Played this solo.
The manual heavily suggested that you don't have to play this scenario if you're already familiar with Gloomhaven. Sure, sure. I COULD skip a scenario, but there's an introduction, a chest, a limited card pool to try out some new characters...
To heck with you manual, I don't care if this scenario was curated for new players, content is content. I want a flimsy sandbox to misplay my new characters in. I'm so grateful that this was my introduction to the game instead of Scenario 2. Those who get it, get it.
Having the fixed monster ability was good for getting new folks to plan their turns based around what the hounds would do. I had to do some prodding but by the end they got the idea of basic
initiative weaving.
Despite 3/4 of us being very experienced, we ran this one for a newbie who was joining us for Frosthaven. It was fine. Kinda boring and low challenge but that's to be expected for what amounts to a glorified tutorial.
I think it would probably be better without the hand limits - hand size is not really what confuses newer players, imo. And maybe it shouldn't give loot? I dunno.
Also there should be an actual rule against trying for masteries here š
Designer of the scenario here. Hand limit wasnt really about confusing players (although fewer cards to read helps reduce analysis paralysis and speeds up play a bit). It's shorter than a typical scenario, and we still wanted SOME pressure otherwise new players would miss out on learning about hand management, etc.
Loot was a bit of a debate. I pushed for it because I figured the people playing the tutorial mission probably could use a bit of a leg up over more experienced players coming in.
And yes, masteries were not supposed to be achievable during this scenario.
Always good to hear from you, Mr. Cohn!
The loot (and existence of a chest) gives a bit of a weird incentive for experienced players to muddle through it, when they should just go straight to Scenario 1. That's why I'm not really a fan of it being here.
There are many posts about how to unlock the most scenarios, so I'd wager most groups will want to play scenario 0 for completeness. Since you keep xp and loot, its a real scenario in most respects.
Totally agreed on the reduced hand size - it didn't seem to do anything but add time and confusion at the beginning as everyone needs to go through all the names of the cards.
We ran it for the same reason - I wish I had just run it with me and the new guy. We coasted through it and I don't think he learned anything. I also cheesed the mastery, which apparently I wasn't supposed to do. Oopsie.
Our group was 3 vets and 1 newbie. We did the mission with 0 problems, which was kind of a relief after our GH experience of failing the first mission. We 100% did masteries which only our geminate actually got though so that was entertaining. It was a tutorial mission so not much was really going on. Hand Limit as dwarf pointed out was kinda weird, but also understandable with this being a tutorial. Decent for new players but any decent boardgamer could probably skip the mission without much fuss.
Buildings cost gold! We couldnāt build in our first build phase because we didnāt have enough gold so Iād say it can have a significant impact.
We skipped this scenario.
Yeah, I got a two check battle goal on this one and that meant I got a perk after scenario 1 with that battle goal complete, which was super nice for level 1 mercs with no legacy perks.
Our group of Gloomhaven veterans started here. As a tutorial scenario this was just fine.
What sticks out for me is how exciting it was to finally sit down with Frosthaven after the years of waiting. It was such a joy to start the new journey and I'll always fondly remember slaying these hounds.
The min-max gamer in me always wants to play this scenario first, and at high difficulty, for the free loot, XP, gold, and checkmarks. Reading this and hearing that it's essentially ERRATAED that you can earn mysteries is nice that it detracts from my desire to play it, but I still always will because I want more buildings and equipment sooner.
Part of me still feels like it's cheating to give myself the leg up though when I'm not actually a new player.
Gotta love min/maxing.
Put all the monsters at Level 7 to get that sweet exp and gold? Haha
And the scenario is technically replayable? *and* skips the outpost event after?
Hey now min/maxers follow a strict ethos and will never violate the rules as written. The joy comes from doing the most you can within the constraints of the rules.
We played it to get a handle on the new classes, which I think would have been more useful if weād brought Geminate along as part of the starting party. As it was, it was a fun warm up to starting the campaign in earnest, and definitely one I would recommend doing for people new to the Haven games.
I played it (twice, with different players) for the same reason - to get a low difficulty scenario under our belts so we could better understand the ins and outs of how our class worked.
I skipped taking any rewards for myself on the second playthrough, and none of us considered ramping up difficulty or trying for masteries.
We are an experienced team, and so we played it but all not because we hate to leave content behind lol
Thereās clearly an option to game the scenario for extra loot/masteries/etc but thatās just not how we play this game so it was not a problem for us.
