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Frostpunk: The Board Game

Created by Glass Cannon Unplugged

A city-survival, cooperative game for 1-4 players where heat means life and every decision comes at a cost. From the designer of Nemesis and story creator for This War of Mine: TBG. In Frostpunk: The Board Game you will take on the role of leaders of a small colony of survivors in a post-apocalyptic world that was hit by a severe ice age. Build shelters and resource gathering facilities, explore the frostlands, research new technologies, and introduce new laws. What decisions will you make to ensure your city's survival?

Latest Updates from Our Project:

Live session - exclusive look at the Leaders & Citizens rules
over 3 years ago – Sun, Nov 01, 2020 at 03:22:46 AM

Greetings citizens of New London!

Today (in three hours, at 21.00 CET, 16.00 ET) - we will have a small surprise for you: a live Tabletop Simulator session hosted by Paul Grogan from GAMING RULES! Paul is going to introduce you to the multiplayer rules, showing how the game works when using Leaders and Citizens cards. Hope that you will find it interesting!

Click here to join!

Have a safe weekend!

Michał & GCU Team

After the Storm
over 3 years ago – Sat, Oct 31, 2020 at 06:36:49 PM

Dear citizens, fellow survivors!

We’ve survived the storm and for the first time in weeks our eyes could see the sun! We thank you for your indomitable support in this time of trials, we thank you for your spirit and sacrifice! Your actions took into the annals of global crowdfunding and hopefully will inspire others for as long as we all live!

What happens now? We bet this question is especially on the lips of those who have no prior Kickstarter or any other crowdfunding experience. Below you will find a brief but solid dose of information about the next steps.

Please read the following info, as this is very important post-campaign data that all of you need to know:

1. Payments are processed by Kickstarter and Stripe, so please contact their help desk if you have any problems with charging your cards. Sorry, but we can't help you in any way, as this is run solely by Kickstarter and we have no influence over this process. Should Kickstarter and Stripe have any issues with processing your payment you will be notified via KS and email (the one you use to log in to Kickstarter). Kickstarter will attempt to collect the payment twice in the next few days, should it be impossible your pledge will be dropped.

2. We are in the process of opening a special panel for you to contact us. The solution offered by Kickstarter messages is inconvenient in the long run. So please DO NOT send us personal messages via Kickstarter, please wait a few days for us to be able to direct you to our dedicated customer support solution – it will be linked in the next update and will ensure better service on our side and less frustration on yours.

3. We will be setting up the pledge manager as soon as possible - we will use BackerKit.com. It will allow you to:

  • manage your pledges (check your items, add or remove items from your pledge, choose language editions of your items),
  • purchase extra copies of the game, add-ons etc.,
  • enter your delivery addresses,
  • change your delivery address before the fulfillment will happen.

Please do not send us messages containing the above information, as we will be unable to process it. These kinds of choices are made in the pledge manager ONLY.

4. People who have missed the campaign will be able to pre-order the game in the pledge manager. You will be able to buy the add-ons as well but you will not have the benefits that were enjoyed by those who backed the campaign with the full pledge when it was live – we think this is only fair for those who showed support and pledged their money during our journey. No content in this campaign is Kickstarter exclusive except the pre-shading for the miniatures.

5. Once the pledge manager is open, you will receive an email notification. There is also going to be a separate update too. You really can’t miss it, although please check your spam email from time to time.

6. The pledge manager should go live in 1-2 months after the campaign is finished, as we need to make the final quotes for shipping based on the number of backers from each country, and set up all the products in the manager. It will live for another few months (probably to the end of March 2021). The pledge manager works like a standard webshop where you choose the items you want to get for your credit (the amount pledged during the campaign). You will be able to increase your credit, to upgrade your pledge and to pay for shipping and add-ons, if you choose any.

7. We will keep you updated about game development and production status. We won’t be spamming, but we will try making at least a single update a month, or more, if there is anything important to share.

That is it for today 😊

We are going to limit the communication until the end of Monday (02.11.2020). We need to recharge batteries, reconnect with families and friends and get the customer/community support up and running!

Yours truly,

Jakub & GCU team!

PS

As a comic relief I am posting some pictures to humor you with what happened on the other side... that not always worked as planned:

1. A few days ago I've built something between gallows and a camera stand... from the wood I found outside my garage... It kind of worked...

2. The leader has super thin hands on this print  probably the supports were too thin. He couldn't bear the burden on those skinny arms!

3. Printing the inside of the Generator without prior knowledge of 3D printing was... Disappointing 😊

We have laid the foundations for the last city on Earth, our journey is nearing its end but the real challenge is about to start!
over 3 years ago – Thu, Oct 29, 2020 at 02:19:33 AM

Dear citizens of the last city on Earth!

