Frosthaven 1.0 Interview with Julian Gollop and Hristo Petkov: Talking Difficulties and the Future

4 weeks ago 14

Published Jun 30, 2026, 9:00 AM EDT

Shane Limbaugh is a Contributor at DualShockers who began covering games professionally in 2025. A longtime gamer with a Bachelor’s Degree in Game Design and Criticism, Shane brings a design-focused perspective to his coverage, looking closely at how mechanics, systems, story, and player experience come together.

Before writing professionally, Shane worked as the Lead Writer and Executive Producer on a college game project for roughly six months. He also spent time working at GameStop, which gave him hands-on familiarity with a wide range of games, platforms, and player preferences.

One of the best video games for board game lovers is probably Gloomhaven since it's a faithful adaptation of the original, but now there's a new contender in the ring: Frosthaven. This new adaptation is a massive undertaking, and I got a unique opportunity to get a peek at what exactly is coming in 1.0.

I sat down with Julian Gollop, creator of X-COM, and Hristo Petkov, Game Director for Frosthaven, and discussed some of the upcoming changes and plans for the game. They offered up a lot of unique insights into what goes into lifting a board game into the digital realm.

They gave me some little hints about the future of Frosthaven and all the things they want to do post-release. It was a lot of fun interviewing them and getting a better grasp of what's on the horizon for the coming launch.

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Interview With Julian Gollop and Hristo Petkov

Q. Frosthaven has been in early access for almost a year now. I know early access is a big kind of gamble in this sort of gaming world that we live in. Do you guys feel like doing early access for Frosthaven was the right choice, or do you think that maybe you should have pushed it back a little bit?

Julian Gollop: It was the only choice. I mean, obviously, we're so confident, but in general, with such an extraordinarily ambitious and complex game, we probably couldn't have managed to get this far without a lot of feedback from players, to be honest. So, that's where it's valuable. I mean, Hristo can probably speak to the experience he's had with it over the last year in a bit more detail.

Hristo Petkov: We had this discussion early in development because Gloomhaven, the predecessor, had early access. Sure. But normally it's not that often that sequels, in a way... it's not exactly a sequel. It's the same universe, but it's different. But we decided to do this mostly to be able to get more feedback from the community because it is a special niche kind of game. Yes, of course, we want to open it to the wider audience of RPG fans, but if it's not liked by this specific group of board game fans and so on, it won't work.

So, it's obviously the most important thing. And as Julian said, the game is really complex, and it's definitely more complex than Gloomhaven. And implementing all these mechanics in a way that is understandable for digital is a challenge.

Julian Gollop: And despite it having the same core system as Gloomhaven, there are so many differences and changes and additions to Frosthaven compared to Gloomhaven. It's really quite a different game in many ways.

Hristo Petkov: I honestly think that this decision was the correct one. At the beginning, we were very ahead in our content development. We could have gone full release in, let's say, 6 months or something like that. I don't think it would have been the better approach or would have led to a better game.

Q. Yeah, that's totally fair. One of the best games of the last decade spent a long time in early access. I definitely don't think there's anything wrong with early access, and I think using that to kind of find your footing with what your target audience wants is a really great idea. I was just kind of curious, because I know for indie studios or smaller studios, it can be kind of a gamble. So it was a fascinating answer. Thank you so much.

Hristo Petkov: It's also always a risk because of how gamers think about early access nowadays, because it's no longer the way it was before. Gamers tend to think that early access is not just full content but a fully polished game. Which wasn't our case. We wanted to work with the community to polish this game. So it's a double-edged sword, but yeah, it worked out.

Q. Got to have some risk to have some reward, don't you know? You guys touched on something I was actually really curious about in doing some more research about Frosthaven and Gloomhaven. One of the things that I've noticed is that several people have commented that Frosthaven is overall a more difficult game and harder in general. Do you agree with that statement? Do you think it's maybe a little unfounded, or was that difficulty sort of intentional? Did you craft it intentionally into the game, or is it a byproduct of, like you were talking about, the complexity of the game?

