First trip into Frostgrave

Well,

Today DrunkenSamurai and I got in our first game of Frostgrave and in a nutshell, we both loved it. What an interesting game it was, we both just put together two Bands and threw down. We did not do any creatures, or specific scenarios. We just wanted to try the game out and get the mechanics of it down.

Necromancer Apprentice and a few men.

I ran a Necromancer Wizard, apprentice, two crossbowmen, two thieves, three thugs and a barbarian. Drunken ran a Summoner  band with Wizard, apprentice, two thieves, two bowmen and a couple of men at arms. Which was surprising that the two bands were pretty similar to each other.

Necromancer himself and a few more men.

Basically we just sort of bummed rushed each other to see how everything worked, since this was our first game. We placed the objectives and just started the game. Figuring out how to move was a challenge, with group activation and such, but we had both printed out the errata and figured it out.

Barbarian hiding behind a wall.

 Combat was pretty straight forward to figure out. We did have a funny situation were I had two Thugs fighting a Zombie (that Drunken had raised). My first Thug attacked, won the fight and only caused 4 wounds, leaving the undead beast with one wound. I then activated the second Thug, only to have him roll a 2 for the fight and loose to the zombie, who in turn killed him outright. We joked that Thug two was cocky and turned his head to congratulate his buddy, only to be attacked by the zombie and tear him apart. I guess he forgot got the Zombieland rule of Double Tap!

Drunkens warband, picture taken from his Twitter page

 When we got to Spell casting, my first attempts were pretty bad, and I wondered how my "Wizard" had become a Wizard, because he couldn't cast crap! Now the Apprentice on the other hand, must have been taking notes, because he was a casting fool. The best casting was when he cast Bone Dart at Drunkens Wizard and killed him outright since he couldn't resist it. I also had killed his Apprentice, but can not remember if it was with a spell or not. I need to remember these things so I could find out experience in later games.

Necromancer Warband

All in all it was a fun game, I actually got two objective markers off the board while Drunken had got none I think, maybe he got one, not sure. But all in all I got the win for the first game of Frostgrave in our little group.

Necro Band Close Up

 So what did I think, well it plays much different than I imagined and different from how it read. I liked the Initiative sequence, feels very much like LotR which of course I love. It made me really think about how I should move models especially about forcing combats.

The rest of the Necro band Close Up.

The movement seemed strange at first, with having to move first and second moves being half of your rate. It got funky when you are in rough terrain, but we figured it out.

Combats are pretty straight forward, and it once again reminds me of LotR, with the higher roll winning. In fact my new Rules use a very similar to Frostgrave, which is strange because when I wrote the Heroic rules, I had not seen Frostgrave.

Shooting is pretty straight forward as well, being much like combat. It is nice that its pretty much the same and keeps the game simple.

Spell Casting is very interesting, I really love if you miscast your spell, which we had a few of those today. I have heard from a few people that they did not like it, but it did not bother me at all. Choosing spells is a very important part of the game, funny thing today, I was playing a Necromancer Wizard, but did not have raise Zombie, Drunken did. So after I get more games in, I am sure it will get easier. I wish that Osprey would have continued to sell the Spell Cards that a guy on LAF had designed. But oh well.

The other part that I like about this game is the terrain, it is going to force me to look at more fantasy stuff like 4Ground lines that I have been eyeing for some time. Today I was able to bust out my old Osgilith terrain for LotR, which was good to have on the table again.

So all in all, I really really liked this game and Drunken and I will be doing more with it for sure in the future, so stay tuned, we will be returning to Frostgrave...

TK