I have a question about how frost tokens should be applied to heroes and allies in The Frozen Wastes expansion when using foraged clothing such as the Sabercat Pelt. There are a ton of challange cards in this expansion with text such as "Activate Sabercat Pelt to cancel 1 (frost icon)." Is this meant to be interpreted as treat the weather tile as if it was one number less -- therefore giving one less frost token to each hero and ally? Or, is it meant to be interpreted as your hero and each of his two allies take a frost counter and the pelt will prevent exactly one counter from being applied to one character of your choosing?

I guess either interpretation would be acceptable as long as it was decided upon before the game started and was applied consistantly. Problem is, it only ever seems to come up the first time somebody tries to use the item and the guy with two expensive allies insists it should prevent a frost from hitting each of his characters and they guy playing the yeti hero with zero allies feels that it should only protect against one token.

Last time we just compromised and said that one item could only protect a single character against the frost, but if you had multiple items, each of your allies could wear one too. Anyway, this made sense from a thematic standpoint that if you had 3 winter coats, why shouldn't 3 characters wear them instead of one guy wearing a coat and letting the other two freeze. I realize that this is a violation of item activation limits, but it worked out well enough and we still didn't allow a single character to wear 2 coats for example.

But in any case, back to my original question -- should one coat protect your entire party, or are your allies meant to be half dead popcicles by the time they trek across the frozen wastes to the Green Vale?

My thinking: it's all in the wording. If it were altering the weather, it would specify it is altering the weather (giving -1 frost). The wording it uses is much closer to preventing wounds. Basically, you activate the card to prevent 1 frost from a character.

Unless the rules say there's a special way to handle these effects, I would treat them the same as preventing wounds.

Nematode said:

Forage Items are described at page 8 of the rulebook. The most interesting statement is:

Forage Items follow the same rules as normal Items, and can be lost or stolen.

This means that they produce the effect of their activation once. If they cancel 1 Frost damage, they cancel it on the Hero or one of the Allies, since there's no limitation to the Hero like other items (e.g.Chainmail). This means also that they are "Activated" and the normal rules are that you can activate only 1 item per game Step. I know that Frost tokens are applied during the Survival Step, which doesn't exist in the base game and doesn't receive a specific limitation for item activation, but since in the Movement and Market step you activate 1 item max. and in the Adventure Step you activate 1 item Before Combat and 1 item per combat round, I think that Survival Step should follow the same ruling for Movement and Market steps.

You activate one Forage Item per Survival Step and it's effect could be applied either to the Hero or one of the Allies. Discard to use Forage Item (such as the Liver) have no limitation as usual.

Your proposal of allowing each person in your Hero's team to wear a Forage coat item is a nice house rule. But I think that it's still very difficult that your Hero and Allies are half dead when they reach Green Vale, unless they travel too soon, unprepared and unwisely. There are lots of ways to avoid Frost and White Death, to travel faster and to recover. You need to be careful when planning the journey.

Thanks for the replies. From a logical standpoint, I guess it just bothered me that my selfish hero should horde all the cold weather clothing while letting his allies freeze. I guess I should just accept it as a game mechanic to make allies (or at least cheaper allies) less useful in this particular adventure. In the several games that my group played, nobody ever actually fought the final boss anyway. Somebody always managed to recover the princess long before anybody felt prepared to face him in combat. This made it something of a moot point whether or not the allies were in good shape to fight after crossing the frozen waste. It was interresting to note though that in each game the winner was a strong solo fighter who made little or no use of allies. The players who did use a lot of allies tended to either hang closer to the towns or spend money healing their allies -- either one of which slowed their progress.

Nematode said:

Also in base Runebound Allies tend to be less and less important for the final battle(s). They can't do damage to Red challenges, so they are conveniently used as "meat shields" to avoid damage for the Hero. I won't care to have healthy Allies if I'm going to fight Arshan; I need to be sure that I can withstand enough rounds with my Hero only, since the Allies will be wasted in one or two rounds, no matter if they are frozen or not.

However, it is true that the harsh climate makes Allies less worthy in this Expansion; the low-health Allies that are so handy (Burning Priest, Acolyte of Flame, Rune Seeker) tend to be easily killed or weakened by White Death. Spending time and money to heal them could be costly. I think this is the main reason for the introduction of Legendary Items cards; these boosts are needed considering that you cannot rely on Allies very much. Moreover, the Allies in this deck may not be the best ones, but they're often resistant to Frost.

I played two times with Frozen Wastes and always won, first game with Karnon (intercepting Laughin' Buldar that was reaching Green Vale with the Princess, then retrieved and brought home the Princess myself) and second game with Okaluk and Rakash (this one I reached Green Vale and crushed Arshan). I never relied too much on Allies, except the always excellent Sir Gareth the Black.