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Wednesday, November 04, 2026
Frosthaven Digital Recommendation
Imagine a hard tactical game like XCOM adding a timer: If you haven't won a map within a certain number of turns, you lost and have to play it over. Set the time limit low enough, and that would make the game extremely difficult, and eliminate a lot of the slower, more defensive tactics. This, in a nutshell, is the Gloomhaven / Frosthaven system. You start turn 1 with something like 10 cards, and play 2 of them each round. Whenever you want to recover your discarded cards, you need to lose one of them. So even if you stretch that to the absolute maximum, you'll play 5+4+4+3+3+2+2+1+1 or 25 turns before you lose because you ran out of cards. If ever you rest with cards still in hand, or use one of your "burn" cards, the maximum number of turns you can play goes down.
Given that Frosthaven is also a rather difficult tactical game, the turn limit makes some larger maps extremely difficult. You are forced into bad choices, like either doing the map room by room and running out of turns, or opening two doors at once, having to deal with more monsters. I never finished Gloomhaven, neither in physical nor in digital form, because I found some maps just extremely frustrating.
Luckily, the story mode of Frosthaven Digital removes the rule that you lose a card on resting. It also doubles your health, which also makes the game easier. But it is the removal of the time limit that ultimately turned out to make this game playable for me. I am now 40 hours into the Frosthaven campaign, which could easily be between 100 and 200 hours total length, and I am having fun. I get into a large map, recognize how difficult that one would have been with a time limit, and then play it without a problem and still reasonable challenge without the time limit. Instead of having to replay map several times before "solving the puzzle" perfectly, I can play casually and still advance the campaign and the city building part of it.
It feels weird to have to play a tactical game in story mode, because usually I am good at tactical games. But Frosthaven is so far out, that I would actually recommend story mode difficulty for the majority of people.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:27 AM Permanent Link