Hristo Petkov: It's more about complexity, actually. Well, this is not my opinion, but we have discussed it with the community a lot, but the game is not more difficult than Gloomhaven, but it is hard to get into because of the complexity level at the beginning. When you get to know the game, it's actually, I would say, slightly easier than Gloomhaven, but early on, when you're not familiar with the complexity of the classes, because even the first six classes are much more complex than even the most complex classes in Gloomhaven.

So, it's kind of hard to get. This is one of the biggest challenges we're having: being able to onboard people.

Q. I'm sure. It is a really difficult line to walk between something that's really interesting and fun to play and something that the average person can understand how to play. A lot of people won't want to put in the time to kind of get to a point where something is enjoyable to play, depending on how complicated it might be.

Hristo Petkov: We added several things that alleviate this to a degree. So we added an easier difficulty from the board game. Of course, players don't want to play at the easiest difficulty, but if they do, I think it's much more forgiving, and you can enjoy the game much more. It's still not easy, but it is much easier than the board game. And also, we added a new campaign that introduces a lot of the new mechanics from Frosthaven.

So, if you're not familiar, you've played a little bit of Gloomhaven, maybe this will be great for you. It's like four missions. It is relatively fast, like a couple of hours, and it really helps. Hopefully, we'll have more of those in the future.

Q: That was definitely something I wanted to sort of ask about. So, the Road to Frosthaven is sort of like the new introductory tutorial-type beginning of the game.

Hristo Petkov: I wouldn't say it's exactly a tutorial because it's not really tutorialized, but it was tailored in a way that it introduces a lot of the new stuff. It is a real mission. It's not really a hand-holding tutorial or anything like that. Some of those are actually hard. You can play them on the highest difficulty. It's pretty hard. They're like, let's say 10% to 15% easier than the first mission. But we cannot make them much easier because it doesn't make sense.

If you go through the Road to Frosthaven, and then you jump into the main campaign, and you cannot pass the first mission, that will be very demoralizing. So, we cannot really drop the bar so low, right? It is very good for people who have no problem with the complexity of Gloomhaven. It just gradually increases through these four missions and introduces new mechanics, new mission types, and so on.

Q. Gotcha. Awesome. We're going to shift gears a little bit here. I've seen a lot, as I did in my research, and this came up in every complaint I found that was somehow related to this. One issue that was really brought up was the UI and how there are some problems with it. Many of the complaints seem to say that it was clunky and that the card descriptions were either not accurate or not descriptive enough. Is that receiving a sizable change with the release of 1.0?

Hristo Petkov: I think a lot of this changed through early access. But yes, when it comes to UI, it is our biggest focus, and part of the reason for the delay is actually that we want to put more effort into the polish of the UI. Our policy when it comes to early access, and in the video we have very few of the things that we have done where it's a huge list of things we have done during early access, but it's not; it was not only content and feedback and bug fixing.

We introduced a lot of quality-of-life stuff, and it was mostly focused on UI and exactly the things that people were complaining about. One of the biggest complaints about the cards specifically was the iconography because, initially, we changed some of the iconography to something more familiar to a digital audience, but it was a mistake. Arguably, because a lot of the board game audience was so familiar and so used to the board game symbols, we decided to back down on this basically, and we changed a lot of those back to the board game versions.

Of course, some of them left with the new ones because they don't really look like digital icons. For example, invisibility or regeneration. Regeneration was a pink hand, which doesn't really say regeneration to me, but when it comes to the cards, I think we completely reworked them. They're very close to the board game now, so people are pretty happy with them. When it comes to the UI as a whole, there is still a lot to do. We have a huge list of stuff to improve.

