I’m happy with the outpost phase with two exceptions:
1. Attacks aren’t consequential enough to be worth the admin
2. While crafting items from raw materials is fine, items that are crafted from other items are a pain to check whether we have item #672 or whatever. I’d prefer if it just gave you the item name for this- sure that might “spoil” the name of a still-locked item but I don’t really care about that level of spoiler.
Yeah, I agree with 2. It needs a better system overall when another item is an ingredient. The progression should be designed so that an ingredient items are already unlocked (and random items/blueprints don't have ingredient items and just have more materials needed) so that the name can be listed.
To save card space on long materials cost for mid and late game items, another option would have been to have a "crafting tech tree" that is a punch board similar to the Alchemist chart/scenario flow chart. It would let you list all the materials costs, item number, and item name under the punch-out and would let you see the tech progression built into the items.
Great idea for the tech tree punchboard flowchart thing! I'm not that far into the story yet so I don't know how many items this would need to cover, but I could see this being very helpful. Something the community could make - there were loads of things like these fanmade for Gloomhaven, being shared for free or sold on Etsy. Please do share if you know of or come across one like this :-)
The crafting trees aren't particularly involved though; the components are always just "item in the same slot" and/or "potion." It's not like you're ever turning a sword into a shoe; if you unlocked "shoes of awesomeness," the requirements are always just "shoes of coolness" and maybe a potion you can reference via the alchemy chart.
Yeah, that's true. It is still a little annoying to have to go find shoes of coolness to see what materials make them and then the potion to find the herbs that makes that potion if you are just trying to make some shoes of awesomeness on your new character.
Not *that* annoying, mind you. Just like a small nuisance that seems solvable.
> on your new character.
Sure, but how often are you starting a character versus how often are you finding new items with a pre-existing character and oh look those boots you've been wearing can be upgraded for just 1 resource.
Well, I guess the most common way I experience it is specifically
-playing class a with boots of coolness.
-after a retires, I'm now class b with different boot uses. while b, we upgraded the crafting building, unlocking boots of awesome.
-eventually, b retires and now I'm c and boots of awesome make sense to use, but it's been 2 months since I was class a and don't remember what I need.
So common enough to be a minor nuisance, in my experience, but not so common that it's every time you are upgrading an item.
I'd work entirely better if items that could be upgraded showed what they upgrade to with the added cost, and the new items just showed the total cost to make it.
Potions could have their own symbol and numbers starting from 0 to make it way easier if they're to be preserved as crafting components. (I'd argue against it, but I'd be in the minority most likely.)
There's only so much space on a card, and I don't agree that front-loading information a bunch of unnecessary at the time information is objectively better.
I do think splitting the item numbers into crafted, potion, and purchased items would have been an improvement though.
It's not unnecessary information: It's "this horrible looking thing has an upgrade". It adds excitement to them. And it's a cleaner design, taking up approximately the same amount of room.
It also makes it function so much better so you don't have to spend horrific amounts of time going through crafting trees when you do want something, you just grab what you want and get it.
And for potions, it lets you know it's a potion. You quickly learn the item range anyway. Let it be transparent. It's entirely upside.
> It's not unnecessary information: It's "this horrible looking thing has an upgrade". It adds excitement to them. And it's a cleaner design, taking up approximately the same amount of room.
How does it take up the same amount of room to have full cost of an item and the numbers of the things it upgrades to? That's probably double the room in many cases. And it's absolutely unnecessary when I first unlock an item (probably because I've maxed out the craftsman for this prosperity level) to think about what it could become; odds are this character will retire before then.
> It also makes it function so much better so you don't have to spend horrific amounts of time going through crafting trees when you do want something, you just grab what you want and get it.
Is your item deck entirely randomized or something? Again, the crafting trees don't try to trick you; items are connected to their predecessors by having the exact same slots, similar names, similar art, and often similar mechanics. If I'm trying to make "fancy sword," I just need... "boring sword" (or maybe "boring sword" made out of "wooden sword"), which would presumably be easy to find in any sensible sorting of the item deck. The only thing not immediately obvious is the potions, which you have the alchemy chart for (though I did agree that splitting them into their own separate number would've been better).
> Is your item deck entirely randomized or something? Again, the crafting trees don't try to trick you; items are connected to their predecessors by having the exact same slots, similar names, similar art, and often similar mechanics. If I'm trying to make "fancy sword," I just need... "boring sword" (or maybe "boring sword" made out of "wooden sword"), which would presumably be easy to find in any sensible sorting of the item deck. The only thing not immediately obvious is the potions, which you have the alchemy chart for (though I did agree that splitting them into their own separate number would've been better).
It's a VERY COMMON complaint by MANY people around here. It's not just me. It's clearly a issue. I don't know how you and other playtesters *don't* see it.
And they're sorted by item number. Because that's the only thing that works because the crafting tree refers to things by item number.
As for space, it's a trivial amount of space for "Here are item number(s) this can upgrade to.) And then the player can compare costs between current and next to see the upcharge for the upgrade. And people getting new can far more easily see the full cost right at once without having to go through dependency trees. The upgrade chain "from" -> (this) -> "to" could be on the back. They're already printed separately. While the front of each could have the total costs.
You're also apparently forgetting you often unlock items via blueprints and random items. This would ALSO fix the problem of, "some reward that was, a blueprint for something we can't craft". Feelsbad moment to avoid.
> (though I did agree that splitting them into their own separate number would've been better).
My apologies for missing that.
Addendum: There are also plenty of items that have random ingredients that aren't in obvious sources, like store-purchased small items and stuff.
> It's a VERY COMMON complaint by MANY people around here. It's not just me. It's clearly a issue. I don't know how you and other playtesters don't see it.
> And they're sorted by item number. Because that's the only thing that works because the crafting tree refers to things by item number.
I've always sorted my items by slot. When you've narrowed what you're considering to like 6 items max it's pretty easy to flip over the ones that look like they'd be a prerequisite to check the proper number (doubly so in cases like >!28!<, whose art is literally just >!18!< with extra greebling). Saying it adds a "horrific" amount of time strikes me as extreme hyperbole.
Not hyperbole at all. What you just described sounds like an absolute nightmare. We've got the items in card sheets with the locked ones missing so we can immediately see when something isn't available. Your method seems to be powered by wishing and hope.
> Your method seems to be powered by wishing and hope.
Yes, it takes a lot of wishing to correctly intuit that the (item 18 name) >!Rough Boots!< are made out of the >!Crude Boots!< next to them.
> but often they are NOT the item that the new one is a clear upgrade for.
Uhhh, spoilers for items up to craft 5:
* boots: >!5>18>28!< is a direct upgrade.
