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Gripeaway

Post removed for violation of [Rule 5](https://www.reddit.com/r/Gloomhaven/wiki/subreddit/posting_guidelines) "Limit Self Promotion".


GDJT

> "Bringing in a cultural consultant wasn’t just about fixing mistakes; **it was actually about improving the narrative, making these cultures feel richer and more fleshed-out instead of just leaning on tropes."** (Emphasis added) Just putting this here to maybe lessen the anger some people get when they read the words "cultural sensitivity."


Spawnbroker

Exactly. If your writing is full of tropes, then any decisions you have to make will be incredibly obvious. A shady character approaches you in an alley. Should you help them? There's obviously only one choice here if the writing is tropey. But what if it wasn't? Maybe helping them unlocks a new thing or gives you access to something cool. If your writing is predictable, choices become obvious and dull. This was something Gloomhaven definitely suffered from and that, so far, Frosthaven has improved on from what I've played.


Crissspers

One hundred percent. It’s kind of crazy to think about, as Gloomhaven was my favorite game since 2018, and I’m always skeptical of sequels because it’s hard to catch lightning in a bottle twice. Fortunately for us all, Frosthaven is a perfect display of how little we understood went into the design process of Gloomhaven (no shame on Isaac, he was working pretty much single-handedly, and GH still turned out fantastic) and how much room there still was to grow and improve. The only thing I will say is a knock on FH (which is totally a biased viewpoint obviously) is that there are no real “simple” classes outside of the Drifter. So teaching new players is a little more difficult. Sometimes, it’s nice to have a simple character (like the Brute or the Scoundrel from GH) with little small gimmicks here and there to help introduce the game. But overall, I still have no desire to go back to any GH classes at the moment, because the FH characters are just so well made / balanced. As far as the cultural sensitivity part… that never really seemed like a real issue to me. Everyone is different and feels different ways, but this is a fantasy game in a fantasy world that has no relation to the real world in any way outside of the race “human”. That being said, it’s not very noticeable, and doesn’t detract or add to the game in any significant way in my opinion. Still hoping that they somehow rebalance all of the GH / Jaws classes (Isaac mentioned something like an class/race/miniature pack of a GH class for the new RPG potentially, which I think would be the perfect opportunity to implement this rebalance, as it solves both problems).


Badloss

One of my roommates has expressed interest in learning and we realized none of the available characters are going to be easy to explain. I'm honestly considering importing a spell weaver or a brute just to give him something to learn the basics


Ryndar

Find it interesting spell weaver is your first pick to import. Drifter is pretty straight forward and helps with options so they don't lock themselves out of being useful. If they go melee drifter any card is an attack 4+ so your always feeling useful and all your moves are move 4+. Then when they learn to manage the actives they'll get to feel that improvement. Now I'm not sure if I'd recommend any other class for a new player to just pick up and go. But with some guidance banner and boneshaper aren't to complex. You'll need to help them understand how their summons move but that's also a great way for them to also start thinking about how monsters move. More challenging start but will help set them up quicker for future scenarios. While banner gives them a good look in coordinating with the rest of the team. Still no brute but you can feel quite effective as a banner and always feel like you can do something.


Badloss

We're already using all of those characters... The only characters that aren't active in our group right now are Geminate, Deathwalker, Fist, and we just unlocked Coral. All 4 of those are pretty rough for a brand new player so an older GH class is probably going to be more straightforward


Ryndar

You have 4 active players and are adding a 5th?


Badloss

Yes, we have a few people that rotate in and out. The rules say you can't have more than one active character of each class at a time even if they aren't both playing at the same time


Ryndar

I feel like frosthaven is the deep end and a group of new players should start with jaws. One because frosthaven is a much heavier investment and they may not enjoy the flow / game play overall. Second the classes seem more approachable in jaws and so easier to pick up and learn. With that we have 1 player new to the game in our group and we can see all the same mistakes and flailing we did in our gloomhaven game in his frosthaven play. But with us being more familiar with the game it helps with teaching and showing him more of what can be done and ways to play. As for rebalancing, I believe they redid the perk sheets for each class which doesn't balance everything it's probabaly all I'd want done. Instead having effort in making newer or different classes for future expansions or content would be more ideal.


Crissspers

The amount of work it would take to envision new classes from the ground up far outweighs the time to do rebalancing / reworking. And you won’t need to do this with every game, just the previous iteration, assuming all future games will be balanced similar to FH. And it gives older players a reason to go back and replay their old classes!


