Frost: The Solo Survival Deckbuilder

Nice try, gang, but YOU WILL SUCCUMB TO MY SICKNESS as well, no really, try it and see:

Frost:

Picture something akin to an Ascension like deck builder vs. the environment. You need to take your tiny band of survivors to the refuge a great distance away, but then can only bypass these many regions, 1 at a time, by being able to efficiently lay down the required combination of resources (food, labor, and materials). While dealing with other hostile survivors, wolves, and other nuisances will come along to hamper your progress, your biggest enemy is the encroaching Frost itself. The Frost value starts at 8, and every turn you spend stuck in the same spot, it decrements 1, by moving onto another region you actually add a point back to this doom tracker, but if it ever reaches 0 (and it will most runs), the game ends as a faliure. If, on the other hand, you actually tune your deck to a clean, mean, fighting machine, you might have what it takes to actually reach the refuge.

Cool game, but it has some serious issues. If I had a nickel for every cool strategy game undermined by an amateurish interface. :(

-Tom

Anyone interested in this who has an iOS device and hasn’t played Dream Quest is missing out. It’s not a “survival” game explicitly, but it’s a dungeon crawler deckbuilder. And on the strength of it, the creator got a job working on Hearthstone. Just to be clear, it was NOT as an artist!

Okay, sorry for the hijacking! Frost looks neat! And at that price I’ll probably give it a try.

Somebody was asking on the stream’s chat for card games recommandation in the vein of Frost, and I can’t believe Dream Quest didn’t come to my mind. Dang, learning that bit about Hearthstone almost makes me want to give that game a try too!
Pursuing the hijacking XD

Just watched Tom’s video and bought Frost soon after. I agree with Tom that the game would be greatly improved by explicitly showing the percentage chances of random rolls but even with its flaws it seems like a great game and well worth its low price.

Wish they would take a little money from that gig and pay for some art to update that one. I’ve heard it is good, but man…it’s…uhm…not terribly attractive. That didn’t used to matter to me so much, but these days, with as many choices as there are out there, I dunno. Not like it has to be fancy. I’m having a great time with Guild of Dungeoneering, for instance.

The art’s never bothered me with Dream Quest - gameplay is so good that it more than makes up for it! I wish they’d come up with some new classes though, like an expansion pack. Guess that will never happen w/ the Hearthstone move though.

Played the Frost demo and rather liked it. I’d like to hear more about how the game changes with repeated plays. Wish this were on iOS.

This game is all about repeated play throughs.

At the most basic level clearing the Easy and Medium Classic game modes will open more modes. Somewhere in there you’ll unlock various Scenario modes.

These scenarios are great fun, not only do they let you play the game with odd new twists, each scenario is named after a different character and if you are able to clear their scenario, you’ll have that character as an option in Classic (each character has a couple of unique skills, so it isn’t just a cosmetic thing).

Beyond that, by repeated play of the Classic or Scenario modes you’ll unlock a bevy of new cards (new events and ideas). While it isn’t clear, I think these extra cards unlock in a set order via little batches of 1-3 that can be announced at the end of any run (you’ll earn them if you win or lose, but evidently winning games will allow you to unlock them faster). Early on it seems like you’re unlocking a new card or 2 at the end of every other game, but it then really slows down. I assume I’ve unlocked all of the cards at this point but have no way of knowing for sure. They also did a pretty good job in how they pair these unlocks as it seems with every really cool new idea they report unlocked, a nasty new event is also added to the game to keep the game’s overall difficulty fairly balanced. Once the new cards are unlocked they will be included in all of your future runs, no matter what difficulty or sceanrio you’re playing, so it isn’t as if the game will allow you to pick and choose (I’ll add all of these awesome ideas but lets leave these events out, m’ky?). I’d say, on average, with all of the new events and ideas unlocked, the game overall is a bit trickier than its simple pure initial form, but also even more engaging as it requires deeper strategies to complete runs.

The dev isn’t sitting on his laurels either, while I’m sure, as in all game releases, continued development will be based on sales, he’s at least promised some new characters and cards as early as next month.

Cool, thanks.

Oh, one other thing I wanted to ask you. Fire seems too strong. Do you think the wood to activate it should be consumed?

I watched @tomchick’s archived stream of this last night and despite Tom’s criticisms I fell in love with the art design, the soothing sounds, and the austerity of the game. I will be picking this up soon. Can’t wait to spend a few quiet evenings with this.

Decent point actually, I long assumed the wood was consumed and thus didn’t utilize this nor shelter which I also assumed consumed the wood mistakenly.

I’m guessing the rationalization is that there aren’t as many easy means to create wood in the game and it seems a lot of the ideas consume wood.

It’s not as strong as it first seems. Since you discard both the fire and a wood to draw three cards, you only essentially draw 1 extra card. Of course it’s not quite that simple as it offers some extra flexibility if you don’t need the wood for anything else but still, I think it’s far from overpowered. If it consumed the wood, fire would be pretty much useless.

It lets you cycle cards, which can be really important in this sort of game. Let’s say you draw a wood and need to use it or get fire without wood. Fine, you use fire to draw a replacement card. It costs you nothing. In the case where you don’t need the wood, you get rid of a card you don’t need (the wood) to draw 2 you might (plus the one from the fire you would have had anyway), again, with no cost. That is EXTREMELY powerful.

So have any of you started in on the full game yet?

Not yet. I would have for sure if it were on iOS.

Dev says mobile port is in the plans but won’t yet even attempt an estimate as to when.

A big update just dropped with new crunchy bits:

Frostbite & Beliefs is out!

This content update includes:

A whole mechanic: Temperature. It affects the size of your hand
2 new characters
2 new Scenarios
New Events, Idea cards, and Regions cards

It also includes a bunch of fixes and features coming from the community!

Enjoy! <3

It has finally made it to the iOS App Store (universal for $3.99):

Oh, and has already been out on Android for a couple of weeks ($4.49):

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.destenebres.frost

The TA thread says there is no screen rotation?

facepalm

How do devs make that kind of mistake?