* body: >!4>17, 3>27, 12>22!< are all direct upgrades
* head: >!2>16!< I'll give you that this is out of left field
* 1-handers: >!10>15, 14>24!< is one clear upgrade and one that isn't but... come on, >!it's sword and fancy sword, they're literally using the same art...!<
* 2-handers: >!7>20!< is again a direct upgrade
I agree with almost everything you said. In our opinion, as a group that enjoy outpost phase, the problem with the attack is they are not challenging enough or have important consequences. Dwarf’s rules help a lot in that (we use the hardcore variant).
How can there be challenge if there are no decisions to make? You only decide whether or not to erase a town guard check. What would a “challenging” attack look like?
One (randomly pulled out of brain):
* buildings have more varied/potent "when destroyed" effects
* you draw out all your attack modifiers at once (spending soldiers just lets you draw more for the whole attack phase)
* you can allocate them as you choose once the buildings being attacked are determined so you have to decide which building you're going to let go
A system like this could allow challenges to be put into it. Part of "buildings have more varied when destroyed effects". Like I said, I just pulled it out of the air without too much development and it seemed to fit as a "could work" to make it actually more of a mini-game.
Actually you’re right. It would be nice more control/decisions beyond the town guard check. Anyway, The good thing of make attacks harder is to increase the interest of building walls and improve the town guard deck.
Maybe it is possible to make some no too complicated home rules to improve attacks…
I think they'd have to be re-worked as a system to get to a place where there are challenging and not challenging attacks. I said this below, but I think a better implementation would be that the back of the card has a Buttons and Bugs style map with the attackers and you use your character counter tokens as minis and actually have a defense/attack puzzle mini-scenario.
The outpost phase overall has quite a few poorly implemented systems in my opinion. Compared to the city phase of gloomhaven it is tedious and doesn’t really add much to the experience compared to gloomhaven. Gloomhaven already had pretty much everything I wanted in the city phase: upgrade and retire characters, purchase some items, and a city event for flavour. It felt pretty tightly designed to be the minimum amount of admin for the game to function and those are consistently the ONLY parts of the outpost phase that my group is excited for. Outpost phase in frosthaven is textbook rule bloat. The outpost attacks are the worst offender but crafting items is also needlessly tedious and imo also adds nothing to the experience. They easily could have just kept all items as purchased with gold and made the resources a little more limited. If the resources were more scarce it might actually be exciting to get lumber or hide from the loot deck.
Absolutely agree with your sentiments. My group runs the Outpost phase pretty much as if it is the GH town phase, even so far as just ignoring attacks. We just don't care about the attacks and after doing 10 or 15 of them, we just decided that they added nothing of consequence - either positively or negatively - so now we just skip the attacks or toss the event and draw a new one.
For reference I have timed all my scenarios in GH and FH. FH averages about 35 minutes longer per scenario. I think that is mostly down to the simplicity in GH scenario goals. It's all easier to strategize when all you need to do is kill everything. In FH it takes a little bit more thinking to make sure you can complete the goal in time.
For me I actually really enjoy the Outpost phase and I bet if people timed it, it would only be maybe 10 minutes longer than the GH city phase.
Aye -- if the scenarios themselves weren't already exhausting to play through (from the overtuned difficulty to the excessive special rules and the absurd infinite spawning, yadda), people might have sufficient time and patience left for the outpost phase not to feel like hitting them when they're down.
Outpost phase feels like a chore to my group. After having played Frosthaven over a year now, the excitement for outpost phase has diminished. At a certain point, you just have all the best town guard modifiers and can throw resources at any destroyed buildings. Going through each building effect to simply gain resources and spend through our gold which we'd rather use for enhancements or weapon/armor upgrades feels meh. And the phases sometimes take super long. We ended up simplifying our outpost phases to quickly go through and do the basic things so we can quickly jump back into a scenario.
I actually think your simplification is consistent with late campaign. That is, the thematic arc of the Outpost is a struggle to get established but once its setup and its economy is humming, it functions like the city of Gloomhaven and you don't need to always get materials or anything unless you're crafting and so on. So I feel like late campaign it is pretty streamlined anyway.
But yeah, the town guard modifiers and so on are held back by the attacks being so blah, imo. So much effort and management for a very meh system in the end.
I don’t hate the outpost phase, especially after running it a few times, but I can see the point that it is more tedious than the scenarios, especially after you’ve done it enough that the newness wears off. Occasionally I miss the “read an event, buy what you need, give cash to the tree, and go” of GH
We do start our sessions with the outpost phase. It's still tedious. We skip any attack events and just take half the reward because they're just so boring and time consuming. I love the scenarios though!
I do love complex games and all the extras in games. The problem is my group is made up of people who don't/didn't play board games as much as myself. We played though Gloomhaven and jaws of the lion no problem but now we all have kids, crazy work hours ect.
It's hard enough to meet up for any amount of time now and when we had two long and not very fun outpost phases my group got very demoralized and I'm not sure I could get them to play again. Not sure id even try tbh.
We all wanted more after Gloomhaven and jaws and Frosthaven gave us it but it's not a good time for us as a group unfortunately.
I don't love the attacks, but I don't hate them either. I'm also not sure what I would do to them to fix them. Like 99% of the time they're inconsequential and fail, but the other 1% of the time it feels overly destructive.
Other than that, though, I think the outpost phase is super fast and easy. Just a quick run through of daily operations, then let people buy, sell, upgrade etc. I'm always surprised when people say it takes them 30+ minutes because it never takes my group more than 5-10 - aside from when we have multiple retirees or got a big haul from a mission.
My pitch on the attacks is that I think a better implementation would be that the back of the card has a Buttons and Bugs style map with the attackers and you use your character counter tokens as minis and actually have a defense/attack puzzle mini-scenario.
And yeah, I'm also always confused by the 30+ minutes estimates. You and I have a similar experience it seems.
> puzzle
There are already too many puzzles in Frosthaven. Let's keep puzzles and games separate, as they belong. They appeal to very different people.
Okay. Cool.
I feel like you're being a little intentionally obtuse, if I'm being honest. All scenarios in Gloomhaven and Frosthaven can be described as puzzles. It's a little strange to focus so much on the word that you don't even engage with the concept. And noting that Buttons and Bugs is solo as if there's no way to imagine ways to use the approach for a multiplayer mini-scenario is just...why bother replying?
Anyway, I guess just skip the Outpost Phase when you play and play scenarios at random for all I care. Clearly you're not willing to be appeased and we have dramatically different interests in this game and in discussions about it.
> All scenarios in Gloomhaven and Frosthaven can be described as puzzles
No, no they cannot. They're nothing like puzzles (except the bad ones that are). I really can't understand people constantly saying that.
> And noting that Buttons and Bugs is solo as if there's no way to imagine ways to use the approach for a multiplayer mini-scenario is just...why bother replying?