It is the last day, the sun is setting and with it the dusk of this journey will be upon us. Yet we are not afraid to draw that card. Thanks to you we know it will be a good one, announcing the success of our shared journey! We have the Generator up and running at over 1000% efficiency and now it is time to use that momentum and, throughout the period of many months, develop our city and see it prosper in the hands of its citizens! It is too early for such decisions but we want to tell you about one last important thing that is a part of this game, something that can utterly change the old order of things in your society…

Going to extremes

Should the situation in your city be dire, with people freezing on the streets, their hopes dwindling and their discontent peaking, there is an ultimate solution – because the city must survive, right? That solution includes extreme measures that will completely remodel your society through the prism of totalitarianism. The choice is yours, will your actions take you down that path? How many individuals are you willing to sacrifice in order to save the society? How much humanity will you sacrifice for humankind to endure?! The digital Frostpunk evokes those questions and its board game adaptation will be no different. So let us take a look into how it could look…

Faith or Order?

What if you could promise your people to solve their problems, knowing it to be a lie from the very beginning? What if you had a tool in your hand that will not feed the hungry but will “help” them to forget that they are? Yes, human history knows too many examples of whole societies and nations falling into this trap, when the carrot had a steel hook inside and the stick was well hidden. If this is your path, give your people the solution to their problems. Is the Discontent in the city so high that it will soon explode with rage? Introduce Order. Is the Hope so low that it will soon doom your people? Give them Faith.

Order and Faith are two laws, contradicting each other, that you can introduce during your game. You can opt to introduce them from the very beginning. They have been designed not to be too beneficial at the beginning, but more so in the later stages of your playthrough. Upon introducing such a Law, you will either activate or exhaust the whole track for either Hope or Discontent! It is a mighty tool. What is more, introducing Faith or Order unlocks an entire new selection for city development. The board that represents Faith/Order includes 4 new types of buildings for each, that can only be accessed after the Law has been passed. These buildings are quite unique. They will allow you to solve many of the problems that your city might be facing (insufficient heating, discontent, lack of hope, hunger, etc.), all on a massive scale. Some of these buildings will even allow you to escape the consequences of a particularly bad draw of a Dusk card! Other structures will help you to resolve the issue of the corpses of the unburied citizens of your city. If your city has suffered a lot of casualties, stepping onto the path of Faith or Order might be your only choice to avoid perishing under the relentless snow.

The choice is a significant one. Its consequences will be equally so, because when people fall under the false image of a totalitarian regime they often pay the highest price. Both Faith and Order laws have their separate decks of cards that work a bit differently than the usual consequence cards for a given Law. The number of Dusk cards added to the Dusk deck for Faith and Order will depend on the number of buildings from a given system that you have constructed. The more you depend on the solutions from Faith or Order, the heavier the consequences will be for your citizens. What consequences do you ask? Sorry, we won’t spoil the part where you get to discover them for yourselves!

As a final note, we have to make a correction that you might actually like! In the list of components, we previously said that the Faith and Order laws have 2 Consequence cards each. The truth is that the Order has 4 cards and the Faith 8 cards, so the total should not be 4 but 12 Consequence cards for these 2 laws! Some of you might have noticed that when you played the modules we prepared for you on Tabletop Simulator, since the numbers were correct there. This is not an unlock 😉 but of course we will be adding those cards to the game!

Physical prototype video

We’re sorry but we couldn’t make it in the form that we wanted – a full playthrough with several players present. We made a few attempts and even sent the second copy to our publishing partner from Germany (Frosted Games). Frosted Games were supposed to record their playthrough during Spiel.Digital but COVID made that impossible. Our Polish crew tried twice, but each time it was that damned virus standing in our way. The first time one of our crew had the symptoms and we didn’t want to take the risk and the second attempt was met with a countrywide lockdown. That is why I recorded the video at home (my mum’s home to be precise :) ), without any professional crew or other people involved. My mum is in the high risk group and my grandma is almost 100 years old, so I couldn’t take the risk and I know there are some great multiplayer playthroughs already recorded and posted on YouTube or BGG. The video presents the physical components and miniatures but not the gameplay + there is a personal message from me to all the backers at the end.

It looks like it is time to say the words that have been growing inside the whole team of Glass Cannon Unplugged since the campaign was funded in less than an hour.

THANK YOU!

 Thank you for making this possible and thank you for allowing us to take you all on this amazing journey. Thank you for all the emotions, all the engagement and the energy we have received from you! Thank you for turning our dreams, my dream and those of each member of the team into reality!

