Snapshot Games' Frosthaven (which I'll henceforth refer to as Frosthaven Digital) is a video game version of the tabletop game of the same name. Frosthaven's predecessor, Gloomhaven, got a similar digital version in 2021 (which was helmed by Flaming Fowl Studios). Unlike games like Baldur's Gate 3 or Cyberpunk 2077, which adapt mechanics and themes from their tabletop inspirations (Dungeons & Dragons and Cyberpunk RED, respectively) to create a unique gameplay experience, Frosthaven Digital is just Frosthaven--it's the board game minus the need to meet up with friends physically. For someone like me, who primarily hangs out with people virtually, Frosthaven Digital is a boon. I've wanted to introduce the board game to friends for a while, and this lets me without us all having to meet up in person to do it.
Gloomhaven Digital was well-received when it came out, and the fanbase has been eager to see Frosthaven make the jump to digital as well. Among the excitement, however, has been a recurring concern: Will Frosthaven Digital have an undo feature? In person, when you make a mistake while playing a tabletop game, the only thing stopping you from fixing it is you and your friends. That's not necessarily the case for a video game if there's no option to do so. In Gloomhaven Digital, it was possible to restart an entire encounter if you wanted, but there was no way to simply start your turn over or undo your last action. It was frustratingly awful, with misclicks resulting in a wasted turn. Fans have wondered if Frosthaven Digital will follow suit, and thankfully, it's not.
"[Undo] was the most requested feature [for] Gloomhaven," Frosthaven game director Hristo Petkov told me. "It [didn't] exist in Gloomhaven Digital, and according to our engineers, it was impossible [for Frosthaven Digital]. But yeah, we did it."
Frosthaven Digital replicates the look and feel of the original board game.
For the unfamiliar, Frosthaven is a dark fantasy RPG that sees you and your fellow players become adventurers who find themselves in the snow-laden town of Frosthaven. Each character class has its own goals and abilities (portrayed as cards). In combat, each player plays two cards to determine what their character does on a turn, and moves through a scenario along a hexagonal grid. During missions, you can also find loot that you can bring back to town to build new structures or improve existing infrastructure, unlocking additional storylines and perks.
Between scenarios, your team can rest to regain spent cards, but over time, you regain less and less. Once every card in your deck is gone for good, your character retires and becomes just another non-player character in town. You pick a new character class, grab their ability cards, and keep going, slowly building the legends of these different adventurers that came to Frosthaven. Your character can also just die, too, but in Frosthaven, most characters retire before succumbing to death.
Each session of the game takes about two to four hours, and an entire story campaign (if played once every week) will likely take you and your friends a few years to finish. It is a commitment to play this board game, one that should be easier to keep over a virtual call with no physical set-up, if Gloomhaven Digital is any indication. It's not a perfect replacement, though. In going digital, Gloomhaven Digital created new issues to overcome, like the aforementioned inability to undo a simple mistake.
You'll return to town often to meet with other characters and build new infrastructure.
"Normally, it shouldn't be [too hard] to do something like [an undo mechanic], but we used the code base of Gloomhaven as a starting point," Petkov said. "And [Flaming Fowl Studios'] code base wasn't really suited at all for this. So it basically was rewriting the whole thing. And one of our programmers found a way around it, but it wasn't easy. It took months upon months of work."
This undo feature is still in development and experimental, so Snapshot Games is looking to the upcoming early access release to see if what it has implemented fits what the fanbase has been asking for. The feature Petkov describes, however, sounds perfect, so I foresee it sticking around in the full version of the game.
"You can enable it in the options [in early access], because there might still be some bugs related to it," Petkov said of the undo feature. "It is pretty well tested--probably no problems with it--but we didn't want to put it in as the default for the beginning of early access. But this is quite amazing--it's not just an undo [for your last turn]. Let's say you are on turn five and in the middle of the round--you can actually undo every action to the beginning of battle. You can undo every single action [at any time]. It is pretty amazing. It works wonders. It was one of the biggest things we needed to do when we started."
Combat is turn-based.
Like Gloomhaven Digital, Frosthaven Digital seems like it will be a fairly authentic reimagining of the original board game. However, Snapshot Games is going a few steps further with its adaptation, implementing features that don't exist in the original board game but that make for a better video game.
