Frostgrave Second Edition: The Frozen City Welcomes Us Back

Frostgrave was an unlikely cult hit in the tabletop wargaming scene - an open-ended and refreshing alternative to the endless meta money train of major high profile properties. Does the new edition manage to improve upon the original while retaining the frozen heart and soul of the game?

Note that the first half of this review discusses some background and the original edition of the game. Skip ahead if you just want to read about the 2nd Edition.

A few years ago while researching miniatures systems, I heard about a widely praised fantasy Wizard skirmish game called Frostgrave. At the time I really didn’t give it much thought. Frostgrave’s claim to fame, it seemed, was the fact that it was a miniatures-agnostic game in a loosely sketched fantasy world that made it sort of a blank slate both narratively and mechanically. You were encouraged to bring in whatever minis you already had in your collection (the preferred scale being the 28mm miniatures people tend to use for games like Dungeons & Dragons) and sort-of create your own missions and story as you fought a pitched series of duels, strung together in a campaign of indeterminate length, against enemy Wizards and their warbands. It had the freedom reserved normally for a role-playing game, but with neither the guiding hand of a DM, nor the inherent narrative hook of a setting like Forgotten Realms or Pathfinder, it seemed less like a game and more like a toolkit with which to create your own.

No doubt some would jump at this idea, and marvel at the ability to let their imagination run wild, create whatever enemies and locations they wanted, and curate some sort of campaign through shared improvisation with their playing partner. To me, though, it felt like a lot of creative energy to expend when I figured the game should be doing the heavy lifting in that department. Don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly not devoid of creativity… but my profession in the film industry is intensely creative and saps a lot of energy that would otherwise find other outlets. At the end of the day, I only have so much strength left for building and painting minis and such. So, by the time I’m actually PLAYING a game, I want it to be as close as possible to a turnkey experience. I don’t want to have to houserule things or tweak the balance, and I don't want it to be Work to put together a campaign. Frostgrave seemed suspiciously enthusiastic about letting players do their own thing, and I read this as a lack of confidence by the author in the game's ability to 'carry' the experience with the rules as-written.

I also wasn’t too keen on the idea of just mashing various miniatures together and hoping for the best when games like Warhammer had clearly themed armies of consistent, beautiful figures. I’m a bit of an aesthetics snob, and just looking at the handful of various makes and lines of figures I already had from various games, with various inconsistent scales and proportions, I shuddered at the idea of how they’d look TOGETHER on the table. A miniatures-based game is already an extensive time commitment for something that usually looks much better than it plays (if I want tight and balanced gameplay over aesthetics, I can go to any boardgame in my collection instead), and the last thing I wanted was for the visual experience of playing to be fugly.

So, with the many games out there with beautiful (and expensive) product lines and narratives and tournament play, Frostgrave didn’t seem to offer what I was looking for in a miniatures game. It had a low barrier to entry, sure, but it seemed too high a bar to actual enjoyment. I banished it from my thoughts for a couple of years and pursued other more structured gaming experiences, but then… something changed.

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MAZES & MONSTERS

My wife loves board games. I introduced her to hobby games early in our relationship, and she went so game-crazy that she’s now a known figure in the board game sphere, does board game sketches and podcasts, and gets recognized at conventions while I skulk around in the corners. But she didn’t grow up a Nerd like I did… or at least she wasn’t the same kind of nerd. She was a theater and band nerd, and I was more of a chess club and DnD nerd. So one day, she discovered Dungeons & Dragons, as many people have in recent years, through “Critical Role” - a show that is literally theater nerds (well-known voice-actors, but I’m assuming they were all theater kids) playing DnD sessions and lending their acting talents to create a very entertaining and Role-Play heavy game.

“Why didn’t I know about DnD when I was in High School?” my wife said. “I would have loved it.”

“Because DnD was NOT like this in High School” I balked. We didn’t have engaging stories and characters. We had min-maxing power gamers and asshole dungeon masters who thought the goal was to kill all the players. DnD was a shitshow.”