This wasn’t the first Kickstarter for some of us but it will be the one we remember forever!

We hope you will enjoy these last hours of the campaign with us and we congratulate you on unlocking and achieving everything there was to be conquered with this campaign!

Jakub Wiśniewski and the amazing team of Glass Cannon Unplugged

Our destiny is but a step ahead. With a storm following us we arrive in front of our goal – what will be the last city on Earth!
over 3 years ago – Wed, Oct 28, 2020 at 02:38:39 AM

Greetings citizens of New London!

The final 24 hours of our shared journey are upon us. Although we have been keeping each other going for almost 22 days, we can’t let you freeze before we reach our destination! So today we have some warmth we want to share. 😉

Heating mechanics

To describe the multilayered heating mechanics from a video game in the language of board games was a hell of a challenge. Yet we knew that the tabletop adaptation of Frostpunk must carry the degree of choice deriving from the original, allowing for multiple solutions to be implemented. Be it by heating an area, heating given buildings, spending large quantities of coal or upgrading the quality of the infrastructure to spend less coal – these choices must belong to the players.

The heat comes from the Generator – the iconic centerpiece of our board. Each cube that is thrown into the Generator allows you to increase the heating level by moving the Heat marker on the Generator track (the cost – in cubes – depends on the weather). To turn on the Generator (by moving the Heat marker by 1 space on the track) you need to spend 1 coal – this provides heating for all the buildings with a red ribbon. When the Heat marker catches up with the first token representing the central tile this tile becomes heated. Should the marker move even one space up, all the orange ribboned buildings become heated. The same is true for other tiles and buildings – when the marker reaches the token that represents the tiles adjacent to the central tile, they all become heated. When the marker moves up, all the yellow ribbon buildings become heated. The maximum heating level is achieved when the marker reaches the token that represents the outer tiles of the board. In such a case the whole crater is heated and thanks to this, in the Generator phase, no additional sickness will harm your citizens.

With these simple yet extremely flexible mechanics we were able to create a heating system that allows you to approach it from various directions. Each strategy you can come up with will be valid when based on coal production, quality of the buildings and city planning – taking into account how far the buildings are from the Generator, their level of insulation (color of the ribbon), etc. Throughout the game it becomes a real intellectual challenge to plan ahead and to find the optimal choice – after all, isn’t this one of the aspects for which we all love board games?!

The Generator

It is the heart that pumps the life-giving heat into your city, but the generators were created on the brink of the catastrophe, with haste and not enough time to test them all. No one knows how long they will operate without a major malfunction. The possibility of malfunction was one of the key motivators behind the interior of the Generator model. It symbolizes the constant threat that this wonder of steampunk engineering, that keeps your people alive, could someday fail…

Depending on how many units of coal you used throughout the round to heat up the Generator, you will be throwing those black cubes into the Generator. Those that fall out become the malfunction cubes. The Generator has two shelves inside that catch the cubes and above the shelves there are two crosses that disperse the cubes so that they tumble all over the interior of the model. Some of the cubes will stay inside the Generator and others will fall out to the pullout drawer at the bottom. After removing the pullout drawer you can easily upend it and let the cubes fall into the palm of your hand to be placed on the Malfunction track. Should the Malfunction track be filled to full, the Generator undergoes a serious malfunction. From that point onward, it will cost you more to use it. If you allow the Generator to malfunction for a second time, it explodes and ends your playthrough with a complete loss. Fortunately you have a means of maintaining the Generator and, with the help of your Engineers, you can perform a special action on the dedicated slot on the board which allows you to remove 5 malfunction cubes from the track.

This is how the key visual element of Frostpunk: The Board Game works – it actually works! This solution allows us to evoke a sense of unease and tension throughout the game, that sometimes makes you think twice before you make a risky move. Obviously the inner workings of the Generator can be counted (as a good euro game should 😉). You know how much you will throw in and how much you can expect to fall out (taking the worst outcome into account). But you can believe us when we say you will take those risks, delaying the maintenance action for your Generator by at least one round, just to introduce a new Law or cure those gravely ill citizens… and there might come a day when you will simply be too late...

Designing the interior of the Generator is a story that unfolded through a period of several months and for the sake of maintaining our minimal level of sanity, we won’t revisit it here for a deeper description. 😉 The situation changed dramatically when Przemek Fornal joined us to provide professional insight. Being an industrial engineer, he managed to achieve the results Adam aimed for, but it took him 33 iterations of the model! We would like to publicly thank you, Przemek, with all our hearts! You can see the short video where Przemek shows the workings of one of the iterations of the prototype. Obviously it is just the interior of the Generator, what you see outside is based on the original model and remodeled to fit the tube by our talented 3D artists!