To answer a little bit more of the question of why it was that way. This game, as I said, when it comes to complexity, is really hard in a way that we don't want to break the gameplay too much, but there are so many decisions that if we introduce them as they are in the board game, you won't be able to play. The game will ask you about something every 3 seconds, and you won't be able to play. So we needed to find a way to actually find a middle ground of actually skipping some of those decisions for you and giving you enough freedom to express yourself. And really, we did this with several features in the only way that made sense for this game, which was basically to make an option, and you can tailor your experience.

If you want the game to stop every second, you can do it. You can make your own decisions. There are other things that we want to introduce as options, so you can customize your game, and I think this is the best way to do it. And when it comes to what's left as a big thing, that is a problem, from my perspective, with the UI experience, is when the game is stopping, and you don't know what it wants from you. For example, somebody died, and some of your abilities are triggered, right? But it was not your turn, and the game waits for you to decide something.

But it's not very obvious what happened. And this sometimes leads to confusion. People are saying, "UI is bad. I cannot understand what's happening." This is something that we are addressing for 1.0 for sure. And it's currently in development, but we need a couple more months to do that.

Q. Fantastic. That's a great answer. So it sounds like walking that line between lifting the board game to the digital realm because they're not one-to-one. A board game and a video game operate very differently. Could you maybe run me through some of the difficulties you guys ran into with having the game stop every few seconds and your solution to that? Was there anything else sort of like that which maybe got in your way while you were developing, or kind of going through how Frosthaven works as a game?

Hristo Petkov: Yeah, I think one of the biggest concerns was what information we are providing to the players. When you're playing the board game, you have all the information, but at the same time, it's overwhelming, right? Because there is way too much stuff to do and way too many things to manage. So the hard part here was to find what is the most essential information that people want at their fingertips immediately, and what we can hide a little bit behind the interface.

All the information is still accessible to everybody, but we don't want to clutter your interface with all the information because you won't be able to actually play. What we did was because, obviously, it's hard to fix it without trying. We actually tried to hide more information than we should, and, of course, the feedback came, and people said "I want this to be easier. I want this to be easier to access" and so on.

And we tried to fine-tune it to a degree that it's really just the essential information you have that allows you to play the game properly. And if you're a hardcore player, you still have the option to actually access this information and make your calculations and all of that. This was another approach that we were taking, and it wasn't possible without the community, really, because it was completely different when we tried it in the office, because we already know how things work, and it really helped having the community.

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Q. Yeah, I'm sure. I definitely see that a lot with the devs I end up talking to. They're like, "Yeah, it's nice to have player feedback because we already know everything. So there's a pretty big disconnect between how you go about making yourself feel like you don't know, because you already do, and most devs are gamers, so you know we're all kind of competitive. We all want to win. Nobody wants to lose." That's a really interesting sort of turn for that to have taken. So early access was definitely the right choice. I have a question for both of you to answer. There are a lot of major changes coming with 1.0. I mean that list was like 10 things long, and then it left off with more. So there are probably things I don't even know. Are there any real major changes coming to 1.0 that stand out or that you're both pretty excited for players to maybe get their hands on?

Hristo Petkov: That's a tough one. That's a tough one because I needed I need to open my list. There is a big list of things that we want to do for 1.0. I'm not sure exactly how many of them will actually be able to land in 1.0, but we are currently focusing on stability mostly, and some of the things that I just said, with the different quality-of-life improvements on player flow of action during the game. And there are several similar things that I really don't want to talk too much about, mostly because I'm not completely sure what is going on and what is not.

The main focus is to finish the content for the game and to make it as bug-free and basically stable as possible. This is the main goal. So, among other things, we'll get in as much quality-of-life stuff as possible. I cannot really say which ones, but your question is what I'm most excited about. It's basically what I just talked about, which we call a player reaction module. When a player needs to react to something, the game needs to stop and throw something in your face to tell you that this happened. Now you need to make a decision.

And why is this a big thing? Because it is very interconnected. It can come from different ability cards. It can come from scenarios, from items, from many things in the game. So, it's a very tedious process, but I think it will be very useful for all players. I think this is the one I'm most excited about.

