If you thought fully cooperative fantasy adventure games with cardboard standees began with Gloomhaven (Cephalofair), think again! Michael Menzel's Legends of Andor made its first appearance fully five years ahead of Gloomhaven in 2012, and it won the Kennerspiel des Jahres award in 2013. It was first published in English by Fantasy Flight Games but publication was subsequently taken over by Kosmos, and it's Kosmos who have published all the sequel games. With last year's Frosthaven, Cephalofair were certainly first with the frost: The Eternal Frost instalment is the fourth game in the Legends of Andor series.
Like all the previous instalments, The Eternal Frost is a standalone sequel. You don't need the original game to play. And like the previous Legends of Andor sequels, the 2-4 players will be working together to resolve a quest as set out in the cards that set out the story that forms each adventure. You'll be playing as an archetypical fantasy hero, and each comes in male or female alternative versions. You'll be moving between adjacent spaces on the board, picking up face-down tokens that can give you a boon or a penalty, and you'll be fending off the various monsters you'll encounter. All the while you'll be working through the story of the quest. You'll need to make use of your character's special abilities and optimise your actions because there's a game timer that can tick away at your action and movement range as it advances.
The Eternal Frost is recognisably very similar to its predecessors but, as with the other sequels, it isn't merely more of the same: there are tweaks to the rules that vary the gameplay enough to make things feel reasonably fresh. Veterans of the previous games in the series will notice that ranged combat has disappeared: the archer character has been replaced by the Keeper of the Fire. In this frost-themed game, ending your turn by a fire will increase your 'willpower' (in effect, your health). There is no gold in this iteration of the game: instead you need to trade items with the merchant: potentially an extra use for those tokens you pick up during your exploration. There were criticisms of previous sequels that they placed too much emphasis on gathering food to survive. Andor veterans will be pleased to know that that's not a concern in The Eternal Frost.
Critics of the Legends of Andor games complain that there are only four or five quests in each box. That's true here too but that seems to be criticising the game for incorporating an interesting story. There's nothing stopping you from replaying quests - just as you can re-play other board games where the creators haven't incorporated a story to follow. The Legends of Andor series has been a great success over the past decade, and The Eternal Frost shows it still has legs. Evidently, Kosmos and Michael Menzel must be doing something right!