Surprise: Gloomhaven creator announces new, revised Second Edition

Gloomhaven, the wildly popular dungeon crawling board game from Cephalofair Games, will soon have a real role-playing game on the table, as well as a set of over 600 new miniatures. Polygon has learned that, in addition to those main products, the Backerkit campaign also offers the option of pre-ordering Gloomhaven: Second Editiona newly revised version of the original award-winning board game that has been in production for a while.

Polygon spoke to creator Isaac Childres to learn more about the ambitious multi-product crowdfunding campaign and why it’s so important to him to make changes to his breakthrough hit. But first, some details on what fans can expect in the new box.

According to Childres, the overhaul of the original game goes incredibly deep thanks to the help of project leaders Drew Penn and Dennis Vögele. Starting with the modular map tiles themselves, longtime fans will see clarified, revised, and otherwise improved art and graphic design everywhere. Mechanically, the game’s many character classes have also been tweaked and completely rebalanced in several instances.

Image: Cephalofair Games

Image: Cephalofair Games

“There’s obviously been a lot of feedback from the community over the years,” Childres said. “We kind of aligned everything to make [classes] they all feel pretty much the same, but also still feel fun to play – even more fun to play in some cases.

Childres proclaimed the Nightshroud, long considered an overpowered character class, as just one example of the changes awaiting die-hard players.

“It’s nice to be invisible and kill everything super easy,” said Childres, “but it gets old after a while, so we made the Nightshroud fun and easy to play, rather than cheesy.”

But perhaps the most substantial changes to the game can be found in its storyline and deeper lore, which historically played second fiddle to the franchise’s unique card-based combat mechanics.

“We basically rewrote everything,” Childres said. “We caused this conflict […] between the merchants and the army in the foreground of the story.”

In the revised version of the game, players will feel more empowered to share their fate with one of three different factions, including the military, the merchants, and the demons. Then, through their actions, players can bring their favorite faction to power in the city of Gloomhaven. When that happens, Childres said, the in-game perks and the opportunity for unique quests and missions will be more substantive than before.

“We tried to integrate [factions] better in the story and in the mechanics [of the game],” said Childres. “When you reach that ultimate goal with a faction, you get to open an envelope and there’s a bunch of new stuff inside that you can play with.”

Along with that complete rewrite, Childres has also taken the opportunity to go back to the game’s many fantastic ancestors and make amends for what he considers mistakes and disdain against real groups that inspired them.

“Besides all the balance problems with Gloomhavensaid Childres,[these have] was also a big, personal eyesore – the kind of tropey nature of much of the writing in the original Gloomhaven and the characterization of some of the ancestors there, where there were obvious parallels to real ethnicities that didn’t sit well with many people.

As announced for Gloomhaventhe sequel, Frost harbor, Childres has worked closely with cultural consultants to align this revised edition with the kinds of values ​​he wants to express in his work. The Inox, for example, have changed dramatically so that they no longer, even casually, diminish the Native American and First Nation peoples.

“At this point, I’m a little embarrassed that it’s still out in the public eye,” Childres said. “It also goes hand in hand with the development of the RPG. All the knowledge that is written from the RPG is also super important, and we can draw from that as well.

Gloomhaven: Second Edition will also feature newly designed miniatures – multi-part sculptures with even greater detail and dynamic poses – just like the miniatures planned for the RPG line. Childres said updated minis for the original Gloomhaven will be for sale themselves. But, unlike other massively successful campaign-style crowdfunded games like Kingdom of Death: Monster, there won’t be a standalone conversion box that owners of the original game can purchase to update their setup. The changes, Childres said, are just too deep.

Cephalofair will launch its next crowdfunding campaign, inclusive Gloomhaven: Second Editionon Backerkit from June 20. Fans can sign up to be notified – more than 55,800 have already done so, making this the most subscribed launch of a crowdfunding campaign on any platform to date.

“It’s crazy to think about,” Childres said of his campaign’s popularity. “I try not to think about it too much. There’s just so many people clamoring to get on this, and we’re just working on making it the best crowdfunding experience we can and then have a good time with it.