Frostgrave - AKA Fighting and Fun among Frozen Ruins

Despite buying the book way too long ago, I finally got a chance to play a game of Frostgrave, and it seems like quite a good game. Is it the replacement for Mordheim I've been looking for? No, but it is still a pretty good game.

It's rather simple in its mechanics. Roll a d20 compare your result, adding your fight or shoot stat to it, to your target's roll with his or her fight stat added. Higher equals success, lower equals failure (or getting hit back in the case of HTH combat. Damage is simple as well. Take the modified hit roll, add the damage bonus, subtract the target's armor, and that is the damage. High hit rolls equal lots of damage.

The book suggests lots of terrain, and it is a good idea. My crossbowman had a clear LOS to his wizard on turn one, rolled a natural 20 to hit, ad 2 for hit shoot stat and 2 for his crossbow damage, and that's 24 damage. The wizard only has 10 armor, and 14 health, so he's out in turn one. The fact that he'd failed a cast and already taken two points of damage didn't help either. That shouldn't happen. We were playing with the optional critical hit rules, so the 14 damage was doubled to 28, not that it mattered. After the game, we decided that maybe the crit rule was over the top.

Crossbows and bows seemed the way to go with the less than crowded terrain, but that may change if the terrain is more dense and shooting lanes are harder to find.

The game ended in a draw, with each of us snagging three treasure tokens, successfully casting three spells each, and neither wizard killing anything.

The most time consuming part of the game was looking up rules and spells, which as any gamer knows, decreases the more you play the game. We started at about 8:00 PM and were done before 10:00, including figuring out experience and treasure. If we knew the rules as well as we did 8th ed. WFB or KoW, we could have played two games in that time, though adding terrain will likely lengthen that as it will take more than 1 turn to begin shooting and casting like we did.