out for that in the next week!

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And we still have two big announcements to talk about! I know I've mentioned it before, but first I just wanted to highlight the fact that there is a new community-driven campaign going on right now, and you can vote on what happens next in the story (it's actually a pretty close vote at the moment!). The reason I am bringing it up, though, is that I'd like to announce there's going to be even more community-driven content in the future!

As a show of gratitude for the success of this Kickstarter, I am committing myself to running another community-driven series of scenarios for Frosthaven specifically. Now obviously once you get the game, there will be a lot of core content to play, but some time after it is delivered, I'll run this extra campaign as well. If you're not sure what a community-driven campaign looks like, you can check out a previous one on BoardGameGeek.

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And that brings us to today's guest designer announcement, Paul Grogan of Gaming Rules! I could talk for a while about all the adventures Paul and I have been through together, but I'll just give you some of his pertinent credentials. He has actually been playing Gloomhaven longer than almost anyone else. He received one of the first production copies of the game to use for his superlative rules video, and has been playing ever since. He's also been playing a lot of Gloomhaven Digital recently on his channel, so it's probably safe to call him a Gloomhaven expert.

He'll also be doing the rules video for Frosthaven, which I'm excited about! You can check out his Patreon if you want to learn more, or watch his latest vlog for, among other things, some info on how to win a copy of Frosthaven.

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Both #TeamAlgox and #TeamUnfettered were fighting hard yesterday, picking up major points. My favorite, though, has to be this thread written entirely in binary.

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On to the puzzle! Here is a solution for the Demolitionist punching a Savvas to death.

And now we have another Hatchet conundrum, this time with no favorite axe to rely on! (Note that there is a water hex underneath each eel, as they can only move in water.)