Julian Gollop: To play the final build. There are many, many quality-of-life improvements going into this stage, which I think is going to be noticeable for players when it's released. So this is when we get to that once Hristo has made his way through the big list with the team.

Hristo Petkov: It's hard to say because it's a big list of small things.

Julian Gollop: Yeah, I know. I know it is. But I mean, it would be great just to see the reaction at launch. To add, I mean, we're not going to stop supporting the game after launch, by the way. Even though it's the big 1.0. It's not the end of the road as far as we're concerned. So, let's see. We'll get a bigger player base, and we'll get, I'm sure, a lot more feedback and comments and opinions.

Hristo Petkov: I'm pretty sure players are also, as we are, excited about what the future holds, because there are obviously many things that players want post 1.0, but we'll see.

Q. I had that as one of my questions because I know Gloomhaven got post-game DLC. So, I was going to ask about that, but it sounds like I've got an answer for that.

Hristo Petkov: Well, you don't have an answer. The answer is we want to, and there are a lot of examples of things, very obvious things that can go into DLC's. One of the most requested things from the players, for example, is for the Gloomhaven 2.0 characters to be playable in Frosthaven. We are not against any of this, but only the future will tell if this will happen or not. We don't have a real answer yet.

Julian Gollop: We can neither confirm nor deny anything that you might have suggested, one of which is requested, which we would like to do. We would like to do more things. We just can't really say what they are because there's no guarantee that those would be the ones that would be chosen by us, Isaac, the publisher, whatever. So, yeah, let's see.

Hristo Petkov: Yeah. A lot of people are involved in deciding. If you ask the team, the team wants to continue developing it.

Q. That's awesome. I get it. You've got to give the public relations answer. I understand. They're here. I know they're listening. That's awesome, though. Yeah. I always really like it when teams are really excited about the product they make because it gives me a lot more confidence in what they're making. I know there have definitely been some games that you could tell were like, "Oh man, they did not have a good time making this." But I definitely love the enthusiasm, and I really love hearing that there's going to be more. Because more is always good, because we're gamers and we're little addicts. I've got a few more questions. Are there any plans to bring Frosthaven to console? From what I have, it's only coming out on Steam and Epic. I'm pretty sure the original is out on everything, as far as I know, but the internet may have lied to me.

Hristo Petkov: You'll get the PR answer here. So, basically, no, we are currently focusing on the PC version. Yes, the original Gloomhaven is on multiple platforms. But it happened later.

Julian Gollop: Yeah. I mean, we certainly have the capability to do cross-platform development. We've released games on Xbox and PlayStation as well. And it's kind of something that we can do. It just needs to probably be something that will follow the release.

Hristo Petkov: When it comes to how we set up our development, it is completely possible. The UI is set up in a way that it can relatively easily go to console. So it's not impossible, but it's a topic to discuss after release.

Julian Gollop: It's still a big challenge. And again, it's down to the UI basically. And yes, with such a complex game and complex UI, is even more difficult to implement this well on a console.

Q: Isn't that the truth? Curse those console players and their controllers.

Hristo Petkov: No, we are not cursing them. They're great players. Everybody is a great player. But yeah, consoles are going to be discussed after release.

Q: Okay, awesome. I love hearing that there's a thought about it at all. That's always nice.

Hristo Petkov: Of course, this is normally one of the bigger questions people are asking.

Q. I'm sure. They're a pretty sizable chunk of the player base at this point. We'll move away from that so we can get to an actual answer instead of PR. I've got one fun one and then another one to kind of close us out. Do you guys have any favorite heroes? And if you do, why are they your favorite?

You may encounter spoilers in the answers below.

Julian Gollop: Well, my favorite one is the Banner Spear because it's simply the one I've spent the most time playing. I don't know, because I also like the design of the character as well. My experience with some of them is extremely limited, and I still haven't played some of them either because I haven't reached them. So, Hristo could probably give you a better answer.