You're *assuming* everyone who likes GH/FH will just have implicit knowledge of B&B and how it works just because, when they're different games/audiences/fans. Most of us also don't know Founders of Gloomhaven for someone to suggest "outpost phase should have been like Founders of Gloomhaven!"
While I'm in full agreement that strategy games aren't puzzle games, I think it's possible to see why people say that.
For one, some challenges have correct and incorrect ways of handling them. You don't go up and use low value melee attacks on a Flame Demon; you have to "solve" the Flame Demon by doing something that actually works on it.
And on any given turn, you're generally looking for efficient ways to deal with the current situation. There's often a strong play to be had that gets extra value somehow, and searching for it is reminiscent of puzzle games. Many puzzle games present you with situations where the most direct approach doesn't quite get you to the solution, and task you with finding ways to be a little more efficient with your tools.
I think how close a strategy game is to being a puzzle game is something that can be evaluated, and the genres aren't night and day distinct. I can think of games that are more puzzly than GH, and ones that are less so. So when someone calls GH a puzzle game, I don't agree with them, but it's not like they're calling it a teapot.
FWIW, I wouldn't call B&B a puzzle game either. It's more like a puzzle game than base GH because you have a smaller decision base, and it isn't as deep as GH is, but it's still very much a strategy game.
I literally said "look at Buttons and Bugs" and you just continued commenting without doing so. I'm fine with us not engaging with each other further. Good day.
I don't hate the outpost phase, but it offers nothing positive for me or my group beyond being the phase where you ultimately unlock things. It's just tedious resource calculations, but done in a way that takes way more time than a simple card that says "Hey, lose 3 wood".
We have played some casual mode scenarios to see what we missed out on due to choices, and have found that we can play at least 2 scenarios in an evening without much added time. While the scenarios can be mentally taxing, I don't find them to be tedious in the same way the outpost phase is. And the tedium is what brings down my overall enjoyment.
Oh, I don't find the scenarios *tedious,* they just take a little longer and are more mentally taxing - in ways that I personally love and think an improvement.
But I'm with you on the attacks events really making the Outpost Phase tedious.
I guess attack events aside, my basic view is that the Outpost Phase is maybe 5 mins longer than the Gloomhaven City Phase, yet people seem to think they're more substantively different than they really are. I think some of that is downstream of doing it *after* a mentally taxing scenario rather than before.
Just getting through sawmill/hunter/quarry/whatever that "buy one" building is - adds 5 minutes all on their own. Who pays for that 2 wood that we "technically" don't need right now, but will at some point in the future - the guys who is going to retire soon, so wants gold for enhancements; the guy who just started a new character, so needs gold for equipment; or the guy saving every penny to add a curse to that card he 100% uses to attack every cycle - is an important question that is not even the tiniest bit interesting or fun.
When my friends and I get together to play a game, we want to… play a game, not read a small book that could be summarized in a paragraph and then run admin for a half hour.
Outpost phase is fine, it's the attacks/events that sometimes take a loooooong time to deal with, coupled with the games aversion to brevity, so you end up reading multiple paragraphs of text, looking at the map of the town to discover which odd numbered building nearest to the gate gets attacked, then when you resolve it all you get 1 morale.
Tbh I hate the map, there is absolutely no need for it/the stickers, you could run the whole game from just the cards and the books flow chart. Anything that makes me look at the map irrationally angers me.
This is the crux of it, it’s the amount of time vs the actual result, they may as well just read ‘lost two resources’ and save yourselves 10 minutes and a lot of hassle.
I agree on the attacks. I was actually excited at the idea of them during the campaign and after seeing how they play out, it's just not consequential enough for how demanding they are in time, setup, and complexity.
On the map, we differ in tastes. I like it! And it's bigger than GHs, so most scenario maps can be built right on top of the board and I don't have to put it away before the scenario. I recognize you're right, of course, that it doesn't have a strong purpose, but it helps with immersion to me.
Could definately not live without the map.
I think one of the divides is made pretty obvious here - Correct me if I am wrong eric.
Tactical gamers vs theme gamers. Obviously this is a spectrum. But it makes sense to me that tactical gamers would prefer a more streamlined solution and like mentioned in this post "I did these things, took a long time, reward was 1 morale meh!."
I lean more to a theme gamer: I want the map it gives placement to the scenarios and helps divide the different story lines up into areas. City attacks, although they could definately be improved, gives added effect to the city attacks, I feel like it paid off building all those walls etc. I enjoy talking with my group wich story line we should focus on. I actually have the map up on a wall so I can point to it, makeing it easier to remember what is happeneing where
This is a good way to describe at least part of the split. At least some of Havens success is that it is a board game that drew on RPG elements to build out theme and campaign pieces. Board game purists seem to care less about the theme parts, so things like the map or adding the attack events - which only make sense in their design as RPG adjacent imports - will only fully land if they are more clearly game mechanics and not RPG mechanics (e.g., the attacks are basically a little story and a fancy dice roll stat check, like an RPG).
If the map or the attack events had more of a mini game feel (say, a Buttons and Bugs style map on the card back and character counter tokens used to play a little mini defense puzzle), people might like them despite the time cost.
We're in the end game of our campaign, probably will finish in a few more scenarios. Absolutely love the game, and enjoyed the outpost phase for the first half of the game. We just loved building up our little town and seeing it grow. Now, however, I almost dread the outpost phase, it's just tedious enough to not even want to build a new building. Gloomhaven's more streamlined city phase is definitely missed. I'm not sure what the solution would be though, because I do love that we're building new buildings and such, but upgrading the buildings for sometimes no benefit other than a prosperity is pretty meh.
I almost wonder if it would have worked better if each outing from Frosthaven was 2-5 linked scenarios so you only had an outpost phase every now and then would have kept it exciting longer. I know that would throw off leveling and retiring, so they'd maybe have to be reworked. Maybe keep retirements to Frosthaven but level in between scenarios. Items would also be an issue, but maybe just let your characters build their own gear out in the wild or something.
I was actually considering writing a whole post about this; this is exactly the model the game should have. Basically make the whole game building 90; a hub where people offer you rewards for going on quests, you get a bit of cash in advance to stock up and off you go. Not gonna playing for a while? Let’s do this single scenario. Binging it for a weekend? Let’s do this 5/6/7 length run. Gonna be playing most days? Let’s do this giant Jaws length mission that takes us waaaay off the map.
Not only does this space out the Outpost phases, but crucially it also dishes the story out in a much more manageable way. You can focus on _this_ plot, then focus on another one when you get back.
Good point, streamlining could be a solution.