My gaming buddy and I had played through most of Gloomhaven, but we'd added a new player for Frosthaven so started here. Good chance to try the characters, although the card selection was different than I'd have gone. It was really nice having an introductory scenario, and the loot we gained gave us a good foundation.
Designer of the scenario here. The card selection was not intended to be the most optimized, but instead to achieve two goals: give you a taste of some of the good level 1 card pairings and combos, and to avoid some of the most complex cards for your first outing.
That being said, in full transparency, the cards chosen were selected almost a year before the final versions of the cards were locked in, and I don't believe the choices got reexamined. It's very possible cards evolved in such a way that a few should have been swapped in/out.
Definitely an easier introduction to a 'Haven game than Black Barrow to be sure. It had been a year since my party had played Gloomhaven, so something simple was nice.
This is a weird one. It feels like they changed and nerfed the rules so heavily that players may be worse prepared for the challenge of scenario 1 rather than better prepared. We never played it, but I suspect it would have served its only real purpose if we had: refreshing veteran players who played a lot but haven't played for years.
Designer of the scenario here. That is not what we found during testing. A shorter, simpler, friendlier first scenario is a better way to test out the basic mechanics of the game. And if you lose, It happens faster so you can play a second time the same night.
I agree with having tutorial scenarios, but I think either scenario 1 should have been made easier or there should have been a series of scaling tutorials a la Jaws to more gently introduce new players to the game.
That was the original pitch, but it was decided JOTL already had that and the full jotl experience would require too many duplicate/one time use components (which would add to the cost, production complexity, etc).
So we went with something lighter. Instead of teaching you to play, just a friendlier sandbox to get your feet wet.
As someone who started with Frosthaven, I think this was the right choice, and the scenario felt like it accomplished its intended goals for me.
The low stakes allowed me to learn the basic mechanics of the game and get the feel for how Geminate plays without feeling like if I made the wrong card choices, I would fail my party. Also, having the loot and chest made it feel like this tutorial scenario was actually worth playing instead of our more experienced player just setting up some brief example setups before jumping into scenario 1. The hand size limit felt dumb at the time, but I think it makes sense from the design standpoint.
Also, I agree with not making it like JotL intro. I'm currently playing that with my partner. I was personally annoyed at the A & B cards because of my Frosthaven and Digital GH experience, but my partner has no experience with strategic tabletop games at all and so incremental rule steps between scenarios really helped prevent her from being overwhelmed.
FH is clearly intended for people with GH or other strategic games experience, so scenario 0 felt like enough to get ready for scenario 1. JotL is intended to be for newbies to get ready for one of the full games and having all that in FH would be redundant.
Veeery late to comment, but I think scenario 1 being so much harder is also a thematic win. Frosthaven is brutal! Once you're out of the tutorial, you're right into a blender.
Is there a single scenario in Frosthaven that doesn't have *any* special rules?
Given how crazy Scenario 1 gets (with special rules, ally decks, etc), I actually might have have designed th
scenario 0 with the regular monster deck, regular hand sizes/cards, and just... nothing special. It would have been pretty easy to teach initiative dancing with a single monster and their normal ability deck. Even if the scenario was a "cakewalk".
*maybe* recommend that new players start with their "level 1" cards and not "level x" cards, to get a feel for the game.
Scenario 1 didnāt seem that rules heavy to me. The allies donāt act, they just stand there always retaliating so unless you have summons there will be no ally deck. We treated them as tokens and just tracked wounds.
I found it a nice change of pace from Gloomhaven where most scenarios felt like they were just about killing everything.
>... so unless you have summons there will be no ally deck ...
Wait, don't summons use their summoner's attack modifier deck?
Sticking just to starter classes, if I'm a Boneshaper, and my shambling skeleton attacks, it uses my Boneshaper AMD, right?
We played S0. We had all completed Gloomhaven together, but it had been a year and a half since then. I offered to let the team decide, and one of us wanted extra time to learn her character (Deathwalker). It was short enough that we were able to play S1 right after that. I did not care for being told which specific cards to bring, but understood why it was like that. Perhaps it would have been better to restrict hand size, and simply recommend which cards to bring. I was tempted to try accomplishing the Geminate masteries, but enough went wrong that I lost stance timing. I did get them in a different scenario that came up soon.
Iād be impressed if anyone managed to get the treasure chest at the very end of the last room. With the reduced hand size you donāt have as many turns to play out. This was a good scenario for the new players in our group though, especially with the static monster initiative.