But that’s not all! Our dear friends and co-workers prepared something really special. For many weeks we discussed the idea that the Generator, being a physical piece, should be upgradable in its physical form, not only through the change of a rule on the board. The obvious choice was to make it more efficient so it would catch more cubes. Przemek was able to address this and turned our vision into reality. He created a special mod in the form of a grate/cross with walls that meet in the form of a “V” – that works just as we envisioned. And with those words, we are ready to reveal today’s daily unlock, with a new component and a new mechanic!

The Efficiency Mod


Installing this Efficiency Mod in your Generator will trap some of the malfunction cubes in a way that they won’t fall out until the end of a playthrough. To install it in your Generator during a playthrough, all you need to do is to send a team of Engineers to the Generator slot on the board, spend a Steam Core and install the mod in the Generator, instead of removing the 5 malfunction cubes. 

But wait, there’s more in the daily unlock for today! 😉

Taking into account your collective feedback (gathered by us throughout this campaign), we would like to add another set of cards, including 8 new Morning cards and 14 new Dusk cards! This translates to even more replayability and our devs being happy that they can fulfill more of the ideas that are occupying their heads, with some new narrative arcs that will now be possible. We began this campaign with a similar daily unlock and we think it is a nice way to close the loop.

What a journey this has been thanks to you! We are sending you a great big virtual hug for making it happen and shaping the contents and form of Frostpunk: The Board Game with us! Tomorrow will be the final day of this campaign and we will talk about choosing the path of Faith or Order.

Take care!

Jakub & the GCU Team

P.S.

We said we wouldn’t add another financial stretch goal but since you keep going – so are we! Throughout this campaign we have listened to you and we do not want to change that approach as we near the end! We have heard the voice of the Council of the citizens and we present you with the (absolute 😉) final financial stretch goal. Upon reaching €2.115 million ($2.5 mil USD), each Miniatures expansion will include a 32mm scale, plastic Leader miniature! 

P.P.S.

Frostpunk: The Board Game is nearing the end of its wonderful journey, but for other projects the end is still ahead. If you want to stay in the cold theme, please check out a new frosty campaign by Fantasia Games for Endless Winter. What a cool name, huh?! 😉

Ruins of The Old World
over 3 years ago – Tue, Oct 27, 2020 at 12:04:27 AM

Dear citizens of the last city on Earth!

Today we begin the last 48 hours of this campaign. During those final hours we will all see how far we can venture! We are aware that many of you are still wondering whether to join us, watching from a distance as our growing caravan slowly but relentlessly pushes forward. We’ve prepared a little summary for you if you are still wondering if this campaign is worthy of your support, we hope those arguments will help you to reach a decision and jump aboard our Dreadnought!

Together with over 14.000 souls we have achieved so much! We funded this game and managed to add hundreds of components and dozens of hours of playthrough time thanks to 5 new setups and 2 new scenarios!

Today we are adding even more content to this already impressive iceberg of replayability! The scenario we are adding today was mentioned in the comments several times. And some of you have asked how much the fine folk of 11 bit studios allowed us to expand the universe of Frostpunk. Today we are presenting a fully original scenario that shapes the fragment of Frostpunk’s history some of you might have stumbled upon when exploring Frostlands in the digital game.

Ruins of Tesla City

Nikola Tesla was one of the experts employed by the British government to work on the project of saving humankind from the winter apocalypse. He was in charge of the American expedition that managed to reach northern England and began building an autonomous city, untouchable by the harsh climate and weather. Unfortunately something went wrong...

A group of refugees stumbles upon this weird and wondrous place and they see it as the end of their desperate journey, a safe harbor in a sea of endless ice. The city is completely abandoned and filled with technology no one is familiar with. Can these people comprehend the workings of Tesla City? Will they uncover what befell its previous denizens before they fall to the same fate? Is it possible they wandered through limbo and have just ended up in hell?!

This scenario takes place on the Flats setup. And here is the list of dedicated components it adds to the game:

We won’t say a word more (although we feel like a kid who desperately wants to tell the secret 😉 ) because it would spoil a lot of the fun that our team has prepared for you in this scenario. We can’t wait to hear your thoughts once you get your hands on the game and will be able to uncover the secrets of Tesla City by yourselves!

Thanks to your support the game now includes 5 scenarios (Introductory, New Home, The Arks, The Fall of Winterhome, Ruins of Tesla City) and 6 setups (Crater, Frozen Grove, Crags, Dreadnought, Canyon, Flats). This adds up to many, many long winter evenings spent in the world of Frostpunk, 2020 please end and make room for 2021!

