Frosthaven first impressions of box & components

It's been a long time but I am still around and about and just received my copy of Frosthaven and boy is it heavy. This box weighs over 16kg (or 35 pounds+). Holy smokes is it a workout if you need to lug this thing around. 

Who needs weights when you have Frosthaven

I haven't actually sunk my teeth into the game so this post will be limited to just the first impressions.  The first thing you get when you open the box is a nice helper sheet that has instructions on how to sort all the components. As a bonus Frosthaven also includes sorting containers for the hex overlay tiles. 

I love this. One of the huge pain points of the original gloomhaven is that it requires you to find a tile sorting solution yourself. It's great to see that Cephalofair games has learned from their Gloomhaven project. 

Now if I counted correctly, there are 27 punchboards worth of cardboard tokens, monsters, traps and more. Make sure you have several hours of spare time ahead of you before you move onto the next steps because this will be time consuming. The sorting guide instructs you to sort your monsters into plastic zip bags provided, and the tokens / tiles into the trays provided. 

When I sorted my monsters, I found 2 sets of monsters were short zip bags, not a big deal if you are a veteran board gamer since you'll have plenty sitting around from other games.  

The hex tiles fit nicely into the trays, but there are alot of overlay tiles to punch out and sort. I found the cardboard punches out easier if you apply a bit of force, as slowly pushing them out can peel some of the cardboard on the edges off. In particular there is a 2 tile overlay that has a bunch of spikes on it, and that one seems to cause me some issues. 

Frosthaven component salad

The cards are mostly straightforward to setup, however the divider cards stick a little bit above the tray. This might be a concern to some gamers depending on how attached you are to component longevity. Since the card trays sit at the bottom and you are going to be putting rulebooks, boards etc ontop of them, the dividers stick out and may warp under the weight of the books ontop of it.

A long time later, I managed to get the components sorted. It's great the guide actually provides a picture on how to put everything back in the box. I managed to get everything in the box with the lid just shy of fully closing. Good enough!

I am excited to play some Frosthaven later but I really want to commend Cephalofair for taking lessons from Gloomhaven and making the component sorting more thoughtful for gamers.