Frosthaven game director on adapting the board game: undo buttons, house rules, and why solo four-character runs are a trap

Snapshot Games is bringing Frosthaven – Isaac Childres' sprawling dungeon-crawler sequel to Gloomhaven – to PC, and game director Hristo Petkov has been candid about how hard that adaptation actually is. The game entered early access in July 2025 and is set for a full launch on October 15.

To get the rules right, Petkov split his team into groups of four and had them play through a full Frosthaven campaign over three to six months of workdays, consulting directly with designer Childres whenever questions came up. "We were playing to understand the whole design behind it and not just to win," Petkov told Polygon. The studio is led by CEO Julian Gollop, the creator of XCOM, and worked closely with Childres throughout development. One of the most significant changes from the physical game is an undo function, added to make the experience more forgiving than the notoriously punishing board game. The team is also building out "house rules" options so players can dial in how strictly they want to follow the tabletop rules – though Petkov admits the balance is delicate: "If we give too many choices, this will break the game too much."

Snapshot also created a free four-mission campaign called The Road to Frosthaven, designed with Childres to ease Gloomhaven veterans into the mechanics that are new to the sequel. The UI is built to keep complexity manageable – enemy card information is always one or two clicks away without cluttering the screen. With Childres' blessing, Snapshot also introduced a story mode that removes one of the game's core mechanics: the card-rest system, where characters gradually exhaust their ability cards over a scenario and can only recover some of them by resting, losing one permanently each time. Stripping that out is a meaningful concession to accessibility, but it's optional.

Petkov's biggest warning to new players is to resist the urge to run a solo four-character party. Each character starts with 10 cards, each usable for one of two actions – meaning a full party of four has 80 possible actions on turn one alone. That first turn can easily eat half an hour, and even experienced players are likely to miscalculate. "Please don't do that, or do it at your own risk," Petkov said. Some players have already flagged the game's difficulty in early access reviews, and the house rules system seems aimed squarely at addressing that feedback before the October launch.