Frostgrave

I played my first game of Frostgrave last night. It's a fantasy skirmish game in which you play a magician, their apprentice and a merry band of hangers-on venturing into a lost city in search of treasure. Whilst the city has dangers of its own, the biggest problem is thta other magicians also have the same idea as you.

In our case there were five such bands of treasure-hunters.

Here's mine. Led by Fabulina, an illusionist, they were: Salaris (her apprenctice), Saran (a brutal skilled fighter), Yalan (an archer), Klin and Klest (a couple of Kobold thieves-for-hire).

(Apparently a full Frostgrave warband consists of the wizard, the apprentice and eight followers. We kept the forces small for this game.)

We were exploring this magnificent set of ruins, produced by the talented Ed. Dotted around it are five stashes of treasure.

My crew sets off down an alley.

Towards the top of the picture, Daniel had magicked a thief next to the pile of treasure on the roof of the quarter-circle building.

My team ambled through the ruins, and exchanged some harsh words (and an arrow or two) with Caesar's gang.

However Fabulina could see Daniel's thief on the roof, and used her Transpose spell to swap him with one of the kobold thieves.

The other kobold thief, and the archer, butchered the somewhat surprised opposition thief.

Salaris and the swordsman Saran did for one of Caesar's men. He should have stayed in his own bit of the board.

When you pick up treasure it may generate wandering beasties. One of these was a large boar, which attacked Ed's archer. They fought for several turns and the board was at death's door when it got in a lucky blow and eviscerated the archer.

Fabulina used her Transpose spell a couple more times. First she used it to bring Klest (and the treasure) back to the safety of the crew. However you also need to get it off teh board and it slows movement, Klin was sent to the nearest board-edge and then the treasure-carrying Klest was swapped with him.

Klest barely took a step of his own all game.

Here's Klest with the treasure

Elsewhere Caesar's barbarian was stuck in a long fight with some of Stuart's men. Every time the barbarian was brought close to death his accompanying magician's apprentice healed him. And so the fight dragged on for most of the game.

One of Caesar's men dispatched another wandering monster.

Caesar's crew. They'd got a lump of treasure off the table and were working on a second. I sent some of my men to try and stop this, but they couldn't catch the hunter. Caesar got two loads of treasure off the table.

Meanwhile my apprentice tried to heal himself, failed the casting roll and took damage sufficient to kill him. He was my only casualty (although Fabulina had taken some damage, mostly self-inflicted from all that spell-casting).

Anyway, that was all I took photos of. The game was actually very busy (as you'd expect with five teams in play), and lots of spells were flying around. 

At the end Caesar was the winner with two of the five treasures. Ed and I got one each and, by the end, Daniel and Stuart were still squabbling over the fifth stash, so agreed to split it.

The game was a lot of fun, with what would seem on the surface to be a standard fantasy skirmish game actually very much driven by the use of magic.