Another week, another exciting session in the world of Frosthaven – a joyful meeting, finished with great success, spoils and satisfaction!
Ok, enough. No. Not this time. What would be the most annoying, long, too difficult, too fiddly or simply bad scenario in Frosthaven? Yes, you guessed well – #14 Jagged Shoals. There is even the whole thread on BoardGame Geek where that infamous adventure proudly and firmly keeps the pole position! And you shall see in a moment why.
Our Frosthaven Campaign in scenario order:
Some interesting materials about Frosthaven World: Frosthaven – first look – starting characters (1/2) Frosthaven – first look – starting characters (2/2) Frosthaven – monsters analysis & strategies – Lurkers Frosthaven – monsters analysis & strategies – Unfettered
But before this, couple of words about our team composition. It seems that we finally settled for a 4-player group, with Tomek (yet another one, please do not confuse with the one from the #5 Frozen Crypt) taking over Drifter. With that change another modification to our well-balanced group arrived – my good friend, Blinkblade retired after 10 scenarios and his place was taken by Deathwalker. That character seems to fit my preferred profile and I hope to experience so many interesting and exciting campaigns as I did with the former adventurer.
To sum up the full composition of our team looked like this:
- Deathwalker (me) – level 1
- Banner Spear (Kuba J) – level 4
- Geminate (Kuba G) – level 4
- Drifter (Tomek) – level 3
Now to the scenario and two attempts we had to play to finally crack it!
Session report
So here you have our adventure:
Two, black dots below the adventure name means this is medium complexity scenario – not true, should definitely be a 3 dot, high-complexity and difficulty adventure. Now, what makes this scenario so malevolent? Let us think:
- It starts as one, open, large room – no time for any preparation, boosting up (Drifter) or any other warm-up; fight starts immediately
- In order to win, we need to destroy snow rock; to do it we have to put 7 damage tokens on it; the only way to place such thing is to be adjacent to the rock and survive turn; so, 7 turns in total to destroy it
- Before getting to the rock, you have to run through the whole room of enemies
- Each turn 2 additional enemies are added to the pack (spawning in pre-defined areas)
- To make things worse, Abael Herders can summon many more monsters, mainly Piranha Pigs (very nasty enemy)
- And if you think that you can avoid creatures living in water, watch out! They can jump and easily get to you!
This is exactly what was in front of us. Let us see now how it went!
PS. Feel free to click on below images for full details.
1st attempt – Hard Difficulty
We usually play our scenarios on Hard Difficulty (+1 level above the recommended) and so we approached this scenario in similar way. Below I am presenting how the adventure is set-up and how we very quickly ended the initial attempt 🙂
2nd attempt – Normal Difficulty
We decided that we should as soon as possible make another attempt. We lowered difficulty to Normal and devised a new plan – called “rush forward ASAP”. Below I am presenting it.
Uff, we were greatly relieved when late in night the scenario successfully concluded.
Outpost Phase
For the next step – Outpost Phase – we concluded it only on next meeting, such a long gameplay it was. But we got some decent stuff there!
Another great discovery after the scenario conclusion was possibility to unlock one of the new characters; will not spoil and provide more details, but as you can see below, both types are somehow connected with Lurkers…
As a one of last steps, we constructed Carpenter, which will give us discount on all further purchases. Nice building!
Last but not least, due to the passage of time, the Winter has come to Frosthaven!
Summary
What a mess it was. Very long evening, pretty tedious scenario and balancing at the verge of defeat. Good we had enough time for second attempt – we pretty quickly realized there is no way we can survive on Hard Difficulty. Still, the gains after completing adventure were huge – you not so often unlock the character – so in the end it was worth it 🙂
See you in next Session Report!
The Boardgames Chronicle 
One wrong decision early and everything colapses quickly, one we noticed how bad it was, already in the 2nd round , we gave us one more turn to see how it resolves, and after 3(if i remember well) turns we’ve decided to restart. The 2nd rund was close to failure as well, we (my Banner Spear and Geminate) barely pushed though enemies near the target, in hope to create a defendable choke-point. If one of enemies didn’t take a step back, we would get surrounded and maybe killed. Luckilly(as it’s already over, and we’ve won) we’ve left it behind and don’t need to return to this tedious scenario(probably the worst we’ve ever played in Gloomhaven and Frosthaven ). There are so many enemies to handle, while we mainly wait and try to survive. It tooks us way more time to handle stupid AI than to think about own actions. Once we all got near the target, we got relaxed and considered it’ll be a boring ending, as since there are just 2 narrow paths, we’re basically safe, just after we’ve discussed that both Piranhas and Eels picked their jump cards(for the first time in both attempts) completelly surprising us and demolishing our plans. That was a very fun moment, but caused tons of tedious work to move all enemies. At the end we’ve ran out of bases for cardboardstandees, so we had to take from blue/allied supply. So crowded, even more enemies than in a scenario with 6 cultists in Gloomhaven ( check out https://theboardgameschronicle.com/2019/10/20/eng-gloomhaven-28-outer-ritual-chamber/ ) 😉
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