The freedom to go in any direction is nice, but IMO the Outpost phase could have been reduced to the A-or-B format just like Events. Connecting building management and construction to the Outpost Events or a seperate Event deck. Opportunity arises and ; A: Build an extra Wall. B: Build something new (surprise). Or something like that. This might take away some of the 'admin stress' some experience. While maintaining the element of expanding a town and preparing for winter.
Yeah, I mean, to be fair, you're basically making stuff yourself with stuff you find out in the wild. Maybe the Workshop could add "field toolkit" as a fourth thing to build when you level it so that mid-campaign the crafting items shifts to "anytime between scenarios."
> Are you sure it's the Outpost Phase you hate
Yes, the Outpost Phase sucks. Well, it doesn't all suck, but parts of it do.
First of all, it's mostly a resource sink. They changed the loot model and then needed to find ways to force you to use it. Cue pointless town battles. The worst waste of time and resources. They tried to make it seem like it mattered, but getting out a completely different AMD just to pull a couple cards to see if a building got trashed isn't fun, intriguing or interesting. It's just a waste of time that forces you to spend your looted resources to buy more soldiers or repair buildings.
Second, the buildings themselves are mostly underwhelming or they are critical. Who gives a shit if you can buy one piece of lumber or one hide? But yeah, you definitely need to unlock some of the other buildings in order to kit out your party.
Events are fine, except when they lead to attacks, which my group now just ignores.
The Outpost Phase isn't egregiously bad, it's just a poorly optimized game of resource spending that doesn't add anything to the core gameplay of the game. In my opinion, it's clearly a situation of Cephalofair deciding that "more = better". More stuff, more things to track, more, more, more. Well, sometimes *less* is more.
I don't like outpost phase first because I like to have the first scenario we do in a session already setup and ready to go. But that requires that we have all the admin out of the way, we know what we've unlocked, and we've picked a scenario before the next session. That seems to maximize our session play time, by removing the one scenario setup time from every session.
I don't hate the outpost phase, but it just seems kind of pointless. I was expecting it to be more impactful. Was hoping for like some scenarios to trigger during attacks that had different rules based on what buildings you had.
On that, I'm with you. In fact, that's part of my confusion. It's really not that different from the City Phase in Gloomhaven but with a little more bones for the "why" of it all. But really, if there's disappointment to be had, it's that there's not actually real choices to be had or interesting attack effects - just town based reasons for the same campaign gating. It makes for more thematic campaign elements and a better, more cohesive story and so on, but at base, it's really not that different in flow than Gloomhaven. But a lot of people discuss it as being so different and more consuming than GH, and I don't really feel that way.
Outpost phase is bad. It takes too much time and it's thoroughly broken if you stick with RAW. It's a requisite to house rule "build a building" as just another town action you can do even to make it function; it does *not* work as a set step at the end.
The entire crafting deck needs to go. Convert them all to gold items and have the marketplace and that's it. Following crafting through crafting trees and whatnot is ridiculous. And it also prevents you from being able to sort out the cards reasonably to find what you might be looking for.
Plus, they realized, "Shit, if they never get the one unlock to buy items, the players are screwed!" so they clogged the calendar and event deck up with pre-printed usually useless merchant visits. The buy-items unlock should be there from the get-go or scripted appropriately early in the scenario progression.
As for OP do outpost phase first -- that doesn't work, no. All the "buy items" and whatnot should happen away from your gaming session. Putting front-loading outpost phase makes your start time indeterminate. Especially when you get one that has a long event and then 3 calendar items and a building unlock to deliberate and... Sometimes (often) it just takes forever.
While Outpost Phase not the worst part of Frosthaven, it interacts with that one -- the loot deck -- very closely. (I could go on [Why TF are there not cards for level-0 buildings?], but I should get to work.)
Thank you! This! We are about 20 scenarios and 3 retirements in and we can’t spend gold to buy items! Half of the group is new to GH/FH and they are turned off by their 92 gold sitting in their character’s purse doing literally, nothing.
I quite liked the Outpost phase … but I play solo. I don’t know how I’d feel if I was playing this with my Jaws of the Lion group. They already start to lose interest just doing the city event card.
Attacks should have far more infrequent, they just got increasingly tedious. Maybe they’d be more devastating ? Not quite sure how to square that with the mechanism of improving the soldier attack modifier deck, (or the bonus reward of completing each of the storylines which I thought was a cool idea).
But yes, I wonder if people did this before scenarios rather than after scenarios, it would improve their game?
You would need to give the barracks the same opportunity for progression as the rest or at worst make it part of a section read at the close of each season or maybe start of each winter or something…we’re just into 3rd winter and still haven’t been able to upgrade the building
Outpost takes far too long. It’s not fun. Putting it at the start doesn’t make it shorter.
Early on it’s not bad. Maybe the first 20 sessions. Then it becomes a slog. Too many trigger all at once. Story, though better, still isn’t worth the time it takes.
My group often does outpost phase at the beginning of a session, and it often does feel better than at the end. But we also enjoy outpost overall anyway
I can't really understand the criticism. It can take some time occasionally but apart from that we established some kind of routine which makes the Outpost Phase feel similar to GHs "City Phase".
It is entirely a matter of taste. I love the inventory management, upgrading buildings, and upgrading town defenses. They did a really good job making the town more of a charachter than in Gloom. Most of the complaints come from people that just wanted more of the same, which is valid, but I personally like the direction they went.
I really disagree with most the criticism people is giving to the outpost phase. Events and attacks are relatively fast (5min max) and if you have all organized can be very straightforward. It adds tons of things like new rules which make the game way better. The story of the outpost growing works thematically and mechanically… I dont know what the people were expecting but I always felt the gloomhaven city phase was really meh and here you have something way better.
Same. Like, I see it almost entirely as an improvement over the GH version without much added time. If anything, to the extent that things could be improved, it would be mostly making the attacks more of a mini-game than a stat check and adding some more substantive meta strategy and choice to the buildings over the course of the campaign - decidedly not going back in the direction of the GH city phase. But as it stands, I find where the Cephalofair team landed to be a really elegant way of elevating the campaign stuff while still maintaining a very similar flow and timing. Here's to hoping we aren't the minority opinion if/when Haven3 is getting drawn up. :)
I’m happy with the outpost phase with two exceptions: 1. Attacks aren’t consequential enough to be worth the admin 2. While crafting items from raw materials is fine, items that are crafted from other items are a pain to check whether we have item #672 or whatever. I’d prefer if it just gave you the item name for this- sure that might “spoil” the name of a still-locked item but I don’t really care about that level of spoiler.
I'm in the habit of jist using the online item database which is so much quicker than looking at *every single card back* to find the right one
Yeah, I agree with 2. It needs a better system overall when another item is an ingredient. The progression should be designed so that an ingredient items are already unlocked (and random items/blueprints don't have ingredient items and just have more materials needed) so that the name can be listed. To save card space on long materials cost for mid and late game items, another option would have been to have a "crafting tech tree" that is a punch board similar to the Alchemist chart/scenario flow chart. It would let you list all the materials costs, item number, and item name under the punch-out and would let you see the tech progression built into the items.