Lo and Behold, I happened to have a copy of the 5th Edition Starter box for Dungeons & Dragons sitting around… bought the previous year on a whim but not opened - I had thought it would be hard sell to convince her to give it a try, remembering only a time when DnD was enjoyed by pedantic jerks like myself. But NOW that DnD was cool, no cajoling was necessary. We had done a one-on-one session of Mouseguard once, but otherwise she had never experienced a role-playing game with a group of people before. So we got some friends together and played a session, which I DMed using the included module. It was rough technically, but 5th edition was much easier to pick up than the 3rd edition game I’d played in High School, and of course the actual ROLE playing was on point, as my wife had learned from the best and brought some of her actor friends to play with us.

She was, of course, immediately hooked, and we planned follow-up sessions. I had the thought to 3D print for her a miniature of her character as a Christmas gift, and I ended up making two copies… painting one for her and priming the other so she could paint it herself. Up until this point she had not shared in my miniature painting hobby, but I thought maybe DnD might push her over the edge.

The good news is, my hint worked, and she did dip her toe into painting and found it was something she could enjoy in small doses. The bad news, however, is that our Dungeons & Dragons group was undone by the bane of every Role-Playing group since time immemorial… a foe greater than any Beholder, Mind Flayer, or Elder Red Dragon. It was the dreaded Scheduling Conflict. We ended up playing some sessions as just the two of us, subbed in some friends from work, and tried to carry on a campaign with a rolling series of special guests, but it was hard work keeping things going. No matter what we did, it was impossible to get any sort of consistency except for the two of us.

Painting practice in various stages of progress, including our Dungeons & Dragons characters

One day, while puzzling about what to do, I looked up at the handful of DnD miniatures that now lined our shelf… most of them painting practice that my wife and I had done together with cheap WizKids and Reaper miniatures, and I suddenly remembered Frostgrave, and all the things I’d considered about it before as weaknesses rearranged themselves in my mind as potential strengths. This was a game that might be able to function, not so much as a miniatures game for me to scratch my itch for expensive finely painted figures and obtuse tactical combat, but rather as a two-player RPG substitute that my wife and I could enjoy together. The game’s generic fantasy feel could be molded into whatever we wanted it to be. The Wizards in the game, leaders of the warbands of otherwise-expendable soldiers, functioned similarly to the players’ avatars in a role-playing game. It would require some effort to put together a narrative sweep for a campaign of otherwise un-related skirmishes (she's a sucker for a good story, after all), but this was certainly much less taxing than DM-ing a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. And the miniature painting would be a low-pressure affair which would allow my wife to paint whatever she wanted and not worry about ‘ruining’ high cost figures while continuing to learn this aspect of the hobby. With rules that were easy and cheap to buy in digital form, and nothing else required to get started, what did we have to lose in trying it out?

I pitched the idea to her to get her buy-in. This was, after all, a game for us to enjoy together. She had considered a few miniature games in the past but always came away frustrated by the general lack of female figures, and the pinup-y overly sexy nature of the few women characters who usually did exist in a game. It made her feel not just like minis games were not FOR her, but that they actively didn't want her in their space. There's no way I can truly understand the sense of alienation that she feels in this hobby as a woman, since the large amount of options we men have, both inside and outside of miniatures games, satiates us in a way that makes it hard to even conceptualize another's hunger for choice, but I empathized with her desire to fully enjoy the hobby the way that I could. I seized upon the fact that the open nature of Frostgrave meant she could try to find whatever minis she wanted to play it with, and she agreed that the women in the artwork and gameplay images in the rulebook, at least, were refreshingly sensible. It didn't hurt that the game takes place in a cold climate where skimpy clothing would be quite absurd. But of course, there was also the matter of the game itself - could we both find enjoyment in it even though it was a compromise in our tastes - mine for fancy paint-jobs and crunchy rules, and hers for a narrative experience?

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TRYING OUT THE (FIRST EDITION OF THE) GAME

The basic soldiers that comprise your warband come with pre-defined weapons and equipment, so you won't need to worry about individually equipping them while list-building.

The Frostgrave rulebook is trivially easy to get through for a miniatures game. The system for movement and combat is as simple and straightforward as can be, with the single D20 rolled for combats and spells, reinforcing the RPG feel of the game. The basic soldiers that form the majority of your warband don’t have different weapon or armor choices, but rather, their roles and stats are defined by what they are equipped with by default. A figure with a bow is simply an Archer, and a figure with a dagger is a Thief, and so on. This makes it easy to put together a reasonably balanced group instinctively, or based on personal taste, without needing to understand the ins and outs of list building or any sort of 'meta' for how the game is supposed to be played, and it makes jumping into the action fairly quick.

