Frost

Genre: Card Game

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in Card Game Bundle Vol. 1 along with Monster Slayers.)

Frost is a Card Game where players take the role of the leader of a band of people trying to survive in the wilderness during a harsh snowstorm and find their way to shelter. Rather than playing against an opponent, this game challenges the player to meet the conditions of each new location to proceed before the frost catches up to them.

It’s a unique concept, and the presentation does a good job highlighting the dire situation it represents, with a clean, sparse, hand-drawn presentation and ominous music that works well for the game.

The mechanics of this game are such that it really could work as a real-life card game, though as far as I can tell this is an original property. Players have a deck of various resources, and draw from another deck of various location cards that require a specific set of resources to pass. In addition, they might face a unique threat or challenge in a location, like a wolf they must fight off, and every turn they get a new opportunity to trade resources of different types. Every turn the player cannot progress past the current location, the frost draws ever closer, and if it reaches them, they lose.

It’s a fantastic concept, but unfortunately it’s undone by the high level of randomness this game puts in every element – your deck is randomly shuffled, of course, but also random are the locations and their requirements, the cards you add when you add cards to your deck, the trades made available to you… so much of this game is out of your control that it really feels that there’s very little that the player does have control over. This may make for a realistic scenario, but it doesn’t make for a very fun game.

It’s a shame that so much of the gameplay mechanics in Frost are random and out of the player’s control, because the core mechanics and theme of this game hold a lot of promise. Unfortunately, the way those concepts are executed makes for a depressing game that simply isn’t very fun.

tl;dr – Frost is a Card Game where players guide a band of people through the wilderness to shelter, evading the encroaching threat of the coming frost. It’s a great concept, and the presentation is good, but the gameplay itself is far too overrun with randomized elements out of the player’s control, making for a game that just isn’t very fun to play.

Grade: C-

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