Every week Chaos and Confetti will alternate between clashing for board game dominance and coming together in table top harmony. This week it’s time for another round of…
CHAOS AND CONFETTI’S COOPERATIVE CHALLENGES!!!
The Premise:
Every other week, we will choose a cooperative board game to play. Then, we will craft a challenge around that board game and give ourselves one shot at overcoming it. No restarts, redos, or retries. We either rise as conquerors or leave as chumps.
While some of our challenges may be a bit more straightforward, others will come with twists or hints of inspiration. This is a test of teamwork.
The Game: Frosthaven
Frosthaven is a campaign game that incorporates dungeon-crawling, decision making, role playing, town building, puzzle solving, and more. It’s the larger, epic follow up to Gloomhaven.
It’s a massive game with over 130 scenarios and a lot of other material for players to interact with and explore.
Much of the game’s meat comes through the form of scenarios that will have players controlling characters as they fight monsters and work to achieve a goal. Each turn, players must carefully choose ability cards which will determine their initiative order and available actions.
Players must complete their goal before they run out of hit points or available cards to play.
*We would dig much deeper into gameplay, but there is a lot to the Frosthaven/Gloomhaven play system that can be better explained elsewhere, such as the action rulebooks you’d get if you purchased the games, which we totally recommend!
The Challenge: The Fight for Date Night
Chaos and Confetti has been really into Frosthaven during the last several months, logging over sixty plays. As a special Valentine’s Day treat, Chaos decided to create a scenario unique to their couple.
Frosthaven comes with many components that can be utilized in creating fan made scenarios. Of course, anything Chaos makes will not have the extreme level of balancing and playtesting that the official game has, but that just adds to the fun and unpredictability of this week’s challenge.
In this week’s challenge, Chaos and Confetti will take on the roles of themselves as they battle against life and its responsibilities. If they succeed that will accomplish their to do list and earn date night together. However, if their characters exhaust, it’s game over because they’ll be too tired to spend any intentional quality time together.
Chaos worked to capture several aspects of their lives in this scenario, but we’ll let you discover them during the actual game play section.
The Set-Up:
As part of the gift, Chaos created and formatted a scenario page that resembles what can be found in Frosthaven’s scenario book.
The goal: When all monsters are killed (responsibilities completed), at the end of that round, read Envelope A.
Introduction: Quick story setting of trying to get to date night
Starting special Rules: Both players will start on separate boards with their own unique monsters spawning each round. They must survive four rounds before being reunited.
Map Layout: The first rounds take place on two separate 7-tiles. After that, the players will be reunited on a board that is designed to look suspiciously like part of their real house. (Chaos will take care of all set-up for the group).
Monsters that can be encountered in the scenario:
– Electric Eels (emails)
– Vermling Scouts (grading)
– Algox Guard (Dinner time)
– Hounds (beagles)
– Ooze (dirty dishes and laundry)
– Earth Demon (daily stress)
– Night Demon (car repair)
– blade spinner (malfunctioning roomba)
Loot = pieces of candy
Level: 3
*Along with the initial setup there are several more special rules, section links, and treasure chest rewards that will be revealed during the game.
Gameplay:
Since this game took place outside of our normal Frosthaven campaign, we were allowed to build and use any character from across any Gloomhaven series game. While many were tempting, we decided to just use the characters we already had built for our current campaign. This would ease set up and let us get right into the action. Unfortunately, we can’t name those characters due to fear of spoilers, but we can say that Chaos played the prism and Confetti played the fist.
The scenario started with both players on separate boards. Confetti started at work, being attacked by constantly spawning emails (electric eels). Chaos had to deal with grading assignments (vermling scouts).
With all enemies at only four health, I (Chaos) hoped that the foes would be easy to deal with. For the most part they were. However, four rounds still ate a lot of cards and we still took quite a bit of damage. It was harder to avoid damage due to starting in more cramped spaces. Chaos getting poisoned definitely sucked.
At the end of the fourth round, we both moved our character pieces to the board that represented our house. Chaos entered through the front door and Confetti came in through the garage door. So, technically we were back together but due to the large board we were still pretty separated. Since Chaos failed to finish off one of his vermling scouts, he had to bring work home with him, so the scout also entered the house with him.
Our living room held more emails/electric eels. The dining room came with a malfunctioning Roomba/blade spinner. Dirty dishes sat in the kitchen and undone laundry flowed down the stairs, both being represented by oozes. Then, we also had to deal with the general sense of anxiety in the form of an earth demon.