The utilitarian nature of the cannon fodder figures is offset by a sort of RPG-lite character creation for the player’s Hero character, the Wizard. At its heart, the narrative of Frostgrave is about rival Wizards going on expeditions into the frozen city of Felstad to uncover artifacts and treasure. An advanced magical civilization, buried under ice for many years, is beginning to thaw out, and the only people crazy enough to brave the dangers of the environment (and the rival expeditions) are Wizards, who hope to find not just wealth, but powerful lost magics as well. Of course, these Wizards aren’t SO crazy as to venture into an environment filled with danger alone. So they’ve brought with them a group of hired mercenaries and (usually) an Apprentice to assist in their journey.

When creating a Wizard, the player chooses a primary ‘school’ of magic from an interrelated array of 9 disciplines, which determines the main flavor of spells the Wizard has access to. Each school also grants lesser access to magic from related schools, along with minimal access to spells from ‘tertiary’ schools. Only one school, the opposing school of magic from the primary choice, is completely off-limits when creating the character (though you can learn spells from this school later at a massive penalty). In addition to the array of spells, Wizards, unlike their soldiers, also can change up their equipment and level up their stats over the course of multiple battles. Although it is not mandatory, most players will also bring an Apprentice for their Wizard. The Apprentice, as one might assume, is essentially an exact copy of the Wizard’s abilities (having trained under their master) except that they cast all their spells at a lower level of effectiveness. This essentially means that, although a player’s warband consists of 10 figures, each player only really needs to keep track of spells, upgrades, and experience for one and a half characters, with the rest of the team being essentially a revolving door of expendable mooks.

This crazy old Wizard looks like he might be in trouble, but don't worry about him. He's got the high ground.

Be wary of developing any attachment to your squad, because they will (frequently) get wrecked in any number of gruesome ways: smashed by a Wizard’s Spiritual Weapon, headshot from across the map by a wily archer, or tag-teamed by enemy footsoldiers, or (worse) wandering monsters. Of course, most miniatures games have fairly vulnerable rank and file units, but Frostgrave is somewhat unique in the way that even high end units can take absolutely crushing blows from much lower-tier opponents. The game simplifies all combat rolls into just one opposed D20 roll to determine both hit AND damage. Bonuses and penalties are assessed on each player’s roll, based on a variety of factors, but the results are heavily skewed by the natural dice-roll results because of how low many of these modifiers are. The highest end soldiers in the game, for example, are only superior to low end soldiers by +3 or +4, which is essentially the same as just a +1 roll bonus on a D6. Roll results can also be shockingly disparate due to the flat probability curve that comes from rolling a single die. Unlike, say, a multiple D6 system, where results are clustered around an average and outliers come up only rarely, every roll of the D20 presents an exactly equal probability of any result. So while you may be able to average the outcome of many rolls over an entire game, each individual roll presents a significantly random outcome that can skew incredibly high or low. Because damage is also calculated based on how high the successful roll was above the opponent’s armor value, a very lucky hit roll becomes a very lucky damage roll automatically as well.

It’s an issue that cuts both ways (pun intended). On the one hand, you can have a vastly superior figure in a favorable match-up with an enemy only to get one-shotted by them due to the roll not going your way. Likewise, your weakest guy might heroically fend off a mob of the opponent’s best troops. It can feel PARTICULARLY punishing, though, especially if you play with Critical Hits and the Injury state (which double damage on a 20 for a guaranteed one-shot kill and essentially cripple units at below 4 HP, respectively), which is why I elected to not play with these optional rules after trying them out just once. Your Apprentice and Wizard are not immune from these results either, since they are really not much more hardy than your regular troops in terms of armor rating and hit points. In fact, these hero characters can fall prey to additional forms of damage even when they are not in a position to be attacked. When casting spells, bad rolls can cause things to literally blow up in your face, since failing a casting roll by a high enough value does self-damage, even for non-attack spells, due to the volatile nature of magic. This means that a Wizard can hilariously nuke themselves to death when casting a spell, especially one that is not part of their primary school of magic. Its a small amount of damage so it doesn’t usually result in a surprise death, but casting failed spell after failed spell is quite common, even with the ability to buff spells by spending your precious hit points. And until your Wizards level up significantly, you may feel lucky if your Apprentice casts more than one successful spell in a game. The results of any action are sometimes funny, sometimes frustrating, but nearly always unpredictable.This comedy of errors led my wife and I to coin a subtitle for Frostgrave: The Game of Inept Wizards.