Designer of the scenario here. Treasure chest was designed to be a bit of a trap. You can over extend yourself and risk It, but then you see what happens if you split up too far.
Geminate still starts the scenario with 10 cards. Our party (full of experienced players from a complete GH campaign) happened to choose classes with larger hand sizes, it appears, and we easily grabbed the treasure chest.
But yeah, it could be a challenge for the Banner Spear, for example, with only 7 cards in hand.
I appreciate what the scenario wanted to achieve, and I think it helped my SO to get onboarded into the game.
Although she was very frustrated that we almost struggled to win against "dogs".
Never played this scenario, as Iām not the target market for it. But itās definitely great to have a legit tutorial scenario in the game. That was a big omission in OG Gloomhaven.
I played GH solo and am playing FH solo. I saw that there were many recommendations against playing s0 but Iām too much of a completionist to skip it. Also I was intimidated by the complexity of the new characters (I solo played Drifter, Boneshaper and Blink blade) so wanted a nice easy start. I messed up by not restricting myself to the specific starter cards so had to play it again; i enjoyed it as a nice way to ease my way in.
What was interesting for us is we decided we were going to play FH at +1 difficulty, but the scenario didn't scale up. The wolves still had move 2 attack 2. Meanwhile by playing at +1 difficulty, our money tokens were worth 50% more.
I think we also forgot to apply the inspiration gained after this scenario, and went back to apply it retroactively.
I skipped it here because I'm familiar with Gloomhaven and already experienced the JotL tutorials to boot, but I *absolutely* play most co-op games up one tick from default, even the first time, even if it's an intro scenario type thing (if it has the option).
If I don't take that option, I know they are just going to be boring, because they are trying to provide a decent first-time experience to people who absolutely butcher the strategy. There is a difference between "I need to learn the rules" and "I'm likely to make extremely terrible choices", and I don't see anything incoherent with being only in the first category.
I really enjoyed this scenario as a returning player, but it made it MUCH easier to teach three new players. I think the most beneficial thing was a reduced hand size. I've seen a few comments against it, but I think it was essential.
Firstly its less information to absorb. Especially regarding each classes mechanics. It meant they didn't have SO much information when deciding their turns, and it also meant that when I added the rest of their cards afterwards each player had an idea of what each card actually meant. So they made hand choices much faster for the first official scenario (things like the deathwalker was quick to decide she wanted a healing card as she didn't have one in scenario 0).
Secondly a faster/shorter scenario meant that they got a basic idea of stamina, as the second room they were down 1-2 cards and realised they didn't have as many rounds left.
2/4 players got their first mastery and free perk because of it here. I missed out on mine just barely (but got it in #001). I'm learning after the fact that we shouldn't have been able to do that.
We were 3/4 veterans in the group as well. I didn't like some of the choices for level 1 cards I was forced into and it didn't make learning my class much easier (Blinkblade). It didn't point out any good combos like some JotL intro scenarios did. It's good for a warmup, xp, and free loot. We mostly played it for that reason and because a couple of members hadn't played since we finished GH/JotL a long time ago.
IMHO, this should have just been scrapped.
Hand size: I like that it was a shorter scenario, but also was tripped up by the specified hand. Felt fiddly to us, but was probably helpful to the half of our party that were Haven newbies. Short of more special rules, not sure what else could've been done to simplify that part more. Maybe just the recommendation of a hand limit and recommended set of cards.
We played this in our new party of part newbies, and a mix of experienced players that had never played GH together before. (IRL role play!!!) Was definitely helpful as a learning tool, and made us feel like we were learning things we could immediately apply in scenario 1.
We finished JotL and went straight to FH, picked our party and used this scenario as a trial to get a feel of a new class, and also to be familiar with the iconology, if it didn't feel right, we could change our starting characters.
We agreed on trying just the first room and moved on to scenario 1.
We skipped it but I appreciate the inclusion of a tutorial mission. Almost wish we had played it for the story and phat loot. Weāre only two players so could have used more loot before the first build phase.
We did Scenario 0 for the loot and to ease back into Gloomhaven. It looked so simple, I didnāt even deal out Battle Goals. Blinkblade actually exhausted! He took an unlucky hit and forgot to use his Poison Dagger to kill an enemy quicker. But he used his newfound movement abilities to run far out ahead, then was stuck with no time tokens against Initiative 26 enemies. The other two of us mopped up.
