Frosthaven

Twenty-some scenarios in, my group has retired its first two characters and picked up new ones, and I keep coming back to the same thought, this is a mechanically superior game to Gloomhaven and I’m not sure it matters, because the two games are asking for different lives from the people playing them.

The combat itself is tighter than I remember Gloomhaven being, and I say that as someone who’s willing to admit that memory might be doing some of the flattering there. Class design is more interesting across the board, monster behavior rewards actual planning instead of brute-forcing your way through, and the moments where a combo you built three turns ago finally lands are as good as anything on my shelf. If the fight itself were the whole review, this would be an easy perfect score.

But the outpost phase is real, and it’s the thing that splits opinion hardest among people I’ve talked to about this. Between-scenario town management, crafting, building defenses, it’s meant to give the campaign texture between fights, and at its best it does. At its worst, especially deeper into the campaign once you’re juggling more systems than the early game prepared you for, it turns into a second job you do before you’re allowed to play the actual game. I’ve had sessions where the outpost phase alone ate forty-five minutes before a single card got played, and I don’t think that’s what anyone signed up for on a weeknight.

That’s really the honest verdict here: whether this is a five-star game depends entirely on whether your specific group has the standing time and the specific appetite for that kind of overhead, not just whether the fights are good, because the fights are good. A group that can commit to eighteen months of Tuesdays, like the campaign log I’ve seen from groups who saw it through to the final boss, gets an experience nothing else on the market touches. A group that can’t, or that already burned out on Gloomhaven’s fiddliness, isn’t going to be won back by more of the same wrapped in ice and fur. Know your table before you buy this one, because the game itself has earned every bit of the hype, it’s the commitment that’s the real cost.