Even when overwhelmingly surrounded by enemies, sometimes a lone figure can hold their own if you manage a series of lucky rolls.

So, is this good game design? It certainly can feel shitty when you’re losing horribly due to a streak of bad luck, but the flip-side is that, because there’s not much you can do to mitigate the dice rolls, a more experienced player will not be at a significant advantage over someone of lesser experience or who just doesn’t want to get really tactically in-depth with every choice they make in the game. Incidentally, this makes Frostgrave a good game for new players, as well as people who want to have a casual play-experience. It also tends to create wacky and memorable scenarios where the tables turn over and over again in a single game. I recall a particularly notable experience where a Wizard managed to cast Crumble on a bridge, opening up a hole beneath a treasure that had been dropped on it and plunging it into the river below. One figure dove through the hole to chase after it, while others piled into the water from both sides and archers rained arrows down on the scrum from afar. It was an absolute mess, but for those involved in the game, it's something they still talk about fondly every time Frostgrave comes up. In another game, a solitary wandering Rat hit some amazingly high rolls and managed to viciously kill figures from both players' warbands a la the rabbit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, leading the opponents to put aside their differences temporarily to slay the beast. It's these types of wild moments that might be lost if the game was more tightly balanced and tuned.

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A GAME OF INEPT WIZARDS

A reminder that here I'm still talking about the first edition of the game. See below for the improvements in the 2nd Edition

Whether or not you consider the inherent randomness a plus or a minus, the first edition of Frostgrave was not without its faults. One of the things that the rulebook is very specific about is the necessity of having a lot of line-of-sight blocking terrain. This means that, while the game system may be simple and the models' overhead low, it is still necessary to invest in a significant amount of terrain pieces and also to set them out in a specific way to ensure a balanced experience. That’s because ranged attacks are fairly overpowered. The 24” reach of most ranged units on the 36" square playing area (and the infinite line of sight range of many spells) means that most ranged characters will be able to take deadly shots from round one if they have a clear line of sight, and there is essentially no distance penalty even when shooting at max range - furthermore, unlike melee attacks, which have a chance of the attacker getting damaged instead if the defender rolls higher, a failed ranged attack does not result in any injury to the shooter. The rulebook specifically states that it should not be possible to draw a clear line of sight with proper terrain placement, but in spite of the large number of hills, trees, and ruins in my collection, I’ve found them to be inadequate, as what the game really demands is large flat walls, buildings, and other broad surfaces to hide completely behind (of course, paradoxically, this means better perches from Archers to snipe down from as well). Otherwise it’s just too easy for ranged units to sneak in a shot even on figures you thought were protected. And ranged units are rarely at a disadvantage in melee either, so even if you manage to get the jump on them, they fight as well as most other figures in the game. I’d hazard to guess that a completely degenerate, if effective, strategy, would be to just load your warband full of all ranged attackers and go to town, even though this would be completely at odds with the spirit of the game.

Archers may have an easy time picking people off if there aren't enough walls to block all the sight lines, even when there's this much terrain on the table. Also where's all the snow? Global Warming is really taking a toll on Felstad.

This brings up another issue in the form of overpowered spells that can skew the game in a player’s favor and lead to degenerate lines of play. Though there are a large number of spells to choose from, it’s fairly obvious which ones are good and which ones are not based on the stated objective of the game. The Wizards are after treasure, and each player has a chance at the beginning of the game to seed the map with treasure tokens that their figures will try to secure and carry off the board. Whichever player gathers the most treasure is usually the winner, and said treasure also becomes the currency for hiring new minions as they die and buying equipment for your Wizard over the course of the campaign. That means that spells like Leap, which can pick up a treasure carrier and deposit them safely 10 inches away, are ideal to have. Even better than Leap, though, is Telekinesis, which allows the treasure itself to be levitated and moved to a different position without needing to even put a figure in harm’s way to pick it up. The original game rules specified that each player place 3 treasure tokens at their discretion, meaning that there was a high probability of the game being a draw on treasure, but a player with Telekinesis could usually run their Wizard to a good lookout position, with line of sight being the only requirement, and start ‘stealing’ the other player’s treasure over to their side of the board. A later update in the Malcor expansion changed the treasure rules so that each player put down only two treasure tokens (4 total), with the fifth one going in a central position on the board, but if anything the change to a single contested treasure just reinforced the value of surgically extracting it with Telekinesis, before a mob of figures from both sides descended on it, and picking it up later from safety. Although many of the attack spells in the game are also considered overpowered relative to some of their more mundane counterparts, I’d argue that the ability to re-position treasure has the most game-altering effects