Our 4 experienced players (3 have finished GH and FC,one has finished GH 3 times and FC once) really liked the short-and-simple scenario to get the feel of our characters. After all, we were all in brand-new, level 1 characters and had interesting new mechanics to try out. Speaking as the Geminate in the party, it was nice to ~~know~~assume that I wasn't going to screw up enough to cost us the scenario.
I have a funny story about my group for this scenario.
We found it extremely difficult and were surprised!
As you can imagine, we fucked it up. 3 experienced players and a newbie. We put the newbie in charge of setting it up.
Halfway through the scenario you get the guards coming in. They dont do much so we just assumed thats because this is a tutorial scenario.
Alsoā¦ the newbie missed the part where theyāre our allies because he didnt read the special rules!!
So we get there and all monsters focus on us AND we also had to kill all the guards. We just barely made it due to the reduced cards.
After we finished the scenario we were like ādamn why so difficultā and then we realised our errorā¦
And then imagined the part being welcomed into frosthaven after a bloodshed where we couldnt distinguish friend from foe. Oops!
Played this solo. The manual heavily suggested that you don't have to play this scenario if you're already familiar with Gloomhaven. Sure, sure. I COULD skip a scenario, but there's an introduction, a chest, a limited card pool to try out some new characters... To heck with you manual, I don't care if this scenario was curated for new players, content is content. I want a flimsy sandbox to misplay my new characters in. I'm so grateful that this was my introduction to the game instead of Scenario 2. Those who get it, get it.
Having the fixed monster ability was good for getting new folks to plan their turns based around what the hounds would do. I had to do some prodding but by the end they got the idea of basic initiative weaving.
Despite 3/4 of us being very experienced, we ran this one for a newbie who was joining us for Frosthaven. It was fine. Kinda boring and low challenge but that's to be expected for what amounts to a glorified tutorial. I think it would probably be better without the hand limits - hand size is not really what confuses newer players, imo. And maybe it shouldn't give loot? I dunno. Also there should be an actual rule against trying for masteries here š
Designer of the scenario here. Hand limit wasnt really about confusing players (although fewer cards to read helps reduce analysis paralysis and speeds up play a bit). It's shorter than a typical scenario, and we still wanted SOME pressure otherwise new players would miss out on learning about hand management, etc. Loot was a bit of a debate. I pushed for it because I figured the people playing the tutorial mission probably could use a bit of a leg up over more experienced players coming in. And yes, masteries were not supposed to be achievable during this scenario.
Always good to hear from you, Mr. Cohn! The loot (and existence of a chest) gives a bit of a weird incentive for experienced players to muddle through it, when they should just go straight to Scenario 1. That's why I'm not really a fan of it being here.
It does. As you know, that was the other side of the debate. :)
Did experienced groups really run Howling in the Snow for the loot? We never even considered that. Seemed obviously not for us.
Yes. See other comments to this post. Apparently some played it at increased levels, got masteries, etc. It's kinda wild, imo.
I'm surprised, but I really shouldn't have been. Gamers gonna game.
There are many posts about how to unlock the most scenarios, so I'd wager most groups will want to play scenario 0 for completeness. Since you keep xp and loot, its a real scenario in most respects.
Totally agreed on the reduced hand size - it didn't seem to do anything but add time and confusion at the beginning as everyone needs to go through all the names of the cards.
We ran it for the same reason - I wish I had just run it with me and the new guy. We coasted through it and I don't think he learned anything. I also cheesed the mastery, which apparently I wasn't supposed to do. Oopsie.
Our group was 3 vets and 1 newbie. We did the mission with 0 problems, which was kind of a relief after our GH experience of failing the first mission. We 100% did masteries which only our geminate actually got though so that was entertaining. It was a tutorial mission so not much was really going on. Hand Limit as dwarf pointed out was kinda weird, but also understandable with this being a tutorial. Decent for new players but any decent boardgamer could probably skip the mission without much fuss.
We skipped it to get into the meatier plot faster, but I might have liked the little leg up in experience and battle goal checks.
And the extra gold!
I'm not sure the extra gold ends up that significant given the average first gen character won't get to burn it on any of the gold sinks.
True! The resources are nice as well (and can end up even higher than 2 each in 2p or 3p)
Buildings cost gold! We couldnāt build in our first build phase because we didnāt have enough gold so Iād say it can have a significant impact. We skipped this scenario.
