When you lug a 36-pound box to game night, you expect a certain level of commitment. Frosthaven, the follow-up to the beloved Gloomhaven, is a dense, punishing boardgame with a rulebook thicker than most fantasy novels. But for the players who've spent years mastering its intricacies at a physical table, the new PC adaptation isn't just a convenience—it's a rude awakening. The complaints are rolling in on Steam forums: characters acting oddly, scenarios breaking, bugs everywhere. Except, according to the developers at Snapshot Games, the problem isn't the code. It's the players.
Game director Hristo Petkov is blunt about it. "The team is reading all of those comments and we were discussing the opportunity to answer those Steam reviews, because those are not actually bugs," he says. "They're misunderstanding the rules of the game." Julian Gollop, XCOM creator and founder of Snapshot Games, doubles down: "Most boardgame players get rules wrong, by the way—it's just that a lot of the time they don't realise it."
The digital adaptation of Frosthaven launched into early access with a promise: automate the fiddly bookkeeping and let players focus on tactical decisions. But that automation is a double-edged sword. When you've been playing a physical copy of Frosthaven for years with your group, you've almost certainly developed what Petkov calls a "house variant"—a few unwritten tweaks that make the game smoother, or just more fun. The digital version, however, implements the rules as written. And it does so unflinchingly.
House Rules Meet Hard Code
The core tension here is one of expectations. Boardgame veterans approach the PC version assuming they already know the system. They don't need a tutorial, they've been playing this for years. But the digital Frosthaven doesn't bend to their table's learned shortcuts. Movement rules, enemy AI behavior, modifier deck probabilities—all of it suddenly feels off. Petkov notes that the rules around movement and AI behavior are especially complex: "For some people that looks like a bug because they have played it some other way."
"They played their house variant. When they start playing the digital version, which perfectly implements the board game, they're like, 'Oh no, this is too hard' or 'This doesn't work correctly'."
Snapshot's challenge is twofold. First, they need to signal to veteran players that the game isn't broken—they are. Second, they have to avoid alienating those same players by making them feel stupid. Currently, the main safety net is the game's Discord server, where other community members quickly correct misreported bugs. But Petkov knows that's not scalable: "If you cannot get them there that's a little bit of a problem."
So Snapshot is building an undo function, currently sitting in the options menu as an experimental toggle. It lets players rewind every action in a round, giving them a chance to catch their own mistakes before they compound. "Frosthaven's way more unforgiving when playing digitally, and this is not the spirit of the boardgame," Petkov says. "When we added undo it fixed most of the issues."
Reducing Chaos, One House Rule at a Time
But the more fascinating development is Snapshot's willingness to adopt the community's own house rules as official toggles. If a large chunk of players routinely play a rule "wrong"—and prefer it that way—Snapshot is building optional modes to match. They're in regular discussion with the community council, which includes the writers of the official Frosthaven FAQ and the unofficial collection of house rules.
One example dropping with the 1.0 release on October 15: a toggle that replaces the critical hit (double damage) and miss (zero damage) modifiers with a simple +2 and -2. It's a direct response to players who find the luck swing of the original modifier deck too punishing. "Just to reduce the chaos of battle," Petkov explains. This isn't just a difficulty slider—it's an acknowledgment that the boardgame's published rules aren't sacred in digital form.
Snapshot is even in talks with Frosthaven creator Isaac Childres to tweak some scenarios that players have found unintentionally difficult when played exactly as written. "We are in discussion with the top members of the community and with Isaac to potentially make some of the scenarios more like the way players actually play them," Petkov says. That's a significant concession—the digital adaptation becomes a living document, not a museum piece.
Counterpoint: Bugs Are Real, Too
To be fair to the complaining players, Frosthaven's patch notes are littered with genuine fixes. The Drill character can no longer destroy Control Columns in Quest 94. Monsters in Quest 65 can't perform a push 2 instead of a push 1. The Ooze health bar now matches the quest info in Quest 9. The camera in multiplayer no longer locks on the highest initiative player. These are real bugs, not house rules. Petkov acknowledges that "each new release causes its own problems. The game is very interconnected and even a small change can ruin something in a completely other part of the game."
Snapshot has a quick response time for post-release issues, but the sheer complexity of porting a 36-pound boardgame into code means some quirks will slip through. The real test will be whether the community's patience holds during this early access phase, especially when the loudest voices are stuck between "this is a bug" and "no, you're just playing wrong."
The Broader Trend: Games That Bend to Players
We're increasingly seeing developers add forgiving options to brutally difficult games—James praised Mina the Hollower's approach in a recent post, for instance. Snapshot's strategy is a variation on that theme, but the crucial difference is that these options aren't arbitrary difficulty sliders. They're the same house rules that players already invented around their physical tables. It's a form of crowdsourced game design, one that treats the community's lived experience as a valuable data point.
This mirrors a shift across the industry. From FromSoftware's patch-nerfed bosses to the granular accessibility options in modern AAA titles, the line between "the intended difficulty" and "what players actually want" is blurring. For a game as rules-heavy as Frosthaven, embracing house rules as official modes is a pragmatic move—it lets Snapshot keep the core simulation pure while still offering escape hatches for players who just want a good tactical session without arguing about whether a push 2 is legal.
What Comes Next
The 1.0 launch on October 15 will be the real proving ground. Snapshot is using the remaining early access months to finalize the undo system, implement a handful of house rule toggles, and tweak scenarios with input from Childres and the community council. If they pull it off, Frosthaven could become the gold standard for how to adapt a complex boardgame to PC—not by simplifying the rules, but by giving players the tools to play the way they already do.
And maybe, just maybe, they'll add an option to flip the digital table when you roll a miss on the final turn of a boss fight. Some things are universal.
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