Few games in recent years have made an impact on the scene quite like Cephalofair’s dungeon crawling mega-hit Gloomhaven. Matt Thrower caught up with the game’s designer Isaac Childres to discuss both its success and its newly released sequel Frosthaven.
Gloomhaven is a phenomenon. Coming out of nowhere on the back of a 2015 Kickstarter it has become an all-conquering ur-game. Acclaimed by critics and players alike, it spans multiple genres by marrying the depth of a strategic board game with the narrative of a role-playing dungeon crawl. It’s seen multiple reprints, despite a high retail price, and has spawned a prequel, a sequel and successful PC adaptation.
The game’s designer, Isaac Childres, was startled by its success. ‘I wasn’t thinking too hard about genres or breaking new ground,’ he says. ‘I was just trying to make the game as fun as possible. Just simple decisions of “is this fun or not?”’ Still, while Childres might not have set out to create such a diverse melting pot, he’s aware that’s what he created. ‘That's a reasonable characterization,’ he admits.
The game grew out of Childres’ enthusiasm for role-playing games. ‘If you give me a dungeon filled with monsters and tell me to run around killing them all, I'm probably going to have a good time,’ he laughs. ‘What I think is nice about them is that even without other ingredients, any dungeon game can be fun, if not great, due to its very nature.’
Yet despite this, Childres shared the same common frustrations with role-playing that many players have. ‘In a roleplaying game, someone always has to DM, and that someone is always inevitably me,’ he says. ‘Being a good DM requires a lot of preparation. With a board game, you can just break it out and play, which is nice.’
But that’s not the only reason. Prior to Gloomhaven, Childres designed and published another game, Forge War. With its fantasy theme paired with a heavy engine-building system this could be seen as a dry run for its successor and marked its designer as someone with a keen interest in exploring tactics and strategies, things not often found in role-playing games.
‘Every RPG I've encountered relies heavily on dice rolling to resolve combat and skill checks and everything else,’ he complains. ‘I understand why, as asking players to engage in deeper gameplay can take away from the primary goal of an RPG, which is the roleplaying aspect. But that is a definite turn-off for me. I enjoy roleplaying, but I wouldn't mind some deeper gameplay alongside. An emphasis on choice over randomness. Deep character progression. Variability through monster types, dungeon goals, and playable characters. And a campaign world that feels alive and is affected by the choices you make. All the ingredients I added to Gloomhaven’
Hence Gloomhaven’s winning combination of cooperation, rich strategy and wordy narrative, so central to its success. What’s surprising, though, is how few titles had even attempted that combination before, let alone done so successfully.
‘They are very different skill sets, so finding someone who can execute both may be rare,’ Childres muses. ‘But game development teams can have multiple people with different skill sets, so it shouldn't be hard to combine them.’
This begs the question of just why there hasn’t then been more cross-pollination. ‘I think it goes back to the old dichotomy of Eurogames versus American games,’ Childres says. ‘These were two different cultures of games that developed for a long time independent from each other. And I'm not saying I'm the first, but it seems that Gloomhaven got in there early enough and executed it well enough to emerge as a prime example of merging narrative and heavy strategy. Certainly, since Gloomhaven, we've seen a lot more games successfully blend the two. A lot of Awakened Realms stuff, and Descent: Legends in the Dark is a great example as well.’
When creating Gloomhaven Childres drew on ideas from established games as well as his own creativity. He’s also a particular fan of multi-use cards. ‘They’re a big thing. Glory to Rome and whatnot. The idea that your cards can do multiple things and it is up to you to decide on the best way to use them.’
But there’s one in particular he feels he owes a debt to. ‘The event cards in Robinson Crusoe inspired the event cards in Gloomhaven. That idea that you could make a decision, and then something could get shuffled back into the deck for you to encounter later. But that is more of a narrative thing than a strategy thing.’
Narrative isn’t the only aspect of role-playing that enthuses Childres. ‘I've dabbled a lot in making my own worlds running games,’ he says. But the setting of Gloomhaven didn’t come out of a role-playing campaign: rather it was designed specifically for the game, something that may be obvious from its stridently non-Tolkeinian setting.