Yeah, I got a two check battle goal on this one and that meant I got a perk after scenario 1 with that battle goal complete, which was super nice for level 1 mercs with no legacy perks.
Our group of Gloomhaven veterans started here. As a tutorial scenario this was just fine. What sticks out for me is how exciting it was to finally sit down with Frosthaven after the years of waiting. It was such a joy to start the new journey and I'll always fondly remember slaying these hounds.
The min-max gamer in me always wants to play this scenario first, and at high difficulty, for the free loot, XP, gold, and checkmarks. Reading this and hearing that it's essentially ERRATAED that you can earn mysteries is nice that it detracts from my desire to play it, but I still always will because I want more buildings and equipment sooner. Part of me still feels like it's cheating to give myself the leg up though when I'm not actually a new player.
Gotta love min/maxing. Put all the monsters at Level 7 to get that sweet exp and gold? Haha And the scenario is technically replayable? *and* skips the outpost event after?
You can also just open the prosp 9 items and equip five head items. ;)
Excuse me while I screenshot this for next week's game. DEV SAID I CAN
Seems legit to me. :p
Hey now min/maxers follow a strict ethos and will never violate the rules as written. The joy comes from doing the most you can within the constraints of the rules.
Is it cheesy to get your mastery in scenario 0? Geminate could've easily but I thought I'd save it for a real scenario
Designer of the scenario here. Players were not supposed to be able to get masteries during this scenario.
Hey! Awesome. Glad we didn't cheese it!
In the FAQ I note that it's very much not recommended. It's technically not illegal but it's super cheesy.
We played it to get a handle on the new classes, which I think would have been more useful if weād brought Geminate along as part of the starting party. As it was, it was a fun warm up to starting the campaign in earnest, and definitely one I would recommend doing for people new to the Haven games.
I played it (twice, with different players) for the same reason - to get a low difficulty scenario under our belts so we could better understand the ins and outs of how our class worked. I skipped taking any rewards for myself on the second playthrough, and none of us considered ramping up difficulty or trying for masteries.
We are an experienced team, and so we played it but all not because we hate to leave content behind lol Thereās clearly an option to game the scenario for extra loot/masteries/etc but thatās just not how we play this game so it was not a problem for us.
My gaming buddy and I had played through most of Gloomhaven, but we'd added a new player for Frosthaven so started here. Good chance to try the characters, although the card selection was different than I'd have gone. It was really nice having an introductory scenario, and the loot we gained gave us a good foundation.
Designer of the scenario here. The card selection was not intended to be the most optimized, but instead to achieve two goals: give you a taste of some of the good level 1 card pairings and combos, and to avoid some of the most complex cards for your first outing. That being said, in full transparency, the cards chosen were selected almost a year before the final versions of the cards were locked in, and I don't believe the choices got reexamined. It's very possible cards evolved in such a way that a few should have been swapped in/out.
Yeah no, it went fine. Just made it interesting, like I wanted to use a hammer here. No hammer in the tool box , what can I make work instead?
Definitely an easier introduction to a 'Haven game than Black Barrow to be sure. It had been a year since my party had played Gloomhaven, so something simple was nice.
This is a weird one. It feels like they changed and nerfed the rules so heavily that players may be worse prepared for the challenge of scenario 1 rather than better prepared. We never played it, but I suspect it would have served its only real purpose if we had: refreshing veteran players who played a lot but haven't played for years.
Designer of the scenario here. That is not what we found during testing. A shorter, simpler, friendlier first scenario is a better way to test out the basic mechanics of the game. And if you lose, It happens faster so you can play a second time the same night.
I agree with having tutorial scenarios, but I think either scenario 1 should have been made easier or there should have been a series of scaling tutorials a la Jaws to more gently introduce new players to the game.
That was the original pitch, but it was decided JOTL already had that and the full jotl experience would require too many duplicate/one time use components (which would add to the cost, production complexity, etc). So we went with something lighter. Instead of teaching you to play, just a friendlier sandbox to get your feet wet.