"Some of the changes that are made are cases where it's quite awkward or difficult to adapt the board game," CEO Julian Gollop told me. "Usually, this is [our] approach and [Frosthaven creator] Isaac [Childres] is generally quite accommodating to this, because he realizes we have to make some adaptations."
"We have a new tutorial that is three missions, and then we have a four-mission campaign that is the 'Road to Frosthaven,' that is basically created in cooperation with our designers and Isaac," Petkov added. "And the goal for this new campaign is actually to get people who know the board game [or have] played Gloomhaven a little bit [up to speed] on the new things for Frosthaven. They're completely new scenarios to the game."
Frosthaven Digital will have a brand-new opening that acts as a prologue to the situations found in Frosthaven.
Frosthaven Digital will also have difficulty modes, allowing players to curate how challenging the experience is to play. "Frosthaven is pretty hard," Petkov said. "So we created a new difficulty that is basically breaking the rules of the board game. ...It allows you, when you rest--no matter if it's a short or long rest--to not lose cards. It makes it much easier. ...And you have double health--that also helps. From our observations, people who try this difficulty, they don't know about the game. They try the difficulty and they play at least four or five scenarios like this, and then when they feel more comfortable with the game, they can switch the difficulty and go to normal difficulty."
Personally, I'm most looking forward to the artwork and character designs for long-established characters. During my conversation with Petkov and Gollop, they mentioned that though all of Frosthaven's major characters are well-known within the community, there are minor characters that have never been given unique tokens or cards or appeared in artwork for the game. These everyday citizens are being realized for the first time because they now exist in a video game, and not just in players' imaginations.
"A lot of the main characters, we have illustrations for them. Some of the main bosses, we have illustrations for them," Petkov said. "But there are quite a lot of characters and environments from the board game that are just described. They're not in the board game, because in the board game, you use placeholder tokens for them--you use a guard token for the blacksmith. All of these are actually created [in Frosthaven Digital], reimagined with new 3D models."
Though it had a small Steam Next Fest demo, we'll get our first good look at Frosthaven Digital when it launches in early access on Steam and the Epic Games Store on July 31. The early access build starts with eight playable character classes (two of which you have to unlock), and about 40-50 hours of missions to play through. The full game will feature 17 playable character classes and will be a lot longer. "Frosthaven Digital has about 50% more content than Gloomhaven, and about double the complexity," Petkov said. "So it [will be] easily over 200 hours."
Gloomhaven Digital eventually made its way to Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch a few years after launching on PC. No such plans have been announced for Frosthaven Digital, but the possibility remains.
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Gloomhaven Digital was well-received when it came out, and the fanbase has been eager to see Frosthaven make the jump to digital as well. Among the excitement, however, has been a recurring concern: Will Frosthaven Digital have an undo feature? In person, when you make a mistake while playing a tabletop game, the only thing stopping you from fixing it is you and your friends. That's not necessarily the case for a video game if there's no option to do so. In Gloomhaven Digital, it was possible to restart an entire encounter if you wanted, but there was no way to simply start your turn over or undo your last action. It was frustratingly awful, with misclicks resulting in a wasted turn. Fans have wondered if Frosthaven Digital will follow suit, and thankfully, it's not.
"[Undo] was the most requested feature [for] Gloomhaven," Frosthaven game director Hristo Petkov told me. "It [didn't] exist in Gloomhaven Digital, and according to our engineers, it was impossible [for Frosthaven Digital]. But yeah, we did it."
Frosthaven Digital replicates the look and feel of the original board game.
For the unfamiliar, Frosthaven is a dark fantasy RPG that sees you and your fellow players become adventurers who find themselves in the snow-laden town of Frosthaven. Each character class has its own goals and abilities (portrayed as cards). In combat, each player plays two cards to determine what their character does on a turn, and moves through a scenario along a hexagonal grid. During missions, you can also find loot that you can bring back to town to build new structures or improve existing infrastructure, unlocking additional storylines and perks.
Between scenarios, your team can rest to regain spent cards, but over time, you regain less and less. Once every card in your deck is gone for good, your character retires and becomes just another non-player character in town. You pick a new character class, grab their ability cards, and keep going, slowly building the legends of these different adventurers that came to Frosthaven. Your character can also just die, too, but in Frosthaven, most characters retire before succumbing to death.