‘We've all seen enough elves and dwarves and orcs in our fantasy,’ Childres smiles. Yet despite the depth of the narrative presented in Gloomhaven and its spin-off games, the setting wouldn’t leave its designer alone. ‘I got a little invested in it,’ he admits. ‘I wanted to keep exploring it and just bring people deeper into its story.’
The result is his newest game, Frosthaven, another colossal cooperative box of strategy and adventure set in the same world. Childres chose to launch it on Kickstarter again despite that platform being very different from when he raised funds for the original game. Back then, it was still very much an environment where niche projects could find funding and prosper. Using it again, as a well established and acclaimed designer, emphasises the way it has changed to become a playground for bigger publishers.
‘If I had launched that [Gloomhaven] campaign now, it most certainly would just get crushed,’ Childres admits. ‘You have to have a really polished project and a large audience to get noticed now, which is unfortunate because both those things cost a lot, and Kickstarter should be about raising money rather than spending money.’
But he still needed the platform to get Frosthaven funded. ‘It wasn't about trying to offset production risks,’ he explains. ‘Even with the huge success of Gloomhaven, we wouldn't have had the capital to print and ship the number of copies we wanted to make without the Kickstarter funds.’
You might imagine that given the amount of play time you could get out of the original box, appetite for another huge set might be limited. But the passion of the game’s fanbase remains undimmed and the Kickstarter for Frosthaven almost reached a cool thirteen million dollars. Childres is honest that only a proportion of those backers will have finished Gloomhaven. ‘Maybe a quarter,’ he estimates. ‘And that seems like a very optimistic guess.’
Some players have proven to be very dedicated, however. ‘At Gen Con, someone came up and told me that they've run through the Gloomhaven campaign seven times,’ Childres says. ‘In truth, Gloomhaven wasn't designed as a game that you were expected to necessarily finish... Obviously, there's a final boss and an ending but I saw it as more of a world that people could just sit down and explore, and there was always some new thing hiding around the corner that you hadn't seen yet. That was the exciting part for me.’
Childres’ zeal for creating worlds and sharing them with others shines through our whole interview. ‘Big, expansive worlds are one of the things I am most passionate about,’ he admits. ‘So when I started working on a sequel, that's immediately what made sense to me. I wanted to make another giant playground for people to explore.’
This is the reason he opted for a big-box sequel rather than another smaller spin-off set like Gloomhaven’s prequel Jaws of the Lion. ‘That’s a great product that I am really proud of, but it isn't everything that Gloomhaven is,’ Childres explains. ‘The campaign isn't nearly as expansive and a lot of the legacy elements like retirement had to be cut out.’
Communicating such a novel world through the static, impersonal medium of a board game seems a difficult task, but Childres feels it has its advantages. ‘If you look at Forge War, I did go with a lot of fantasy tropes because it was a Euro game and the only way to really communicate the theme was through quest titles, which was very limited,’ he opines. ‘If you're making a narrative-based game, I'd argue that you want to do the opposite. You don't want to just fall into the standard stereotypes and tropes because you want to provide your players with a narrative that is fresh, and you have the space to fully communicate it. I'm not saying Gloomhaven wasn't without its tropes, but I'm still working on improving, and I think Frosthaven is going to be much better in that regard.’
Of course, there’s more to Frosthaven than just a new narrative. While it retains the core mechanics of the original, it’s packed with fresh ideas and mechanics. ‘We have 17 new character classes that play very differently from all the classes in previous games,’ he says. ‘Plus more monsters and more varied scenarios.’
Childres is confident that there’s enough novelty inside to offer new challenges to veteran players. This is a bold claim that benefits from an example. ‘A common theme through a lot of the classes is the use and management of additional resources,’ Childres offers.