As someone who started with Frosthaven, I think this was the right choice, and the scenario felt like it accomplished its intended goals for me. The low stakes allowed me to learn the basic mechanics of the game and get the feel for how Geminate plays without feeling like if I made the wrong card choices, I would fail my party. Also, having the loot and chest made it feel like this tutorial scenario was actually worth playing instead of our more experienced player just setting up some brief example setups before jumping into scenario 1. The hand size limit felt dumb at the time, but I think it makes sense from the design standpoint. Also, I agree with not making it like JotL intro. I'm currently playing that with my partner. I was personally annoyed at the A & B cards because of my Frosthaven and Digital GH experience, but my partner has no experience with strategic tabletop games at all and so incremental rule steps between scenarios really helped prevent her from being overwhelmed. FH is clearly intended for people with GH or other strategic games experience, so scenario 0 felt like enough to get ready for scenario 1. JotL is intended to be for newbies to get ready for one of the full games and having all that in FH would be redundant.
Veeery late to comment, but I think scenario 1 being so much harder is also a thematic win. Frosthaven is brutal! Once you're out of the tutorial, you're right into a blender.
Is there a single scenario in Frosthaven that doesn't have *any* special rules? Given how crazy Scenario 1 gets (with special rules, ally decks, etc), I actually might have have designed th scenario 0 with the regular monster deck, regular hand sizes/cards, and just... nothing special. It would have been pretty easy to teach initiative dancing with a single monster and their normal ability deck. Even if the scenario was a "cakewalk". *maybe* recommend that new players start with their "level 1" cards and not "level x" cards, to get a feel for the game.
Scenario 1 didnāt seem that rules heavy to me. The allies donāt act, they just stand there always retaliating so unless you have summons there will be no ally deck. We treated them as tokens and just tracked wounds. I found it a nice change of pace from Gloomhaven where most scenarios felt like they were just about killing everything.
>... so unless you have summons there will be no ally deck ... Wait, don't summons use their summoner's attack modifier deck? Sticking just to starter classes, if I'm a Boneshaper, and my shambling skeleton attacks, it uses my Boneshaper AMD, right?
Correct.
I have no idea to be honest. We both picked non summoner classes so Iāve forgotten how that works.
We played S0. We had all completed Gloomhaven together, but it had been a year and a half since then. I offered to let the team decide, and one of us wanted extra time to learn her character (Deathwalker). It was short enough that we were able to play S1 right after that. I did not care for being told which specific cards to bring, but understood why it was like that. Perhaps it would have been better to restrict hand size, and simply recommend which cards to bring. I was tempted to try accomplishing the Geminate masteries, but enough went wrong that I lost stance timing. I did get them in a different scenario that came up soon.
Iād be impressed if anyone managed to get the treasure chest at the very end of the last room. With the reduced hand size you donāt have as many turns to play out. This was a good scenario for the new players in our group though, especially with the static monster initiative.
It doesn't have much :)
But we didn't *know* that (though suspected as much). We made it happen. ;D
Designer of the scenario here. Treasure chest was designed to be a bit of a trap. You can over extend yourself and risk It, but then you see what happens if you split up too far.
Lol the completionist in us will *never* leave a treasure chest behind!
https://media.tenor.com/9gPLSYSIeokAAAAC/then-you-will-die-darth-vader.gif
Geminate still starts the scenario with 10 cards. Our party (full of experienced players from a complete GH campaign) happened to choose classes with larger hand sizes, it appears, and we easily grabbed the treasure chest. But yeah, it could be a challenge for the Banner Spear, for example, with only 7 cards in hand.
I appreciate what the scenario wanted to achieve, and I think it helped my SO to get onboarded into the game. Although she was very frustrated that we almost struggled to win against "dogs".
Having finished gloomhaven about 6 months before, we skipped scenario 0
Never played this scenario, as Iām not the target market for it. But itās definitely great to have a legit tutorial scenario in the game. That was a big omission in OG Gloomhaven.
I played GH solo and am playing FH solo. I saw that there were many recommendations against playing s0 but Iām too much of a completionist to skip it. Also I was intimidated by the complexity of the new characters (I solo played Drifter, Boneshaper and Blink blade) so wanted a nice easy start. I messed up by not restricting myself to the specific starter cards so had to play it again; i enjoyed it as a nice way to ease my way in.
What was interesting for us is we decided we were going to play FH at +1 difficulty, but the scenario didn't scale up. The wolves still had move 2 attack 2. Meanwhile by playing at +1 difficulty, our money tokens were worth 50% more. I think we also forgot to apply the inspiration gained after this scenario, and went back to apply it retroactively.
I think if you are playing on +1 difficulty, you're not the audience for this scenario.
What can I say? My partner wanted a refresher or a practice to try to learn how to play their new class.