Each session of the game takes about two to four hours, and an entire story campaign (if played once every week) will likely take you and your friends a few years to finish. It is a commitment to play this board game, one that should be easier to keep over a virtual call with no physical set-up, if Gloomhaven Digital is any indication. It's not a perfect replacement, though. In going digital, Gloomhaven Digital created new issues to overcome, like the aforementioned inability to undo a simple mistake.
You'll return to town often to meet with other characters and build new infrastructure.
"Normally, it shouldn't be [too hard] to do something like [an undo mechanic], but we used the code base of Gloomhaven as a starting point," Petkov said. "And [Flaming Fowl Studios'] code base wasn't really suited at all for this. So it basically was rewriting the whole thing. And one of our programmers found a way around it, but it wasn't easy. It took months upon months of work."
This undo feature is still in development and experimental, so Snapshot Games is looking to the upcoming early access release to see if what it has implemented fits what the fanbase has been asking for. The feature Petkov describes, however, sounds perfect, so I foresee it sticking around in the full version of the game.
"You can enable it in the options [in early access], because there might still be some bugs related to it," Petkov said of the undo feature. "It is pretty well tested--probably no problems with it--but we didn't want to put it in as the default for the beginning of early access. But this is quite amazing--it's not just an undo [for your last turn]. Let's say you are on turn five and in the middle of the round--you can actually undo every action to the beginning of battle. You can undo every single action [at any time]. It is pretty amazing. It works wonders. It was one of the biggest things we needed to do when we started."
Combat is turn-based.
Like Gloomhaven Digital, Frosthaven Digital seems like it will be a fairly authentic reimagining of the original board game. However, Snapshot Games is going a few steps further with its adaptation, implementing features that don't exist in the original board game but that make for a better video game.
"Some of the changes that are made are cases where it's quite awkward or difficult to adapt the board game," CEO Julian Gollop told me. "Usually, this is [our] approach and [Frosthaven creator] Isaac [Childres] is generally quite accommodating to this, because he realizes we have to make some adaptations."
"We have a new tutorial that is three missions, and then we have a four-mission campaign that is the 'Road to Frosthaven,' that is basically created in cooperation with our designers and Isaac," Petkov added. "And the goal for this new campaign is actually to get people who know the board game [or have] played Gloomhaven a little bit [up to speed] on the new things for Frosthaven. They're completely new scenarios to the game."
Frosthaven Digital will have a brand-new opening that acts as a prologue to the situations found in Frosthaven.
Frosthaven Digital will also have difficulty modes, allowing players to curate how challenging the experience is to play. "Frosthaven is pretty hard," Petkov said. "So we created a new difficulty that is basically breaking the rules of the board game. ...It allows you, when you rest--no matter if it's a short or long rest--to not lose cards. It makes it much easier. ...And you have double health--that also helps. From our observations, people who try this difficulty, they don't know about the game. They try the difficulty and they play at least four or five scenarios like this, and then when they feel more comfortable with the game, they can switch the difficulty and go to normal difficulty."
Personally, I'm most looking forward to the artwork and character designs for long-established characters. During my conversation with Petkov and Gollop, they mentioned that though all of Frosthaven's major characters are well-known within the community, there are minor characters that have never been given unique tokens or cards or appeared in artwork for the game. These everyday citizens are being realized for the first time because they now exist in a video game, and not just in players' imaginations.
"A lot of the main characters, we have illustrations for them. Some of the main bosses, we have illustrations for them," Petkov said. "But there are quite a lot of characters and environments from the board game that are just described. They're not in the board game, because in the board game, you use placeholder tokens for them--you use a guard token for the blacksmith. All of these are actually created [in Frosthaven Digital], reimagined with new 3D models."
Though it had a small Steam Next Fest demo, we'll get our first good look at Frosthaven Digital when it launches in early access on Steam and the Epic Games Store on July 31. The early access build starts with eight playable character classes (two of which you have to unlock), and about 40-50 hours of missions to play through. The full game will feature 17 playable character classes and will be a lot longer. "Frosthaven Digital has about 50% more content than Gloomhaven, and about double the complexity," Petkov said. "So it [will be] easily over 200 hours."
Gloomhaven Digital eventually made its way to Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch a few years after launching on PC. No such plans have been announced for Frosthaven Digital, but the possibility remains.
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