In spite of these issues, my wife and I enjoyed our time with Frostgrave a good deal, and we turned some friends onto it as well. It’s an easy game to have fun with as long as you don’t take it too seriously, and it was also a low pressure way for me to get more into terrain building and for her to get more into painting miniatures. It's worth noting, actually, that even though the game IS miniatures agnostic, there is a line of miniatures released by North Star Figures that are designed and themed for Frostgrave, and we actually found these to be a very good choice of figures for the game for multiple reasons. First of all, although the minis don’t have dynamic poses, the design of each sprue, which breaks the figures up into separate arms, legs, torsos, and heads, and includes all the weapons found in the game rules, allows every single miniature in their line to be more-or-less mixed and matched with anything from the other sets. This gives a lot of options to personalize the figures beyond what comes in the individual boxes. You can use Barbarian heads with Pirate bodies and vice versa. And even though the Wizards sprues unfortunately didn't come in female versions at the time (they do now), it was possible for my wife and I to Kitbash some female Wizards and Apprentices. And, as is consistent with the illustrations and setting of the game, the women minis don't feel at all exploitative or gross. North Star and Osprey should be happy to know that their choice to create reasonable female figures is giving more people a chance to belong in the hobby and has turned my wife into both a painter and miniature gamer.

With a few warbands painted up, some treasure chests, and extra miniatures on hand to represent wandering monsters, there’s a lot of fun to be had throwing together skirmishes, either as a one-off, or as part of a larger campaign. There are multiple rulebook supplements for everything from various new magical abilities to dungeons, new types of mercenaries for your warband, and co-op and solo scenarios, and you can even bring in additional players for team games or a free-for-all. It’s almost a moot point that the game is a bit random and swing-y, because it means there’s no meta to keep up with and no issue with house-ruling your own stuff to tune the gameplay to your liking. There are no finely tuned balance of power you'll mess up if you want to create your own types of enemies or characters, nor a perfect scenario progression that you throw off by crafting your own missions. It doesn’t lend itself to rules lawyer-ing or super serious competitive play. Its just a lightweight and open-ended tabletop adventure to play casually with your friends and watch absurd stories unfold.

You're definitely going to get killed by a giant Ice Toad at some point. I had a lot of fun scratch building terrain and experimenting with snow-bases.

So, when it was announced that a Second Edition of the game would be coming out this year, I was intrigued by what direction designer Joseph A. McCullough would take it in. Would it just be a revised edition that incorporated material from the various supplemental rules sources? Would the core of the game stay the same, or would it shift to try and remove some of the randomness and perhaps create something more competition-oriented? Would it expand on the campaign system and add more ‘stuff’ to the game overall? Any of these options was potentially valid.

In his blog, McCullough mentioned that a major factor in the creation of the second edition was a re-assessment of the many spells in the game, trying to make it so that the strong ones were less overpowered, and so that every spell actually felt useful. This alone would be a major improvement, so I kept an eye on the development process and vowed to buy a real hard copy of the rulebook as soon as it came out.

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IS THE SECOND TIME THE CHARM?

The new edition of the rulebook looks amazing.