‘The Blinkblade has time tokens, the Deathwalker has shadows, the Boneshaper uses their health very much as a separate resource. Adding in these other resources creates a lot more strategic decisions because there's an extra layer to think about. I also really tried to dig down into the mechanics and more fully explore them. You can see this in the Drifter, who is all about managing their persistent limited-use bonuses, and the Banner Spear, who is all about setting up positioning with their allies.’
One of the other core additions is well trailered: the addition of a crafting system. This involves not only gathering resources to craft items but building an entire settlement in the frozen wastes. As players add new facilities to their growing outpost they’ll unlock new powers and paths within the game’s narrative.
Between them these additions elevate the downtime between dungeon adventures into a comprehensive and engaging aspect of play in itself. Other new features though are less well advertised.
‘The calendar system is another prominent mechanic,’ Childres explains. ‘Like I was saying earlier about shuffling event cards back into the deck, there's still a lot of that, but it can be very random when that event pops up again. Sometimes it made more sense to specify exactly when some story element was going to pop up again. So now, sometimes you'll get prompts from events or scenarios that say to put section X into the calendar in Y weeks.’
As ever, the calendar started as a narrative addition rather than a strategic one. ‘The goal is to, through events, really make the players feel an ebb and flow to the defense of the outpost,’ Childres says. ‘The calendar is important for the flow of seasons throughout the game, progressing from summer to winter and back again. You can build up in the summer, but then you're going to get hammered by events in the winter so that you will celebrate when summer finally arrives again.’
Frosthaven also builds on ideas first found in Gloomhaven’s spin-offs and expansions such as the additional story details found in Forgotten Circles. In Frosthaven that means the inclusion of a 200 page section book which, in addition to adding detail, melds the narrative and strategic aspects of the game.
‘Very often when you do anything impactful in the game, you'll be directed to this section book to read some snippet of narrative and then also get some mechanical reward,’ Childres explains. ‘So the section book really ties everything together in terms of telling the story of this outpost and its survival under harsh conditions.’
Together, Childres is confident this is more than enough to keep players of the original invested in the new box. ‘Even without the new mechanics, I would say all the content itself is novel enough to motivate players to explore it,’ he says.
‘And I'm really hoping that the stronger narrative and all the new town-building and calendar stuff will get people even more excited to play through a scenario, do meaningful things with the stuff they've collected from the scenario, and follow along with all the different threads of the story.’
For all the new material, Frosthaven also preserves what’s best about the original game. As well as the core mechanics, that includes its clever spin on cooperation which sees players keeping individual money pools. Getting treasure in the game demands players waste critical actions to do so, creating a fascinating dichotomy between the needs of the group and those of individual players. This helps give everyone individual motivations and creates an uneasy cooperative dynamic that’s unique to the game.
‘I feel like that just came naturally,’ Childres recalls. ‘It's pretty common in role-playing groups to have a little friendly rivalry going on. Who did the most damage, who got the most loot, that sort of thing. And it just made sense to foster that a bit.’
It also allowed him to explore a genre he’s curious about. ‘There's also some influence from semi-coop games like Dead of Winter or Battlestar Galactica. It's a very interesting genre, but it's an extremely hard line to walk, because it always has to come down to the binary of did you win or did you lose?’
Childres feels that the cooperative nature of Gloomhaven and Frosthaven helped him solve that problem. ‘With a campaign game, things can become much more granular because your progress is simply carried over to the next game,’ he continues. ‘If you got more loot than your friends, that has a meaningful advantage for you in future games, even if you all still technically won as a group.’
Even after all the work he’s put it to developing these games and their settings, he’s not done yet. ‘We recognize that there are people who just are just there for the gameplay and don't need the commitment of the giant campaign,’ he says. ‘So we might do something similar to Jaws of the Lion again in the future.’
But perhaps the ultimate sign of his commitment is that Childres continues to delight in his own creation. ‘The new Descent was executed well,’ he admits. ‘I enjoyed the gameplay of that and the narrative was really strong. But in terms of dungeon games is it weird to say that Gloomhaven fully scratches that itch for me?’
Frosthaven is out now from cephalofair.com
This feature originally appeared in Wyrd Science Vol.1, Issue 4 (April '23)