Frosthaven Preorders (Q1 2023)

Guest designer Julie Ahern and a rule book discussion
over 4 years ago – Wed, Apr 29, 2020 at 03:01:00 AM

Hello! First off, wow! There was a lot of feedback on those class icons, and most of it was not great! Still, I appreciate all of it, and we'll be using it to revisit the art and see if we can't get closer to that abstract geometric style seen more in Gloomhaven. Some time down the road, I'll be sure to share revised versions with you.

What I can share with you now is a new guest designer! Julie Ahern is the VP and COO of Greenbrier Games and also just a really good friend. She even lent me 20 euros after I forgot all my money at home on a trip to Essen. And then we played Tokyo Highway on the floor of the Dublin airport on the way home.

But anyway, that's not important. Julie is also a great writer and one of the creative minds behind Folklore: The Affliction, which is all about immersive storytelling, so I'm really excited to see what she brings to the table for Frosthaven. Also, Folklore's latest Kickstarter still has pre-orders available, so you can check that out if it is of interest.

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I don't have much else to talk about today. In fact, as we approach the end of the Kickstarter, I seem to have largely run out of game elements to discuss (at least those that aren't spoilers), so if you still want me to discuss anything specific, let me know in the comments.

One thing I did want to briefly talk about is the rule book. Obviously we don't have any available rules document for the Kickstarter, largely because the rules are more-or-less the same as Gloomhaven's with new looting and town elements that are highlighted on the Kickstarter page.

All that said, Frosthaven will feature a single rule book with all rules to the game, old and new, presented in a coherent format for players new to the system to pick up and learn. The Gloomhaven rule book is dense, and this book will be as well, but we've got a lot more eyes and experience working on it, so the intent is to provide extra clarity on those rules that many players get confused about.

In addition, if you are already familiar with the Gloomhaven rules, we don't want you to have to read through 50 pages just to figure out what is different, so any aspect of the rules that is new or different from Gloomhaven will be clearly highlighted for easy skimming. Now, you may be curious about what specifically is different in the rules, but all I can say is that that is still in flux. Plus, just because a rule is different in Frosthaven, doesn't mean it is different in Gloomhaven. Frosthaven rules shouldn't change your Gloomhaven experience.

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Also the latest poll for the community-driven campaign is up!

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Ah hahaha, what is going on? Over 4000 points, and you are somehow within 3 points of each other. That's less than 0.1% difference! The big news is that #TeamAlgox did manage to take the lead after I spent some time reviewing the main comments section and the additional chapters of the Algox stories. They were actually a little farther ahead before some #TeamUnfettered memes popped up on BGG. The Unfettered have become ruthless every time their lead was challenged, so the big question is, what will they do now they've fallen behind?

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Today we have a solution to the Cragheart puzzle, featuring a tiny Cragheart!

And next up on the puzzle docket is the Scoundrel, who just wants to get that Living Doom assassinated, but all her friends are gone and she's on her last legs!

Locked class icons and guest designer Ryan Schoon
over 4 years ago – Tue, Apr 28, 2020 at 12:10:20 AM

Good day! Once again, I must commend you all for crushing it. I was hoping to reach the $9 million mark right before the 48 hour mark, and we've already breezed past that and are about to become the 8th most funded project on Kickstarter! I think this list will be fun to watch moving through this last week. Thanks for joining me on this journey!

Before we get to the class icons, I want to welcome our newest guest designer, Ryan Schoon. I feel like Ryan knows everyone, so you are probably already friends with him. Seriously, I see him at every convention, and at each one, he's friends with each person there. Ryan contributes on Man vs Meeple, and works full-time on writing and designing RPGs, so I'm pretty sure he can handle a little Frosthaven scenario design.

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All right, some last caveats before the icons. First, these are still a work in progress and might get tweaked a little. Second, and this is the more important one, there may be some information floating out there about the names of what some of these might actually be. The class icons are not spoilers, but the actual names of the classes are, so please be very mindful of that. Wild guesses and nicknames for the symbols are okay, but if you have valid information on a name, please keep it to yourself.

So here they are, in no particular order!

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Just when you think it's getting close, #TeamUnfettered springs from dormancy and pulls out all the stops, making strange puzzle tutorials, music videos, and song lyrics. #TeamAlgox was fighting too, but it is an uphill battle once again.

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And here is your Spellweaver solution video, doing the unheard of thing of intentionally losing Reviving Ether on a short rest. What has the world come to?

And our next puzzle is for everyone's favorite Cragheart. Can you kill the monsters before the monsters kill you? One thing to make note of in this puzzle, which hasn't really come up before, is that killed monsters don't drop loot.

The passage of time
over 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
over 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
over 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!