Frosthaven and the Outpost That Ate My Tuesday Nights

Backed this on Kickstarter years ago, forgot about it mostly, and then a truck showed up with a box heavy enough that I had to make two trips getting it up to the game room. That’s the first thing to know going in, this isn’t a game so much as furniture with rules attached. Once it’s actually out on the table though, it’s the best version of the Gloomhaven combat system I’ve played, full stop, better balanced classes, better organized components, and the outpost building layer gives you something to actually care about between fights instead of just tallying gold.

The outpost phase is the real addition here, you’re rebuilding a frozen little settlement scenario by scenario, deciding what gets built next, and it turns what could be a pure dungeon crawler into something closer to a management game wearing combat clothes. My group has spent almost as much time arguing over what to build next as we have fighting anything. Rulebook explains this part badly though, genuinely badly, we had to look up a fan reference sheet just to understand the resource flow the first few sessions.

Stickers this time around are the reusable kind, which is a real improvement over the original Gloomhaven’s permanent ones, my hand didn’t hover nervously over the sheet the way it used to. Box smell on first open was that thick fresh cardboard and ink smell you get from a big print run, faded fast but it’s part of the ritual for me at this point, cracking a new box open is half the fun before a single card gets shuffled. There’s also crabs in this one, actual crab enemies, small detail but it made me laugh the first time one showed up on the map.

If you already own Gloomhaven this isn’t a hard sell, it’s just more and better. If you don’t and you’re eyeing this as an entry point, buy Jaws of the Lion first and see if the system clicks before you commit shelf space to something this size.