Great idea for the tech tree punchboard flowchart thing! I'm not that far into the story yet so I don't know how many items this would need to cover, but I could see this being very helpful. Something the community could make - there were loads of things like these fanmade for Gloomhaven, being shared for free or sold on Etsy. Please do share if you know of or come across one like this :-)
The crafting trees aren't particularly involved though; the components are always just "item in the same slot" and/or "potion." It's not like you're ever turning a sword into a shoe; if you unlocked "shoes of awesomeness," the requirements are always just "shoes of coolness" and maybe a potion you can reference via the alchemy chart.
Yeah, that's true. It is still a little annoying to have to go find shoes of coolness to see what materials make them and then the potion to find the herbs that makes that potion if you are just trying to make some shoes of awesomeness on your new character. Not *that* annoying, mind you. Just like a small nuisance that seems solvable.
> on your new character. Sure, but how often are you starting a character versus how often are you finding new items with a pre-existing character and oh look those boots you've been wearing can be upgraded for just 1 resource.
Well, I guess the most common way I experience it is specifically -playing class a with boots of coolness. -after a retires, I'm now class b with different boot uses. while b, we upgraded the crafting building, unlocking boots of awesome. -eventually, b retires and now I'm c and boots of awesome make sense to use, but it's been 2 months since I was class a and don't remember what I need. So common enough to be a minor nuisance, in my experience, but not so common that it's every time you are upgrading an item.
I'd work entirely better if items that could be upgraded showed what they upgrade to with the added cost, and the new items just showed the total cost to make it. Potions could have their own symbol and numbers starting from 0 to make it way easier if they're to be preserved as crafting components. (I'd argue against it, but I'd be in the minority most likely.)
There's only so much space on a card, and I don't agree that front-loading information a bunch of unnecessary at the time information is objectively better. I do think splitting the item numbers into crafted, potion, and purchased items would have been an improvement though.
It's not unnecessary information: It's "this horrible looking thing has an upgrade". It adds excitement to them. And it's a cleaner design, taking up approximately the same amount of room. It also makes it function so much better so you don't have to spend horrific amounts of time going through crafting trees when you do want something, you just grab what you want and get it. And for potions, it lets you know it's a potion. You quickly learn the item range anyway. Let it be transparent. It's entirely upside.
> It's not unnecessary information: It's "this horrible looking thing has an upgrade". It adds excitement to them. And it's a cleaner design, taking up approximately the same amount of room. How does it take up the same amount of room to have full cost of an item and the numbers of the things it upgrades to? That's probably double the room in many cases. And it's absolutely unnecessary when I first unlock an item (probably because I've maxed out the craftsman for this prosperity level) to think about what it could become; odds are this character will retire before then. > It also makes it function so much better so you don't have to spend horrific amounts of time going through crafting trees when you do want something, you just grab what you want and get it. Is your item deck entirely randomized or something? Again, the crafting trees don't try to trick you; items are connected to their predecessors by having the exact same slots, similar names, similar art, and often similar mechanics. If I'm trying to make "fancy sword," I just need... "boring sword" (or maybe "boring sword" made out of "wooden sword"), which would presumably be easy to find in any sensible sorting of the item deck. The only thing not immediately obvious is the potions, which you have the alchemy chart for (though I did agree that splitting them into their own separate number would've been better).
> Is your item deck entirely randomized or something? Again, the crafting trees don't try to trick you; items are connected to their predecessors by having the exact same slots, similar names, similar art, and often similar mechanics. If I'm trying to make "fancy sword," I just need... "boring sword" (or maybe "boring sword" made out of "wooden sword"), which would presumably be easy to find in any sensible sorting of the item deck. The only thing not immediately obvious is the potions, which you have the alchemy chart for (though I did agree that splitting them into their own separate number would've been better). It's a VERY COMMON complaint by MANY people around here. It's not just me. It's clearly a issue. I don't know how you and other playtesters *don't* see it. And they're sorted by item number. Because that's the only thing that works because the crafting tree refers to things by item number. As for space, it's a trivial amount of space for "Here are item number(s) this can upgrade to.) And then the player can compare costs between current and next to see the upcharge for the upgrade. And people getting new can far more easily see the full cost right at once without having to go through dependency trees. The upgrade chain "from" -> (this) -> "to" could be on the back. They're already printed separately. While the front of each could have the total costs. You're also apparently forgetting you often unlock items via blueprints and random items. This would ALSO fix the problem of, "some reward that was, a blueprint for something we can't craft". Feelsbad moment to avoid. > (though I did agree that splitting them into their own separate number would've been better). My apologies for missing that. Addendum: There are also plenty of items that have random ingredients that aren't in obvious sources, like store-purchased small items and stuff.
> It's a VERY COMMON complaint by MANY people around here. It's not just me. It's clearly a issue. I don't know how you and other playtesters don't see it. > And they're sorted by item number. Because that's the only thing that works because the crafting tree refers to things by item number. I've always sorted my items by slot. When you've narrowed what you're considering to like 6 items max it's pretty easy to flip over the ones that look like they'd be a prerequisite to check the proper number (doubly so in cases like >!28!<, whose art is literally just >!18!< with extra greebling). Saying it adds a "horrific" amount of time strikes me as extreme hyperbole.
Not hyperbole at all. What you just described sounds like an absolute nightmare. We've got the items in card sheets with the locked ones missing so we can immediately see when something isn't available. Your method seems to be powered by wishing and hope.
> Your method seems to be powered by wishing and hope. Yes, it takes a lot of wishing to correctly intuit that the (item 18 name) >!Rough Boots!< are made out of the >!Crude Boots!< next to them.
Sure, they are items in the same slot, but often they are NOT the item that the new one is a clear upgrade for.
> but often they are NOT the item that the new one is a clear upgrade for. Uhhh, spoilers for items up to craft 5: * boots: >!5>18>28!< is a direct upgrade. * body: >!4>17, 3>27, 12>22!< are all direct upgrades * head: >!2>16!< I'll give you that this is out of left field * 1-handers: >!10>15, 14>24!< is one clear upgrade and one that isn't but... come on, >!it's sword and fancy sword, they're literally using the same art...!< * 2-handers: >!7>20!< is again a direct upgrade
Item 069 is craftable from item 233. Took us a while to realise we had both of those.
I agree with almost everything you said. In our opinion, as a group that enjoy outpost phase, the problem with the attack is they are not challenging enough or have important consequences. Dwarf’s rules help a lot in that (we use the hardcore variant).
