Who would've thought that saving an entire group of people would be hard!?

Where do I even start!!?? There is SO MUCH to tell and I am SO IMPRESSED with Frostpunk: The Board Game

I now have THREE playthroughs under my belt. ALL completely unsuccessful. ALL SO MUCH FUN!!!

Who would've thought saving people would be hard though, eh?

-Some are grumpy

-Some are completely against your choices

-Some are not

-Some are sick

-Some are dying

-Some are hungry, starving... or worse... "hangry"

-Most are cold...

Last night I enjoyed my third playthrough and easily the smoothest so far in terms of setup and rules. Minimal checking on rules, understanding each phase well.... And (I'm still shocked) my 15yr old daughter asked if she could play with me!!! 😮 *We've actually enjoyed three different games in the past week... Dad, may be cool again? 🤔 🤣

So how did my easily most complex and deep game, with a dark theme go with my 15yr old teenager you ask??

Well in terms of saving our people - horrendous. 🤣 We made it to round 5 when too many people died. Hunger was a big factor in this game, not to mention the storm him during our last round as well. Ugh. It was wild.

In terms of the gameplay - it was awesome! As solo gamers, here's what I love about Frostpunk despite it's depth, complexity and incredible variety: It's the same game whether you play solo or multiplayer. It's a cooperative effort to save your people and survive the harshness of this alternate world. The only difference is you have an extra brain to figure out "how the heck we're gonna do this!?" 😏

Here are some things that have blown me away so far with this game:

The variety has been fantastic. Every game is different based on MANY factors. Aside from the changing map game to game (and therefore resources, territories to build on etc) your choices/decisions create A TON of variety. And all three games have been the same scenario (the starting scenario: A New Home: Crater scenario). There's 8 or 9 MORE! AND 6 different societies to use, each with a "normal" and "hard" difficulty level. 😮

The depth is fascinating to me. I told my daughter after the game as we were putting it back on the shelf and she was looking at all the games she has yet to learn/play with me, that after Frostpunk everything else will be easy to grasp (and she did really well I thought). In particular I pointed out Gloomhaven (which I know she'll enjoy the fantasy theme) and she likes co-op games as well. Gloomhaven (in my opinion) doesn't have the same depth as Frostpunk. My reasoning being that in Gloomhaven your decisions are confined to the particular moment such as skirmishes/battle decisions, equipment purchase decisions etc... Whereas in Frostpunk, one choice can open up a couple different rabbit holes that you may or may not tumble down. It's incredible. And that choice is often bogged down by multiple other possibilities at the same time.

The designer took a deep, tough game on PC and made it manageable at the table. I know some of you are looking at the picture here and reading my posts about the game thinking "Manageable? That monstrousity?" I'm not saying there's no learning curve, but like any good complex game, once you have the foundations down the game guides you along with card text, icons etc. What I admire is how they simplified the basic nuts and bolts. For example, on the PC you're collecting resources that can amount to into the hundreds. Say coal for example to fuel the generator. You may have 250 coal collected, but if you decide to run your generator all night long, it'll burn up 175 of your current supply (just throwing out numbers). At the table you're dealing in smaller numbers; 2, 5, 8... It makes things really simple and quick to work with. And yet, they maintain the toughness, ruthlessness and feel of the video game. I'm blown away. In regards to population, your meeples represent groups of people. For example, in the intro scenario you start with 5-worker meeples (which equates to a range of 20-25 workers in terms of population numbers). It simplifies things.

Speaking of Ruthlessness...

Let me paint you a picture of the last part of our game last night:

-We've had 8 or 9 people die. 10 = game over (as one of the MANY ways to LOSE - which my daughter found very amusing in how many possible ways you can lose) 🤣.

-Hunger was a big issue last night (it's always present but it just seemed to be tougher to keep "controlled" - I use that term loosely)

-Due to the storm (I think it was) we ended up with more sick people (almost all of our children, engineers and workers were sick) and several of our workers to become unavailable for this round.

-We had even passed the "child labor" law the previous round to be able to have them gather resources for us, but with all the illness it didn't help in the end.

-We needed to do several things that we were trying to sort out: We need more food because people are starving, we need coal but there's only 2 left on the map (not enough to get the generator going to a helpful level for heat), that means we need to explore to find more resources (which means more sick people because it's cold to clear snow and no guarantee we'll find coal), which also means we wouln't have enough people left to gather more food or resources OR to go to the medical post to cure some people....

-We also didn't have enough people to send any scouts out on an expedition to find more survivors or resources (in fact a round or two earlier, we had decided to turn survivors away from our camp because we barely had the means to feed our people, let alone more!)

And so - starvation ended the game with a 10th death. That was that.

That little bit is just a SNIPPET (seriously) of the incredible and tough decisions you have to make throughout this game. And as the rounds go on, people are unhappy, cold, starving and possibly dying... You have your work cut out for you. There is no avoiding sickness, hunger or death in this game.

We actually played our game last night in 2hrs (not including 20ish minutes to setup). Which was really good considering it's only my third playthrough and my daughter's first! Granted, we only made 5 rounds. 🤣Trust me, time absolutely flies with this game. And no matter how brutal the conditions get for my people - I don't want it to end! 😋