Sunday 25 October 2015

First Thoughts - Frostgrave

I've now had the opportunity to play 3 games of Frostgrave with 2 different wizards against 3 different opponents and I wanted to share my thoughts.

First up a bit about the game.  Frostgrave is a skirmish level fantasy campaign game set in a ruined city where competing warbands led by a variety of wizards search the ancient ruins looking for treasure and relics of days gone by.
The game is mechanically very straight forward, it uses a D20 to resolve all actions and you are typically rolling off against an opponent where each of you has 1 die plus or minus 1 modifier to get your total (high wins).
The basic game rules are very simple and straight forward, going into it my one concern was that it would be overly simple and might get repetitive quickly.  Based on my limited experience so far that seems unlikely.  although the rules themselves are quite simple the order you activate in really drives you strategy and makes careful planning really important.  The other thing is the variety of spells along with them having varying degrees of difficulty for various casters mean there are a lot of value judgements being made during the game.
On the downside the placement of treasure seems to create a situation where in many scenarios you just won't bother crossing the centre line of the board.

Overall I really like Frostgrave.  Osprey Games has hit on that perfect middle ground of 'easy to learn, difficult to master' and the campaign system seems to do a good job of maintaining balance.

If you like D&D, Pathfinder or Mordheim I highly recommend this game.

-Jay

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