The final Money-based Stretch Goal

For this entire campaign we wanted to introduce content, replayability and depth on a daily basis. We wanted to add component upgrades to the game with financial stretch goals because that makes most sense from all the perspectives - the more backers the more copies and as a result, lower costs of manufacturing. To express our gratitude for the tremendous engagement and for the help we received from you, we would like to propose 1 final stretch goal - something a lot of you have asked for. We realize it isn’t something that will sweep the feet from underneath you but we saved that part for the daily unlocks!

So, if we cross the 2 million Euro threshold, the Frostlander expansion (free for all Kickstarter backers who get a full pledge before the end of the campaign) gets 4 wooden tokens for the Hunger & Sickness track!

Please bear in mind that this stretch goal is something on top of the daily unlocks and the two do not contradict each other. Tomorrow we have the final daily unlock for you and it carries what we all love - more content, more replayability and more depth to the core game! Since it is almost the end we will also add a new physical component to the game, a quite unique one to be honest. Thank you for joining us on this journey and helping us to reach our goal!

Heating and sickness

The thing that is definitely not helping is the winter apocalypse in Frostpunk! It’s mean and it is deadly. To represent that this board game has a mechanic for sickness that reflects it – therefore becoming number one threat to your people. The sickness is of course a collective name for a whole plethora of conditions that would ail people faced with a situation like the one in Frostpunk (exhaustion, accidents, frostbitten limbs and illnesses – that can cause a major threat to any population, even under normal conditions and with a modern healthcare system). But how does it work in the game?

The citizens of your city can fall sick for various reasons: being assigned to remove the snow, working in an unheated area, working in an unheated building that is placed in an unheated area, spending the night outside of a heated shelter, having to endure a day’s workload without the Generator being heated up sufficiently (visible during the Generator phase), effects of the Events deck, Dusk deck and other mechanics can also add to this list. That is a lot of reasons and a lot of ways to fall victim to the merciless environment of Frostpunk.

Each case gets marked on the Sickness track, separately for each of the three groups of citizens. In the Preparation phase all of the groups that possess sick citizens are exposed to the effects of their ailments. These effects are: spreading the sickness (the number of cases increases), worsening the condition of patients (some people become gravely ill), incapacitating sick people (they are too sick to work) and finally putting them to their final rest. As you see the effects are dire and self-propelling. Your job as those responsible for governing your citizens will be to quickly cure them, before the situation gets out of control, unfortunately it isn’t an easy process. Not only does it require specialized buildings, but also specialized medical personnel (specialists are generally represented by the Engineers citizen group). To cure people you assign an Engineer meeple/miniature to the building that has the relevant action. Resolving it allows you to reduce the number of sick people or to stabilize those who are gravely ill.

As you can expect there are numerous alternatives for curing people in the game, some of them you might be familiar with if you played the digital Frostpunk – for example the Care House, medical Automatons etc. There are also laws that can cause the whole process to be more efficient  - their implementation depends on your decision, but you might be forced to introduce them if you will see that the phantom of a spreading illness endangers your people. Once again you will be given the tools, methods that will let you “break” the core rules of the game and try to get the situation in your city under control. Of course the responsibility and the consequences will be yours to face...

The sickness mechanics is a nightmarish thing, this is why preventing its spread is such a crucial part of the game – taking care of the living conditions of your citizens and keeping them warm. We have already described the shelters, as a mechanic in the game and tomorrow we will speak more about the heating.

Sending out the light of the Beacon! You did it!

Wow! Thanks to your engagement we reached our 1st and last at the same time ;-) social stretch goal. Your activity will help us to fulfill our promise. So congratulations, you have unlocked the upgrade for the Beacon miniature, it will now be possible to install a transparent rod between the balloon and its base! 

Thank you for making the Beacon fly high!

AMA on Reddit

We know many of you don’t have an account on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram so for all those of you who are active on Reddit we'd like to put forward an invitation to an AMA on Reddit that will take place today at 4 PM ET until 6 PM ET (in 30 minutes!). Our team will be represented by Jakub Wiśniewski and we will have the pleasure of Adam Kwapiński joining us!

Click here to join!

See you tomorrow, for the last day of our Kickstarter journey!

Good night and good luck!

Jakub & GCU Team

PS

GCU Spotlight - Yedo - Deluxe Master Set by Board And Dice.

Do you remember when we wrote about experiencing technical difficulties on the second day of our Kickstare? And how old friends saved us? Well today those good pals of ours have launched a campaign for a reprint of their game - Yedo: Deluxe Master Set (BGG rating 8.4). If you like worker placement, euro games check it out, we recommend it :-)