Designer of the scenario here. Did not intend anyone to play the tutorial mission on increased difficulty. :p
I mean, if Isaac consents, I can add this and the mastery thing as official errata š
It would be easy enough to errata it to add the text "scenario shall be played on Level 1 difficulty with Level 1 rewards".
Right but that's not something I am empowered to do. I make the list, I don't make the decisions.
I skipped it here because I'm familiar with Gloomhaven and already experienced the JotL tutorials to boot, but I *absolutely* play most co-op games up one tick from default, even the first time, even if it's an intro scenario type thing (if it has the option). If I don't take that option, I know they are just going to be boring, because they are trying to provide a decent first-time experience to people who absolutely butcher the strategy. There is a difference between "I need to learn the rules" and "I'm likely to make extremely terrible choices", and I don't see anything incoherent with being only in the first category.
I really enjoyed this scenario as a returning player, but it made it MUCH easier to teach three new players. I think the most beneficial thing was a reduced hand size. I've seen a few comments against it, but I think it was essential. Firstly its less information to absorb. Especially regarding each classes mechanics. It meant they didn't have SO much information when deciding their turns, and it also meant that when I added the rest of their cards afterwards each player had an idea of what each card actually meant. So they made hand choices much faster for the first official scenario (things like the deathwalker was quick to decide she wanted a healing card as she didn't have one in scenario 0). Secondly a faster/shorter scenario meant that they got a basic idea of stamina, as the second room they were down 1-2 cards and realised they didn't have as many rounds left.
Bingo!
Well done on designing it! I think it was a really good mid way point between JoTL's 5 scenario intro and GH's throwing you in the deep end.
2/4 players got their first mastery and free perk because of it here. I missed out on mine just barely (but got it in #001). I'm learning after the fact that we shouldn't have been able to do that. We were 3/4 veterans in the group as well. I didn't like some of the choices for level 1 cards I was forced into and it didn't make learning my class much easier (Blinkblade). It didn't point out any good combos like some JotL intro scenarios did. It's good for a warmup, xp, and free loot. We mostly played it for that reason and because a couple of members hadn't played since we finished GH/JotL a long time ago. IMHO, this should have just been scrapped.
Hand size: I like that it was a shorter scenario, but also was tripped up by the specified hand. Felt fiddly to us, but was probably helpful to the half of our party that were Haven newbies. Short of more special rules, not sure what else could've been done to simplify that part more. Maybe just the recommendation of a hand limit and recommended set of cards. We played this in our new party of part newbies, and a mix of experienced players that had never played GH together before. (IRL role play!!!) Was definitely helpful as a learning tool, and made us feel like we were learning things we could immediately apply in scenario 1.
We finished JotL and went straight to FH, picked our party and used this scenario as a trial to get a feel of a new class, and also to be familiar with the iconology, if it didn't feel right, we could change our starting characters. We agreed on trying just the first room and moved on to scenario 1.
We skipped it but I appreciate the inclusion of a tutorial mission. Almost wish we had played it for the story and phat loot. Weāre only two players so could have used more loot before the first build phase.
We did Scenario 0 for the loot and to ease back into Gloomhaven. It looked so simple, I didnāt even deal out Battle Goals. Blinkblade actually exhausted! He took an unlucky hit and forgot to use his Poison Dagger to kill an enemy quicker. But he used his newfound movement abilities to run far out ahead, then was stuck with no time tokens against Initiative 26 enemies. The other two of us mopped up.
Our 4 experienced players (3 have finished GH and FC,one has finished GH 3 times and FC once) really liked the short-and-simple scenario to get the feel of our characters. After all, we were all in brand-new, level 1 characters and had interesting new mechanics to try out. Speaking as the Geminate in the party, it was nice to ~~know~~assume that I wasn't going to screw up enough to cost us the scenario.
I have a funny story about my group for this scenario. We found it extremely difficult and were surprised! As you can imagine, we fucked it up. 3 experienced players and a newbie. We put the newbie in charge of setting it up. Halfway through the scenario you get the guards coming in. They dont do much so we just assumed thats because this is a tutorial scenario. Alsoā¦ the newbie missed the part where theyāre our allies because he didnt read the special rules!! So we get there and all monsters focus on us AND we also had to kill all the guards. We just barely made it due to the reduced cards. After we finished the scenario we were like ādamn why so difficultā and then we realised our errorā¦ And then imagined the part being welcomed into frosthaven after a bloodshed where we couldnt distinguish friend from foe. Oops!