Frosthaven, and Gloomhaven before it, are complex turn-based tactical boardgames. Filled with cards, plastic figurines, a dense rulebook, and a denser tome filled with scenario descriptions and special conditions, Frosthaven’s box comes to a weighty 36Ibs, or, in old money, 5Ibs heavier than the Lego Titanic.
One of the perks of the digital adaptations is that you don’t need to lug around the equivalent of a four-year-old child to go play at being an RPG adventurer in a frozen wasteland with your mates, you can just boot it up and all hop into a multiplayer server together. Turns, too, play out faster, as you don’t need to calculate all the enemy actions and slide their little plastic figurines to their new spots on the board. The digital adaptations reduce this down to a few neatly animated seconds of action. Though, that doesn’t mean the rules themselves are any less simple. Nic (RPS in peace) spent a good chunk of his glowing Gloomhaven review just breaking down everything you need to do in a turn. So, understandably, Frosthaven can be difficult for new players to pick up.
However, it’s actually the boardgame players trying out Snapshot Games’ digital adaptation that are causing more of an issue.
Head over to Frosthaven’s Steam page and discussion forums and you will find reviews and posts criticising the game for bugs in its scenarios. Longtime boardgame players are complaining that the characters aren’t behaving as they should and quests aren’t resolving as they expect.
“The team is reading all of those comments and we were discussing the opportunity to answer those Steam reviews, because those are not actually bugs,” game director Hristo Petkov tells me. “They’re misunderstanding the rules of the game.” At another point in our interview, he explained “The rules are very complicated, especially around movement and how AI behaves. We have implemented exactly like it is in the boardgame and for some people that looks like a bug because they have played it some other way.”
“They played it wrong,” founder of Frosthaven developer Snapshot Games and XCOM creator Julian Gollop says. “Most boardgame players get rules wrong, by the way it’s just that a lot of the time they don’t realise it.”
Knowingly or not, many Gloomhaven and Frosthaven players will have developed their own way of playing the boardgame and now they’re running into an unflinching reality. “They played their house variant,” Petkov says. “When they start playing the digital version, which perfectly implements the board game, they’re like, ‘Oh no, this is too hard’ or ‘This doesn’t work correctly’.”
Currently, the main way of communicating to early access players that they might be playing the game wrong is when they join Frosthaven’s Discord to lodge a complaint. “When people go to Discord and say, ‘This doesn’t work right!’,” Petkov says, “Immediately ten people explain why this is actually correct. But if you cannot get them there that’s a little bit of a problem.”
Obviously, that can’t be the only solution longterm. The most incensed or well-meaning players might join a Discord to share a ‘bug’, but others may just bounce out of the game. So, instead, Snapshot are implementing other ways of gently helping players banging their heads against an unforgiving rulebook.
The first is an undo function that lets players travel back through every action in a round. It’s currently sitting in the options menu as an experimental extra to be toggled on from its default off position, but it will be made more prominent in future after it’s been fully tested. “[Frosthaven’s] way more unforgiving when playing digitally, and this is not the spirit of the boardgame,” Petkov says. “When we added undo it fixed most of the issues.”
Though, the change I find much more intriguing is based on how players are playing the game wrong. “If there is something that people regularly play wrong, and intentionally play wrong,” Petkov says, “We try to introduce those things as ‘house rules’, so people can play the way they want.” Snapshot are in regular discussion with the community council – which includes the writers of the official Frosthaven FAQ (and the unofficial collection of Frosthaven house rules) – to see what can be implemented as an optional rule change.
One example of a house rule that will be implemented for Frosthaven’s 1.0 release on October 15 reduces the game’s chaos. In both Frosthaven and Gloomhaven, your attack damage is augmented by modifiers. Many of these modifiers add or subtract a point of damage, but a critical hit will double it and a miss will reduce it to zero. If you find that wild swing a bit much you will be able to switch on a rule that replaces critical hits with a plus two and a miss with minus two. “Just to reduce the chaos of battle,” Petkov explains.
Tweaks may also include some changes to the scenarios that have been recreated from the boardgame, which in some cases, players have been found unintentionally difficult when played exactly as written. “We are in discussion with the top members of the community and with [Frosthaven creator] Isaac Childres to potentially make some of the scenarios more like the way players actually play them, and not how they are written in the boardgame.”
In defence of the complaining players, however, reading through Frosthaven’s patch notes, it’s clear there have been bugs. After all, many of the logs cite fixes for individual scenarios:
- The Drill character can no longer destroy the Control Columns in Quest 94 “A Grand View” with its abilities.
- In Quest 65 “A Strong Foundation” monsters can no longer perform push 2 instead of push 1.
- In Quest 76 “Apotheosis”, the 2 hex obstacle now correctly increases the damage for the bottom action of the Meteor card “Hardened Spike”.
- Fixed an issue in Quest 71 “Invasion of the Docks” connected to the movement of the Artificer.
- In Quest 9 “Glowing Catacombs” the Ooze health points are now displayed identically on the health bar and on the Quest information.
- The Orphan can now be selected when using Translocation Rod in Quest 59 “Automaton Uprising”.
- The camera in Multiplayer is no longer centered and locked on the highest initiative player when performing a Pet ability.
- In Quest 84 “Here There Be Oozes” when using the challenge “Hardy Stock” oozes spawned by other oozes now don’t have their HP risen by the challenge.
But, Petkov says these are rare instances and quickly fixed: “Each new release causes its own problems. The game is very interconnected and even a small change can ruin something in a completely other part of the game. That’s a problem, obviously, but we’re trying to give ourselves enough time to QA every release. We also have very quick response time after release if something goes wrong.”
We’re increasingly seeing developers implement forgiving difficulty options – something James praised Mina The Hollower for in a recent Supporter post –, and in some ways what Snapshot are doing with Frosthaven is simply another example of that. Yet, for me, that the options are ‘house rules’ created and adopted by players sitting around a table with the physical board game, carries a different inflection. It makes me think of all the different games of Kings I played as a teenager, where from party to party the dares linked to each card would change. Or playing games of Monopoly and Risk where over evening after painful evening, my family tried to find tweaks that made the standard-holiday-home-boardgames more tolerable.
Games like Tabletop Simulator allow you to be extremely flexible with implementing rules, but in doing so you lose the accelerating benefits of digital Frosthaven’s automation, Snapshot’s approach sounds like an exciting halfway house.
Though, maybe they should also provide an option to flip the table when you role a miss modifier on the last turn of a boss fight.