Hristo Petkov: It's a tough one for me. There is a very easy win for me from the first of the first six characters, which are the starting characters, and this is the Deathwalker. The reason is that, generally, I like more of a caster character, and her gimmick with the shadows teleporting to shadows and attacking through shadows. It's very cool and strategic, which really resonates with me, because some of the other starting characters are also like this. But she's kind of self-sufficient to a degree.

She doesn't really require a lot of help from the other characters, and she has a lot of strategic decision-making and managing the shadows and so on. That's why I like her from the starting characters. As compared to the other characters, it is a little bit trickier because I need to talk with keywords, because the community is very secretive about unlockable content in the game. I think I have several that I really like a lot, but I think the Drill is the one that I like a lot because it has a very unique class mechanic.

It's hard to go too much into detail without spoiling, but basically, it has this mechanic of pressure building pressure up and pressure down, and different abilities have different effects depending on the level of pressure you have. There are four levels of pressure. So it's very intricate how you need to set up your turn so you're at a certain level of pressure to execute the thing that you want to execute. It's a very, very tricky character.

Q: It sounds like there are a lot of really interesting mechanics, which gets me pretty excited.

Hristo Petkov: This is one big change from Gloomhaven to Frosthaven, by the way. Each character has its own mechanic. They're very unique. So this is something that adds to the complexity, because when you learn one character, and you start a new character, it's basically completely different. That's the tricky part. There are a lot more gauges, right? Different resources that they use, and so on. UI problems again.

Q. Darn it, the UI. It's just that there are so many complicated things to make sense of. That's cool, though. I think that's really interesting, and it kind of leads into my next question. I know I like it when tactical RPGs offer a certain level of replayability, where maybe if I play the game with different character sets, if I play it in a different style, or have a different setup with my characters or whatever. That offers a lot of ways to replay the game. Is the same sort of replayability available here in Frosthaven, or is it more like you'll play through it once, and you can play through it again with friends, but for the most part it's going to be pretty linear?

Hristo Petkov: There are two ways that I would explain how replayability, in a way, works. In Frosthaven, like in Gloomhaven, when a character finishes their personal quest, they retire, and you need to start a new character. So, each playthrough, you can have a different combination of characters playing through the game. Okay, this is one thing. Second thing, you can replay scenarios with quests. You can replay quests throughout the game.

Go back, collect rewards that you couldn't get the first time, for example, a chest or something like that. And there are reasons to replay quests. Apart from this, you can farm for resources and so on. And the third one is that the game is not linear. It's not completely different every time, but there are choices that you make that change the quests that you can finish. So, if you make certain choices, you cut yourself off from actually finishing the other part.

If you go with these guys, you won't see these 15 quests. The game has 137 quests in total, but in one playthrough, you will probably see something like 60. You probably won't be able to see more than half. So it does take several playthroughs to actually go through all the different types. It's not Baldur's Gate, but it still has its branching moments.

Q. Not every game is going to be Baldur's Gate. No way. It's not possible. That sounds really cool. The conversations happening online just didn't seem to arrive at a very unified sort of point. It's really interesting that it's sort of linear in a sense, but there are choices you can make where it'll alternate and sort of change how things go. That's a really fun way to do it. Gives you a little more purpose for playing it again, especially with different heroes and them retiring. We're just barely over time. This is the first time that's ever happened to me. I like to give one last sort of: Is there anything you'd like to include? Anything you want to shout out to the players? Anything that you want them to know before everything's said and done?

Hristo Petkov: From my perspective, I want to make sure the players know that these two months will not be wasted. We really want to make the best out of the time we have and to provide them with the best experience possible.

Julian Gollop: Well, I mean, this is the most ambitious and complex board game adaptation in the history of computer gaming and probably forevermore into the future as well. So, it is a landmark event, and I'm looking forward to it.

That's all the information anyone gets for now until Frosthaven finally releases on October 15th, 2026. You can still jump into the Early Access period to get a feel for things before launch, but things are looking great for the future.