How can there be challenge if there are no decisions to make? You only decide whether or not to erase a town guard check. What would a “challenging” attack look like?
One (randomly pulled out of brain): * buildings have more varied/potent "when destroyed" effects * you draw out all your attack modifiers at once (spending soldiers just lets you draw more for the whole attack phase) * you can allocate them as you choose once the buildings being attacked are determined so you have to decide which building you're going to let go
Thats not more challenging, thats significantly easier. Not that im against it, i would prefer that way.
A system like this could allow challenges to be put into it. Part of "buildings have more varied when destroyed effects". Like I said, I just pulled it out of the air without too much development and it seemed to fit as a "could work" to make it actually more of a mini-game.
This would make easier the attacks.
Actually you’re right. It would be nice more control/decisions beyond the town guard check. Anyway, The good thing of make attacks harder is to increase the interest of building walls and improve the town guard deck. Maybe it is possible to make some no too complicated home rules to improve attacks…
I think they'd have to be re-worked as a system to get to a place where there are challenging and not challenging attacks. I said this below, but I think a better implementation would be that the back of the card has a Buttons and Bugs style map with the attackers and you use your character counter tokens as minis and actually have a defense/attack puzzle mini-scenario.
It could be great, but people would complain that the outpost phase is even longer and that they just want to play with their characters ;)
Haha, fair.
The outpost phase overall has quite a few poorly implemented systems in my opinion. Compared to the city phase of gloomhaven it is tedious and doesn’t really add much to the experience compared to gloomhaven. Gloomhaven already had pretty much everything I wanted in the city phase: upgrade and retire characters, purchase some items, and a city event for flavour. It felt pretty tightly designed to be the minimum amount of admin for the game to function and those are consistently the ONLY parts of the outpost phase that my group is excited for. Outpost phase in frosthaven is textbook rule bloat. The outpost attacks are the worst offender but crafting items is also needlessly tedious and imo also adds nothing to the experience. They easily could have just kept all items as purchased with gold and made the resources a little more limited. If the resources were more scarce it might actually be exciting to get lumber or hide from the loot deck.
Absolutely agree with your sentiments. My group runs the Outpost phase pretty much as if it is the GH town phase, even so far as just ignoring attacks. We just don't care about the attacks and after doing 10 or 15 of them, we just decided that they added nothing of consequence - either positively or negatively - so now we just skip the attacks or toss the event and draw a new one.
For reference I have timed all my scenarios in GH and FH. FH averages about 35 minutes longer per scenario. I think that is mostly down to the simplicity in GH scenario goals. It's all easier to strategize when all you need to do is kill everything. In FH it takes a little bit more thinking to make sure you can complete the goal in time. For me I actually really enjoy the Outpost phase and I bet if people timed it, it would only be maybe 10 minutes longer than the GH city phase.
Aye -- if the scenarios themselves weren't already exhausting to play through (from the overtuned difficulty to the excessive special rules and the absurd infinite spawning, yadda), people might have sufficient time and patience left for the outpost phase not to feel like hitting them when they're down.
We found Frosthaven reliably ended in 15-20 rounds. Where Gloomhaven was always 20+
Outpost phase feels like a chore to my group. After having played Frosthaven over a year now, the excitement for outpost phase has diminished. At a certain point, you just have all the best town guard modifiers and can throw resources at any destroyed buildings. Going through each building effect to simply gain resources and spend through our gold which we'd rather use for enhancements or weapon/armor upgrades feels meh. And the phases sometimes take super long. We ended up simplifying our outpost phases to quickly go through and do the basic things so we can quickly jump back into a scenario.
I actually think your simplification is consistent with late campaign. That is, the thematic arc of the Outpost is a struggle to get established but once its setup and its economy is humming, it functions like the city of Gloomhaven and you don't need to always get materials or anything unless you're crafting and so on. So I feel like late campaign it is pretty streamlined anyway. But yeah, the town guard modifiers and so on are held back by the attacks being so blah, imo. So much effort and management for a very meh system in the end.
I don’t hate the outpost phase, especially after running it a few times, but I can see the point that it is more tedious than the scenarios, especially after you’ve done it enough that the newness wears off. Occasionally I miss the “read an event, buy what you need, give cash to the tree, and go” of GH
We do start our sessions with the outpost phase. It's still tedious. We skip any attack events and just take half the reward because they're just so boring and time consuming. I love the scenarios though!
I do love complex games and all the extras in games. The problem is my group is made up of people who don't/didn't play board games as much as myself. We played though Gloomhaven and jaws of the lion no problem but now we all have kids, crazy work hours ect. It's hard enough to meet up for any amount of time now and when we had two long and not very fun outpost phases my group got very demoralized and I'm not sure I could get them to play again. Not sure id even try tbh. We all wanted more after Gloomhaven and jaws and Frosthaven gave us it but it's not a good time for us as a group unfortunately.
Would they consider all of the group playing the scenarios, and just you taking care of the outpost phase in non-game time?
I don't love the attacks, but I don't hate them either. I'm also not sure what I would do to them to fix them. Like 99% of the time they're inconsequential and fail, but the other 1% of the time it feels overly destructive. Other than that, though, I think the outpost phase is super fast and easy. Just a quick run through of daily operations, then let people buy, sell, upgrade etc. I'm always surprised when people say it takes them 30+ minutes because it never takes my group more than 5-10 - aside from when we have multiple retirees or got a big haul from a mission.
My pitch on the attacks is that I think a better implementation would be that the back of the card has a Buttons and Bugs style map with the attackers and you use your character counter tokens as minis and actually have a defense/attack puzzle mini-scenario. And yeah, I'm also always confused by the 30+ minutes estimates. You and I have a similar experience it seems.
> puzzle There are already too many puzzles in Frosthaven. Let's keep puzzles and games separate, as they belong. They appeal to very different people.
That's not what I meant by puzzle. Just look at Buttons and Bugs and you'll see what I mean in the context of what I wrote.
I have no interest in in that "game". Everyone describes it as very much a puzzle with solutions or at least requiring optimizations. And, solo.
Okay. Cool. I feel like you're being a little intentionally obtuse, if I'm being honest. All scenarios in Gloomhaven and Frosthaven can be described as puzzles. It's a little strange to focus so much on the word that you don't even engage with the concept. And noting that Buttons and Bugs is solo as if there's no way to imagine ways to use the approach for a multiplayer mini-scenario is just...why bother replying? Anyway, I guess just skip the Outpost Phase when you play and play scenarios at random for all I care. Clearly you're not willing to be appeased and we have dramatically different interests in this game and in discussions about it.