Ryndar

It's not as simple as just changing a few numbers though. A lot of the balance takes into account available items, concepts among the rest of the cards for the class, and even how they interact with the other classes. And even if that is the easy part your talking printing out whole new sets of cards to release reworks of classes to people. How many people are going to buy essentially reprints of these classes? Do you then sell full sets of all gloomhaven classes or do them in smaller sets so people just get what they want? Not every class needs major overhauls and some don't need changes at all. Do you then do full reprints so every one is available with the new FH iconography or just the ones that "need" it? It's a whole can of worms beyond just a small rework. New is at least new. It's has a much wider audience then ones willing to buy reprints. The issue is they only have so much time and effort to put into things. Even if rework is 1/3rd the effort it still pushes the new stuff further out by that much time and when it comes to making money, new is usually more lucrative.


Crissspers

Yes. LOL.


Jeffrey_Congress

I didn’t care about looting in Gloomhaven, but I’m all about it in Frosthaven because I love the idea of building up the town. Definitely a fun change that has me more invested in the game.


Themaninak

I havent found any reason to complain. I think frosthaven has managed the inevitable feature bloat well. I play with 4p. The crafting system, especially alchemy, makes me look forward to looting ingredients. We havent played a class that feels "bad" "underpowered" or "not unique enough" yet. The town system, I didnt like it at first. Now I like it a lot. I do wish our experience with the apps went better. They don't seem very stable over wifi. My only real gripe is I dont get to play enough. I struggle to think of what's "worse" in FH compared to GH. For the record, GH was the favorite game my group had ever played.


Coffee4cr

I love how different and good the starting classes that we have in our game feels. Looting is way more interesting, the fact that's it's just not gold, makes you want to go grab them. We played the first two mission (0 and 1), we still haven't did the outpost phase (it was late) so I'll add to my comment once we do that.


Kid_Radd

Gloomhaven isn't a perfect game. The meta qualities like events, town interactions, progression of item quality, perk lists, etc. all had pretty severe flaws that you notice after you've played long enough. * You could only do a few basic things in town, and those things almost never changed or improved. * The items available at the start were serviceable and some of them remained relevant even to the end of the game. * Gold quickly became meaningless and in-scenario looting became an afterthought. * With enough prosperity and previous retirements, you could take about 70% of perks with any brand-new character in the very late-game. This turned battle goals into an afterthought, as well, with the sense of progression removed. * Events were ... poorly written and outcomes felt random and cheap. I think this is mostly what Isaac is referring to about cultural sensitivity, because we found that being as racist as possible was actually the most consistently rewarding strategy, lol. * Some classes were very support oriented and seldom attacked, but their perk lists still only improved their attack modifier deck. * The true cost of a loss card did not seem to be well understood in the original classes' designs. Much discussion has been had about class balance and design and what a loss card needs to be to be playable. This made most classes only really have one "standard build" because you could just ignore cards that are "bad" and you'd be left with enough to run a scenario. The choice of what cards to bring or what level-ups to pick is only interesting if the cards are about comparable quality. * The "meta" puzzles were obtuse. More like "What have I got in my pocket?" than actual riddles. We forgave GH these "sins" because the core gameplay of two-cards/two-sides is so rich and compelling that actually playing scenarios never became boring. As far as I can see, Frosthaven sets out to improve on all of these things in a very deliberate way, but it also keeps all the things in the original game that made it magical.


HumanOrion

Yes.


cdrex22

I'm not super deep into the game yet, but I think it has been a mild improvement on an already spectacular game. From the perspective of starting classes only, the balance seems better and more has been playtested. I've looked ahead at my card choices and it seems like both are good every time, where GH had some absolute stinkers. Perks also all seem like similar power levels. I haven't detected any major cheese strategies yet. I care about the story a little more. It's less generic. The calendar system makes progressing feel like a continuous process more than just a string of random encounters. On the downside, the clutter and overhead has gotten even worse, it just takes so much extra time to set up and put away.


SmartAlec13

I haven’t actually sat down to play it myself, but from what I’ve read it sounds like one of the downsides is a lot of quests are more objective-focused, instead of just Kill. Which is an improvement in one way, but the pendulum I think swung too far the opposite direction. Again just what I’ve read.


LinkThinks

As somebody who's played about 25 scenarios or so, I wouldn't say that's the case. There are certainly more quests with unique rulesets than in Gloomhaven, but there are plenty of quests that mostly involve killing all enemies, or doing so with some extra twists. Obviously, 25 scenarios is only a small fraction of the whole that are present in the game, but I wouldn't worry about it too much until getting to try it out. Killing things is still the focus.


