X-Com creator Julian Gollop unexpectedly takes over sequel to sprawling board game adaptation, and you can try out the closed beta next week

Two adventurers face off against a pair of undead scallywags in Frosthaven

(Image credit: Snapshot Games)

As much as I like getting friends sat down around a table, I breathed a deep sigh of relief when it was announced that tactical dungeon crawler Gloomhaven was coming to PC, due to the tabletop version being a terrifyingly huge (and expensive) obelisk full of smaller boxes, each containing innumerable smaller, easily lost pieces.

I feel a similar twang of relief now that its semi-standalone sequel Frosthaven is also going digital, this time coming from Phoenix Point studio Snapshot Games, and headed up by original X-Com megamind Julian Gollop.

While this adaptation appears to be largely more of the same (hardly a bad thing, given Gloomhaven’s quality), it’s a fetching-looking adaptation, at least going by the debut trailer below. The battlegrounds are as claustrophobic as I’ve come to expect from Gloomhaven, but the frosty aesthetic, new monsters and player characters are colourful, detailed and slickly animated, and the outpost upgrading mechanics shown are obviously a bit fancier than anything you’d get when playing with cardboard standees and miniatures.

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For those who haven’t played Gloomhaven or Frosthaven (either digitally or otherwise), they’re what are known as ‘Legacy’ board games, where each play session often leads to additional content being ‘unlocked’ through opening boxes or card packs, which makes it an intimidating piece of kit to play in tabletop format. Obviously unlocking new content over the course of multiple runs is just par for the course in a PC game, so it’s a significantly less complex and messy process. And you don’t have to cram it all back into the box at the end of the day. Plus, it’s vastly cheaper and easier to get a group together for.

Also, while the tabletop version of Frosthaven was compatible with Gloomhaven (allowing you to play as the characters from the first game in the followup), it appears that this new Snapshot-made adaptation is fully standalone and independent of what came before. Still, it seems it's not changing what already worked, with the UI shown being very similar (although not quite identical) to Flaming Fowl’s Gloomhaven adaptation.

While this obviously isn’t quite as gritty or simulationist as Phoenix Point (which has seen a resurgence in popularity thanks to the Terror From The Void mega-mod), this does feel more in Snapshot’s wheelhouse, considering that the studio started out with the hex-based Chaos Reborn. Certainly a more traditional game than their (also recently announced) action-RTS hybrid Chip ‘N Clawz Vs The Brainioids.

While there’s no release date announced for Frosthaven, you can wishlist it on Steam now. Snapshot has also confirmed that it will make its initial debut as an early access title, and that sign-ups are open now for a closed beta starting on March 27th, so you’ll want to move quick if you want to try it next week.

As for why Snapshot has taken over from Flaming Fowl, here's word from the horse's mouth.

"Because of our strategy game expertise, Isaac Childres, creator of the Frosthaven board game, along with the publisher of the board game, Asmodee, reached out to us to see if we would be interested in developing a video game adaptation of the board game," says Hristo Petkov, Game Director for Frosthaven.

"This was an incredible opportunity that we couldn’t pass on, and we’re of course honored to have the chance to build off of what the developer of Gloomhaven, Flaming Fowl, was able to achieve—especially as we were able to get a lot of the original source code of Gloomhaven to work off of!"

All very nice, though it probably also has something to do with all-consuming IP-holders Embracer and its messy split with Gloomhaven’s tabletop distributor, Asmodee, detailed here by Reuters.

The product of a wasted youth, wasted prime and getting into wasted middle age, Dominic Tarason is a freelance writer, occasional indie PR guy and professional techno-hermit seen in many strange corners of the internet and seldom in reality. Based deep in the Welsh hinterlands where no food delivery dares to go, videogames provide a gritty, realistic escape from the idyllic views and fresh country air. If you're looking for something new and potentially very weird to play, feel free to poke him on Twitter. He's almost sociable, most of the time.