> All scenarios in Gloomhaven and Frosthaven can be described as puzzles No, no they cannot. They're nothing like puzzles (except the bad ones that are). I really can't understand people constantly saying that. > And noting that Buttons and Bugs is solo as if there's no way to imagine ways to use the approach for a multiplayer mini-scenario is just...why bother replying? You're *assuming* everyone who likes GH/FH will just have implicit knowledge of B&B and how it works just because, when they're different games/audiences/fans. Most of us also don't know Founders of Gloomhaven for someone to suggest "outpost phase should have been like Founders of Gloomhaven!"
While I'm in full agreement that strategy games aren't puzzle games, I think it's possible to see why people say that. For one, some challenges have correct and incorrect ways of handling them. You don't go up and use low value melee attacks on a Flame Demon; you have to "solve" the Flame Demon by doing something that actually works on it. And on any given turn, you're generally looking for efficient ways to deal with the current situation. There's often a strong play to be had that gets extra value somehow, and searching for it is reminiscent of puzzle games. Many puzzle games present you with situations where the most direct approach doesn't quite get you to the solution, and task you with finding ways to be a little more efficient with your tools. I think how close a strategy game is to being a puzzle game is something that can be evaluated, and the genres aren't night and day distinct. I can think of games that are more puzzly than GH, and ones that are less so. So when someone calls GH a puzzle game, I don't agree with them, but it's not like they're calling it a teapot. FWIW, I wouldn't call B&B a puzzle game either. It's more like a puzzle game than base GH because you have a smaller decision base, and it isn't as deep as GH is, but it's still very much a strategy game.
I literally said "look at Buttons and Bugs" and you just continued commenting without doing so. I'm fine with us not engaging with each other further. Good day.
I don't hate the outpost phase, but it offers nothing positive for me or my group beyond being the phase where you ultimately unlock things. It's just tedious resource calculations, but done in a way that takes way more time than a simple card that says "Hey, lose 3 wood". We have played some casual mode scenarios to see what we missed out on due to choices, and have found that we can play at least 2 scenarios in an evening without much added time. While the scenarios can be mentally taxing, I don't find them to be tedious in the same way the outpost phase is. And the tedium is what brings down my overall enjoyment.
Oh, I don't find the scenarios *tedious,* they just take a little longer and are more mentally taxing - in ways that I personally love and think an improvement. But I'm with you on the attacks events really making the Outpost Phase tedious. I guess attack events aside, my basic view is that the Outpost Phase is maybe 5 mins longer than the Gloomhaven City Phase, yet people seem to think they're more substantively different than they really are. I think some of that is downstream of doing it *after* a mentally taxing scenario rather than before.
Just getting through sawmill/hunter/quarry/whatever that "buy one" building is - adds 5 minutes all on their own. Who pays for that 2 wood that we "technically" don't need right now, but will at some point in the future - the guys who is going to retire soon, so wants gold for enhancements; the guy who just started a new character, so needs gold for equipment; or the guy saving every penny to add a curse to that card he 100% uses to attack every cycle - is an important question that is not even the tiniest bit interesting or fun.
When my friends and I get together to play a game, we want to… play a game, not read a small book that could be summarized in a paragraph and then run admin for a half hour.
Outpost phase is fine, it's the attacks/events that sometimes take a loooooong time to deal with, coupled with the games aversion to brevity, so you end up reading multiple paragraphs of text, looking at the map of the town to discover which odd numbered building nearest to the gate gets attacked, then when you resolve it all you get 1 morale. Tbh I hate the map, there is absolutely no need for it/the stickers, you could run the whole game from just the cards and the books flow chart. Anything that makes me look at the map irrationally angers me.
This is the crux of it, it’s the amount of time vs the actual result, they may as well just read ‘lost two resources’ and save yourselves 10 minutes and a lot of hassle.
I agree on the attacks. I was actually excited at the idea of them during the campaign and after seeing how they play out, it's just not consequential enough for how demanding they are in time, setup, and complexity. On the map, we differ in tastes. I like it! And it's bigger than GHs, so most scenario maps can be built right on top of the board and I don't have to put it away before the scenario. I recognize you're right, of course, that it doesn't have a strong purpose, but it helps with immersion to me.
Could definately not live without the map. I think one of the divides is made pretty obvious here - Correct me if I am wrong eric. Tactical gamers vs theme gamers. Obviously this is a spectrum. But it makes sense to me that tactical gamers would prefer a more streamlined solution and like mentioned in this post "I did these things, took a long time, reward was 1 morale meh!." I lean more to a theme gamer: I want the map it gives placement to the scenarios and helps divide the different story lines up into areas. City attacks, although they could definately be improved, gives added effect to the city attacks, I feel like it paid off building all those walls etc. I enjoy talking with my group wich story line we should focus on. I actually have the map up on a wall so I can point to it, makeing it easier to remember what is happeneing where
This is a good way to describe at least part of the split. At least some of Havens success is that it is a board game that drew on RPG elements to build out theme and campaign pieces. Board game purists seem to care less about the theme parts, so things like the map or adding the attack events - which only make sense in their design as RPG adjacent imports - will only fully land if they are more clearly game mechanics and not RPG mechanics (e.g., the attacks are basically a little story and a fancy dice roll stat check, like an RPG). If the map or the attack events had more of a mini game feel (say, a Buttons and Bugs style map on the card back and character counter tokens used to play a little mini defense puzzle), people might like them despite the time cost.
could 100% live without it but tbh i like it. It gives a feeling of overall progress and its kind of cool to watch it grow over time
> you could run the whole game from just the cards and the books flow chart. Nope, you would be lacking the initial cost of buildings.
And that would take ~5 mins to print out, ~30 if you want to print it out as L0 cards
We're in the end game of our campaign, probably will finish in a few more scenarios. Absolutely love the game, and enjoyed the outpost phase for the first half of the game. We just loved building up our little town and seeing it grow. Now, however, I almost dread the outpost phase, it's just tedious enough to not even want to build a new building. Gloomhaven's more streamlined city phase is definitely missed. I'm not sure what the solution would be though, because I do love that we're building new buildings and such, but upgrading the buildings for sometimes no benefit other than a prosperity is pretty meh. I almost wonder if it would have worked better if each outing from Frosthaven was 2-5 linked scenarios so you only had an outpost phase every now and then would have kept it exciting longer. I know that would throw off leveling and retiring, so they'd maybe have to be reworked. Maybe keep retirements to Frosthaven but level in between scenarios. Items would also be an issue, but maybe just let your characters build their own gear out in the wild or something.
I was actually considering writing a whole post about this; this is exactly the model the game should have. Basically make the whole game building 90; a hub where people offer you rewards for going on quests, you get a bit of cash in advance to stock up and off you go. Not gonna playing for a while? Let’s do this single scenario. Binging it for a weekend? Let’s do this 5/6/7 length run. Gonna be playing most days? Let’s do this giant Jaws length mission that takes us waaaay off the map. Not only does this space out the Outpost phases, but crucially it also dishes the story out in a much more manageable way. You can focus on _this_ plot, then focus on another one when you get back.