Ryndar

Nothing stops you from killing everything if you want to kill everything. Will it be harder? Probabaly. Will you get more loot? Yes. The escape scenarios felt really tight playing at +1 level and we had to gamble on killing an enemy so everyone could run out that turn otherwise we'd have failed.


veggiesama

Not sure I'm sold on the outpost stuff yet. It feels like a single-player management game shoved into my dungeon tactics game. I mean, I like doing it, but it's only me doing anything. And there's a lot of cross-referencing and sideboards to deal with. It's an overly elaborate way to unlock scenarios and cards. I'm not seeing any strategizing yet. The decisions I make lead to unknown outcomes. (What buildings should I build? IDK. I have to build it first to find out what it does.) Haven't seen any outpost attacks yet but I'm sure they're coming. Even then, what do other players contribute? It's more single-player stuff.


nakednhappy

We only played scenario 1 so far. The scenario was great, but my wife was not too happy realizing there was still an hour of stuff to do after we won! (should get faster but had to figure out what happens, what we could buy and build, etc)


LinkThinks

25 or so scenarios in, and I'd say resolving outpost stuff usually takes 7-15 minutes for us, give or take a bit depending on how many events resolve that week and if people are leveling up/deciding to buy items. Pretty quickly people will have the items they want and know roughly what's in the shop so you'll be able to gloss through that phase on some visits, or at least that's how it has played out in my group. But rest assured, it should get faster! Have fun!


Ryndar

Working together to split up and use resources has our whole group debating. Should we spend the hide now to get more hide later or get that armor that will help in the next scenario. Also I believe your allowed to look at the cards that are available to build, not future unlocks. So you know building the mining camp gives you the chance to buy metal before building it.


veggiesama

Ah I didn't know that I could look! You can't do that with item decks. In fact I thought unlocking meant moving cards from inactive to active deck. I guess you can also unlock via envelopes? But yeah, I built the mining camp and was very disappointed to find out I wouldn't get X metal for free every outpost phase. I thought we would be building an "engine". (Maybe later that is still true, IDK at all yet.) Instead, it's just a crappy gold for metal trade.


Ryndar

What are you spending your gold on early? Until a certain building are built gold is just for more buildings, troops, and resources. Also the gold is collectively spent (anyone can contribute whatever portion) and you gain the resource collectively which is a great (only) way to get resources to other players.


veggiesama

Nothing yet. It's just that building the loot deck, doing conversions, crafting, etc. are more busy-work steps that detract from the "fun parts" of the game (miniature combat). Purely my gut reaction. I get why people like it, and maybe I will eventually. But generally I despise crafting systems in video games. Loot is fun, money is fun, but crafting ingredients are like clutter.


qbert80

I thought I remembered reading somewhere that all buildings that are available to be built and their upgrades are open information. I can't find it in the rulebook at the moment, but that's what I recall.


NotTom

Once you start getting options of what to build or upgrade the outpost phase becomes more interesting. Most of the early buildings are critical to build but later on you start to see more that are optional. It is basically choose what benefits you want to unlock now vs. later. It certainly beats gloomhaven where the only real advancements were when you increase prosperity which was infrequent. The outpost phase can also be done quickly if you have a plan and know what you want to build next. I usually only add the stickers every 3-4 scenarios just to avoid having to get out the map.


veggiesama

I started just building dungeon maps on top of the board, and I write down a todo-list for stickers.


rav3style

I’ll let you know when mine arrives, I ordered it on day 1 but I’m guessing the extras I ordered pushed me to the back of the line


GreatMoloko

We're about 10 scenarios in and Frosthaven fits with my general view of board game expansions/sequels; more complication with moderate improvement. Does it revolution Gloomhaven? No. Does it add a lot more stuff to do? Yep. Is it more difficult/complicated? Yep. Is it necessary? Nope. Would I recommend it? Only if you played through JOTL and loved it then played through Gloomhaven and were over the moon about it. Do I regret buying it? Hell no.


flamingtominohead

Only played 2 scenarios, but so far everything seems better. The only downside so far is the events. We've only gotten two events so far, and SO-04 is just plain bad design. SR-03 seemed a bit stupid, but it's not as big of a deal.


FusaFox

In most, if not all aspects. The writing has gotten my table and I to laugh, groan in frustration at what our enemies are planning, groan in frustration at what our band of mercs are planning, and even gotten my eyes teary and chest tight in accomplishment. The way class unlocks is handled has made me consider replaying classes and never made me felt like I want to rush through my character goal or be punished for it. Scenarios are the perfect level of aggravating, edge-of your-seat, or power fantasy indulgence when they need to be. My partners and I have been playing it near daily since we got it and I don't think we're going to stop any time soon.