So here it is… the new edition. First of all I gotta say the book is beautiful. I never laid my hands on a hard copy of the original edition (mine is a kindle digital copy) so I can’t make a direct comparison, and I rarely gush over printed material, but everything from the binding to the artwork to the actual physical size of the book is great. It’s also laid out nicely and is easy to find all the charts and references. Normally I don’t love when these things are duplicated in various sections of a rulebook, but here the way that charts are placed in-line and spells in alphabetical order in the relevant sections, and then everything is repeated, along with page number reference and spells ordered by school in the very back of the book, is a boon. Nothing felt like it was in the wrong section, and I found that both reading the book in order and referencing it for discrete information later were equally easy to do. Also, it may just be my imagination since I’m looking at a physical copy now that I didn’t have before, or the fact that this book seems to have more illustrations and photos than the original, but I feel like the theme of an ice-covered city feels more distinct and aesthetically unique in this edition, whereas it just came across as ‘generic’ before, despite the fact that the actual written lore and flavor text is still minimal. One more thing to note, on a technical level, is that the pronouns in the game have been converted to they/them. This should be a no-brainer, particularly because, even in the first edition, the Wizards and warbands in the game were not depicted as only men. It is nonetheless noticed and appreciated.

The book lays out its intentions early with a reiteration of McCullough’s blog post, in which he numbers three principal goals for the second edition of the game: 1) Make the game more fun (with a specific focus on improving the way spells work) 2) make the rules more balanced, and 3) keep the 1st edition supplements relevant. Indeed, reading through the rules and comparing them to the original edition, I definitely got a sense that the game had been tuned and tweaked, and I was pleased to see that nearly all of my niggles from the first edition had been addressed in one way or another.

That treasure certainly LOOKS un-guarded and ripe for the picking. Likely nothing to fear here... but that's what I'm afraid of.

On the most basic level, Frostgrave’s second edition cleans up a number of the original rules and re-phrases or refines them to have fewer gray areas or potentially counter-intuitive results. Improvements like the adjustment to Will Saves against spells, which now require a minimum of a 14 to succeed if the Wizard rolled lower while casting, prevent high level Wizards from succeeding on spells with a low difficulty number due to their training, only to be penalized by having that spell be easily shrugged off by a conversely trivial saving roll. Figures can now always move a minimum of 3 inches as well, which means that slow characters carrying treasure across rough terrain while potentially suffering from negative status effects will no longer find themselves with essentially no movement. The Fight penalty due to encumbrance from treasure is now limited to units who already have both hands full (with two handed weapons or otherwise), and various other small tweaks to everything from monster activation to the addition of rules for moving in deep water round the game out and give the players more options and more agency.

Warbands have been re-imagined to now consist of both Standard (Thug, Thief, War Hound, Infantryman, Man-at-Arms, and Apothecary) and Specialist Troops (basically everyone else), with a limit of only 4 Specialist Troops at a time. In addition, the costs of various troops have been tweaked significantly, with Thugs and Thieves now being absolutely free to hire, while many specialists have had their cost increased by as much as 50%, and some of the better units have had their abilities reduced slightly. This both firmly closes the door on degenerate lists like the hypothetical all-archers warband I mentioned earlier and also prevents a player who earns more loot in the campaign from steamrolling their opponent by building up an unstoppable list of elites. Along with the cheaper costed Apprentice (only 100GC now rather than 200, although the Wizard’s starting money is reduced to 400GC) with slightly improved stats over the first edition, this promises to level the playing field between warbands and make the game a more balanced affair overall.

Ho, good traveler. May I interest you in my assortment of totally legitimate magical items that are definitely not haunted or cursed in any way?

Some of the best rules from Frostgrave’s many supplements have been folded into the game as well. The improved potion list from The Frostgrave Folio finds its way into the core treasure tables now, and the change in treasure allocation (from 6 treasures to 5, with a central contested treasure) and modified experience point calculations for Wizards (which focus more on spell casting and less on killing) carries over from The Maze of Malcor. In fact, it seems that the core objective and gameplay loop of treasure gathering from the original has undergone the most wholistic improvement, with changes reflected in all aspects of the new ruleset. Aside from the aforementioned minimum movement distance and lack of inherent fight penalty for carrying treasure, tabling your opponent no longer guarantees that you’ll make off with all the remaining treasure on the board automatically if your figures aren’t already carrying it, with only a 25% chance per treasure of recovering it after your opponent has left the battlefield. This will certainly prevent warband power creep, since making off with all the treasure after killing off an opponent’s entire warband in 1st edition guaranteed that the rich would get richer, as the victor could plow the profits into gearing up their figures while the loser would likely not be able to afford to replace their slain team members.