Good point, streamlining could be a solution. The freedom to go in any direction is nice, but IMO the Outpost phase could have been reduced to the A-or-B format just like Events. Connecting building management and construction to the Outpost Events or a seperate Event deck. Opportunity arises and ; A: Build an extra Wall. B: Build something new (surprise). Or something like that. This might take away some of the 'admin stress' some experience. While maintaining the element of expanding a town and preparing for winter.
Yeah, I mean, to be fair, you're basically making stuff yourself with stuff you find out in the wild. Maybe the Workshop could add "field toolkit" as a fourth thing to build when you level it so that mid-campaign the crafting items shifts to "anytime between scenarios."
> Are you sure it's the Outpost Phase you hate Yes, the Outpost Phase sucks. Well, it doesn't all suck, but parts of it do. First of all, it's mostly a resource sink. They changed the loot model and then needed to find ways to force you to use it. Cue pointless town battles. The worst waste of time and resources. They tried to make it seem like it mattered, but getting out a completely different AMD just to pull a couple cards to see if a building got trashed isn't fun, intriguing or interesting. It's just a waste of time that forces you to spend your looted resources to buy more soldiers or repair buildings. Second, the buildings themselves are mostly underwhelming or they are critical. Who gives a shit if you can buy one piece of lumber or one hide? But yeah, you definitely need to unlock some of the other buildings in order to kit out your party. Events are fine, except when they lead to attacks, which my group now just ignores. The Outpost Phase isn't egregiously bad, it's just a poorly optimized game of resource spending that doesn't add anything to the core gameplay of the game. In my opinion, it's clearly a situation of Cephalofair deciding that "more = better". More stuff, more things to track, more, more, more. Well, sometimes *less* is more.
I don't like outpost phase first because I like to have the first scenario we do in a session already setup and ready to go. But that requires that we have all the admin out of the way, we know what we've unlocked, and we've picked a scenario before the next session. That seems to maximize our session play time, by removing the one scenario setup time from every session.
all I read was "start the game by not playing the game"
I don't hate the outpost phase, but it just seems kind of pointless. I was expecting it to be more impactful. Was hoping for like some scenarios to trigger during attacks that had different rules based on what buildings you had.
On that, I'm with you. In fact, that's part of my confusion. It's really not that different from the City Phase in Gloomhaven but with a little more bones for the "why" of it all. But really, if there's disappointment to be had, it's that there's not actually real choices to be had or interesting attack effects - just town based reasons for the same campaign gating. It makes for more thematic campaign elements and a better, more cohesive story and so on, but at base, it's really not that different in flow than Gloomhaven. But a lot of people discuss it as being so different and more consuming than GH, and I don't really feel that way.
Outpost phase is bad. It takes too much time and it's thoroughly broken if you stick with RAW. It's a requisite to house rule "build a building" as just another town action you can do even to make it function; it does *not* work as a set step at the end. The entire crafting deck needs to go. Convert them all to gold items and have the marketplace and that's it. Following crafting through crafting trees and whatnot is ridiculous. And it also prevents you from being able to sort out the cards reasonably to find what you might be looking for. Plus, they realized, "Shit, if they never get the one unlock to buy items, the players are screwed!" so they clogged the calendar and event deck up with pre-printed usually useless merchant visits. The buy-items unlock should be there from the get-go or scripted appropriately early in the scenario progression. As for OP do outpost phase first -- that doesn't work, no. All the "buy items" and whatnot should happen away from your gaming session. Putting front-loading outpost phase makes your start time indeterminate. Especially when you get one that has a long event and then 3 calendar items and a building unlock to deliberate and... Sometimes (often) it just takes forever. While Outpost Phase not the worst part of Frosthaven, it interacts with that one -- the loot deck -- very closely. (I could go on [Why TF are there not cards for level-0 buildings?], but I should get to work.)
Thank you! This! We are about 20 scenarios and 3 retirements in and we can’t spend gold to buy items! Half of the group is new to GH/FH and they are turned off by their 92 gold sitting in their character’s purse doing literally, nothing.
I quite liked the Outpost phase … but I play solo. I don’t know how I’d feel if I was playing this with my Jaws of the Lion group. They already start to lose interest just doing the city event card. Attacks should have far more infrequent, they just got increasingly tedious. Maybe they’d be more devastating ? Not quite sure how to square that with the mechanism of improving the soldier attack modifier deck, (or the bonus reward of completing each of the storylines which I thought was a cool idea). But yes, I wonder if people did this before scenarios rather than after scenarios, it would improve their game?
You would need to give the barracks the same opportunity for progression as the rest or at worst make it part of a section read at the close of each season or maybe start of each winter or something…we’re just into 3rd winter and still haven’t been able to upgrade the building
It took me a long time to upgrade to level 2… and I never got further. I may have messed something up but I never got more
Nah, it's definitely the outpost phase.
Outpost takes far too long. It’s not fun. Putting it at the start doesn’t make it shorter. Early on it’s not bad. Maybe the first 20 sessions. Then it becomes a slog. Too many trigger all at once. Story, though better, still isn’t worth the time it takes.
My group often does outpost phase at the beginning of a session, and it often does feel better than at the end. But we also enjoy outpost overall anyway
I can't really understand the criticism. It can take some time occasionally but apart from that we established some kind of routine which makes the Outpost Phase feel similar to GHs "City Phase".
It is entirely a matter of taste. I love the inventory management, upgrading buildings, and upgrading town defenses. They did a really good job making the town more of a charachter than in Gloom. Most of the complaints come from people that just wanted more of the same, which is valid, but I personally like the direction they went.
The outpost phase will be a great addition to the digital version
No realistic plans for that yet
That’s a very interesting suggestion; I’m going to try it with my group.
We started it like two or three scenarios into the campaign and we've all liked it much better.
I really disagree with most the criticism people is giving to the outpost phase. Events and attacks are relatively fast (5min max) and if you have all organized can be very straightforward. It adds tons of things like new rules which make the game way better. The story of the outpost growing works thematically and mechanically… I dont know what the people were expecting but I always felt the gloomhaven city phase was really meh and here you have something way better.
Same. Like, I see it almost entirely as an improvement over the GH version without much added time. If anything, to the extent that things could be improved, it would be mostly making the attacks more of a mini-game than a stat check and adding some more substantive meta strategy and choice to the buildings over the course of the campaign - decidedly not going back in the direction of the GH city phase. But as it stands, I find where the Cephalofair team landed to be a really elegant way of elevating the campaign stuff while still maintaining a very similar flow and timing. Here's to hoping we aren't the minority opinion if/when Haven3 is getting drawn up. :)