Frosthaven

Frosthaven fixes the things that were actually broken about Gloomhaven, character balance in the early classes, scenario pacing that used to sag in the middle third, and it does it while adding an entire outpost management layer on top that I have mixed feelings about even after two campaigns.

The core loop is still the best tactical combat system in the genre, hand management standing in for both action selection and a hidden initiative timer, which never stops feeling clever no matter how many scenarios deep you are. The new classes lean harder into asymmetry than anything in the base game did, and the campaign writing is noticeably sharper this time, less generic fantasy filler, more actual consequence.

The outpost phase is the part that splits people, myself included. Building the town back up between scenarios adds real texture, the kind of long-arc investment that makes losing a building sting, and one event in my own campaign had a fish-man raid hit our outpost with twenty points of force we simply couldn’t answer, wiping out defenses we’d spent two sessions building. That’s a great story to tell afterward. In the moment it’s forty-five minutes of flipping between rulebooks to figure out how building damage actually resolves, and the building cards themselves cram an enormous amount of icon-based information into a tiny card face that took me multiple sessions to parse cleanly.

The loot deck redesign is the other place I’d flag, it’s an improvement over Gloomhaven’s system in theory but it’s the one piece of the new machinery that still feels like it’s fighting the rest of the game’s pacing rather than serving it.

This is not a game you buy on a whim, it’s a years-long commitment in both time and shelf space, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who hasn’t already played Jaws of the Lion and confirmed they actually like the underlying system. If you have, and you do, this is meaningfully better than what came before it. Four stars, docked half a star in spirit for the outpost documentation, rounded back up because the combat is still the best in the business.