As I mentioned earlier, spells that allowed the manipulation of treasure were significantly overpowered in the first edition, and the two greatest offenders, Leap and Telekinesis, have been de-buffed significantly. The fact that Telekinesis can no longer be used specifically on the middle treasure until it’s been picked up at least once, seems kind-of forced and clunky, but it is appreciated nonetheless, as it necessitates more direct player interaction. Fool’s Gold, likewise, has been completely changed from something that plants a fake treasure out of game to an ability that strips the treasure from a figure that is carrying it and moves it several inches away at the Wizard’s discretion. This actually seems arguably better than the original usage of the spell, but I will wait to cast (more puns) judgment until I’ve played a few more times. The spells do seem to have gotten a decent amount of attention overall, with various re-wordings, adjustments, and consolidation. Most spells also have explicit maximum ranges now, rather than just being infinite within line of sight, meaning its harder to do things like zing someone with a Bone Dart from across the map or place a Wizard Eye on the side of a tower and cast spells into the opponent's back. A few spells have been removed, but more have been added, and the difficulty ratings of various spells have been adjusted, mostly down, it seems, meaning (hopefully) fewer Inept Wizards.

This Apprentice is 0 for 4 on successful spells this game, so he'd better get his act together if he doesn't want to get punched in the face by a zombie.

With all these improvements, I have almost no complaints, though there are a few things I could nitpick. I do feel like the general level of randomness from the original game is still present, and there are times that I would have liked the dice roll modifiers to be larger in general so that they made a bigger impact on the game vs the swing of fate caused by the dice. I also became keenly aware, during my latest match, of how unclear the rules for cover from ranged attacks are. The exact mechanics of how cover works are written a bit casually, presumably so you won't make too big a deal of it, but ironically a more strict system would likely have involved much less measuring and fiddling. I seriously used my phone and laser line to check line of sight and obscurement way more than with most other games, and I'm not quite sure I'm clear on what constitutes 'Intervening Terrain' anymore. The rulebook says that each piece of intervening terrain is cumulative... but if two pieces of terrain in-line with one another obscure the same part of the miniature (or the first piece of terrain is even slightly larger than the second, does the second piece of terrain count? And does it matter where you draw line of sight from to determine whether a figure is, say, in Heavy Cover or not? Most games get very granular with their line of sight measurements and I get what Frostgrave is going for here by making it vague, but it's the one major area where the game bogs down, and because of the ambiguity, it's the closest my wife and I came to arguing over the rules while we were playing.

Also, among all the solid iteration in the new edition, I had secretly hoped for some big rules addition that would shake up the game and turn it into something new and exciting. The general consensus on the magic seems to have been to de-buff the overpowered spells, rather than raising the effectiveness of the weaker spells. Sure it’s more balanced, but it comes at the cost of the Wizards feeling that much more mundane. As in the first edition, the magic ‘schools’ nominally have unique spells, but all Wizards still dip into a variety of disciplines by default, and the spells themselves, while powerful, still don’t weigh heavily enough on the outcome of the battle for the Wizards to require distinct play styles based on their specialties. Every Wizard plays more-or-less the same, which is a shame, because any number of other Wizard-duel-based games, including the granddaddy of them all, Magic: The Gathering, have managed to create very distinct but balanced strategies among the different flavors of magic, such that two different players could have drastically different approaches. Frostgrave sometimes feels too safe in its quest for parity, and ironically more-so now that it has sanded down some of the few rough edges on the existing rules without introducing new rules that would have added true nuance to the strategy of the game. I can’t help but wonder if one or two simple additions or new rules, for either spell casting or combat, would have created a whole new aspect of player agency and elevated the current system to the level of the sublime. Perhaps we'll have to wait for a third edition to find out... or, of course, in the spirit of the game, there is always house-ruling.

I’ll admit that it is a fine line to walk, between approachability and complexity, competition and fun, strategy and storytelling. Frostgrave is by no means a perfect game, but it does walk this line better than most miniatures games out there. I’d recommend it almost without exception to any fan of RPGs or boardgames (or even someone with little gaming experience at all) who is interested in getting into miniatures for the first time. And I think it’s equally appealing to those who do have experience in the hobby but are tired of chasing the latest products and trends, who want something evergreen that they can kick back with and enjoy with their friends without worrying if their list is ‘on meta’ or not. There's no wrong way to play, and really no wrong person to play the game with. And with the second edition improving on the first printing in almost every way, there's no better time to check it out than now.