Of course, it only felt right to include our son, Yeti, as well. Represented by a vermling mini, Yeti moved two space at the start of every round. We rolled a die. On even he would move towards the fridge and on odd we would move towards opening the backdoor. If he ended his turn adjacent to any figure, he would attack for one. Yeti had ten hit points and if he was ever exhausted, the scenario would be lost. So, we had to deal with chores/monsters and protect our child from possible harm.
We both quickly got to work, but already had to deal with some hardship as our characters used up quite a few moves at work and came home pretty beat. Confetti tackled the dishes, while Chaos tried finishing up his grading as he saw the need to deal with other chores quickly approaching.
Unfortunately, while Confetti was able to deal with the ooze dishes, Chaos’ neglect of the laundry ooze allowed it to spawn more laundry. Curses.
Scattered about the house were chests that could provide helpful items, but both players were much more focused on staying alive and dealing with enemies. With so many foes at once, it was all they could do to stay alive while trying to optimize their quickly dwindling card supplies.
Throughout all of this, Yeti mostly stayed a nonissue as he bounced around in the kitchen area. He did take one hit from the dishes early on, but thankfully, the damage was minimal.
After the fourth round, it became five and that meant dinner time. An algox guard spawned in the kitchen, representing hunger. We finally felt we were starting to get a bit of a handle on the situation and of course, life kept piling on.
Chaos, surprisingly was able to do enough damage to deal with the algo guard in one turn. Way to go Chaos; way to feed your family!
As the game progressed, foes began falling. Eventually, we were down to laundry (an elite ooze) and a general sense of anxiety (an earth golem). We also saw that we were moving towards our final turns, as our cards were nearly depleted. Out of all the possibly available items, only Chaos was able to pick one up. It was a mini coke can, which worked like a major stamina potion. Caffeine helped fight off exhaustion just a little longer.
On Confetti’s final turn and and Chaos’ second to last, they finally vanquished the last of the laundry. Victory!
But no…
Fake out!
Their kid still wasn’t in bed. Gaining a second win, both players got to recover four lost cards. They then had to move adjacent to and discard top cards to slowly move their son to the top of the stairs. Yeti kept trying to move to the fridge, but they wrangled him without too much trouble and then won the game for real. With all responsibilities handled, Chaos and Confetti could finally spend time together and enjoy one another’s company. Huzzah!
Final Results: Chaos and Confetti complete the scenario and proclaim victory!!!
Chaos’ Final Thoughts:
As we previously stated, there was no balancing or playtesting this scenario beforehand. The game ended up being pretty tough, but we won which was great. If I was ever going to play this scenario again, there are several aspects I would tweak. First, I would probably lower the work separation to two or three rounds because they definitely ate up a lot of turns which made the second section of the game a lot harder.
Also, while allowing the players to utilize the entire house, that meant we actually used very little of it. The large space might have been too big to reasonably cover and the monster fighting of course kept us in the areas that required combat. I would probably adjust this by closing doors. This would focus fighting a bit and also force players to explore the board a bit more.
I tried planting a few easter eggs, but many of them stayed unrevealed. Only one chest was opened, so the other thematically appropriate items remained sealed away. We also had the garage door and backdoor closed and never opened. The backdoor would have allowed our dogs (allies) to enter the scenario and the garage door would have let in car expenses/a night demon. Those situations never played out, but with the difficulty level ending up where it was, I guess an extra enemy wasn’t needed.
My final tweak would have been on Yeti. I debated whether I should give him two or three movement. I decided to keep it at two to try and contain him a bit, but then he ended up being a nonfactor since he mostly stayed in one space. I think three or four movement would be better to allow him to actually mix in with the rest of the scenario. I might also change his move-focuses from the fridge and back door to his two parents to again force him into the scenario a bit more.
Overall, I had fun though and I definitely gained a further appreciation for those who built much better balanced and operating scenarios for Gloomhaven and Frosthaven.
Confetti’s Final Thoughts:
I didn’t participate in the creation of the scenario, just the playing – but I super loved it. It was really creative, well themed, and made great use of the Frosthaven components. 10/10 would play again 🙂
Wrap Up:
And so, once again the day is saved by Chaos and Confetti. They may have not let the dogs in during this scenario, but next week promises to bring plenty of doggy-goodness as this team faces inner friction again, during a Dog Park clash.
Chaos & Confetti 