If you already know whether you like Gloomhaven, you already know whether you’ll like this, so let me get the caveat out front rather than burying it: don’t start here if you’ve never played the core system before. This is bigger, more expensive, and asks more of you in setup time, and I’d point anyone unsure toward Jaws of the Lion first to see if the fundamental loop clicks before committing to a box this size.

For those of us already in, though, it’s Gloomhaven improved in nearly every direction that matters. The new outpost phase, where your surviving mercenaries manage and build up the settlement between missions, is the single biggest addition and also the thing I have the most complicated feelings about. It adds real, meaningful weight to your choices, whether to spend resources on a new building or hoard them, and it makes the campaign feel like it’s actually accumulating consequences rather than just unlocking the next envelope. It also adds a genuine chunk of upkeep time to every session, checking building effects, tracking resource decay, and by scenario thirty or so in my group’s campaign, that bookkeeping was noticeably slowing us down. I don’t want it gone. I just wish it were a little more elegant.

The tempo of individual scenarios has shifted too, in a way I like: Gloomhaven had this rhythm of dread at the start and relative ease by the end, and Frosthaven flips it, you’re much more likely to feel like everyone’s about to die in the messy middle of a fight, scraping through on the last cards of your last characters. That’s a better story to tell at the table. One character-specific gripe from my own group and from what I’ve read elsewhere: Blinkblade needs a balance pass, it’s clearly overtuned compared to the rest of the roster. Small complaint against an enormous, extremely well made game. If you loved the original, budget the shelf space and the time, because you’re not going to want to play much else for a while.