Gloomhaven’s sequel is so big they hired a submarine engineer to fit it inside the box
The original campaign game-in-a-box, Gloomhaven, is a big beefy boy – and I don’t just mean the 100 encounters that come with it. The thing weighs a ton and barely comes in at 18 pounds. The sequel, Frost harbor, just finished shipping to lenders, and it’s even bigger. Well, I should say heavier: while the box is only slightly larger than the original, it weighs almost twice as much – an impressive 35.6 poundsor about the same as 16 copies of Clue.
So how did Cephalofair Games cram all that cardboard and plastic, including over 2,500 cards and a 2.5-inch-tall stack of 27 punchboards?
They hired a retired submarine engineer.
No really.
“I did my bachelor’s work [Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute]said Matt Healey in a recent interview with Polygon. “When I was at RPI, I got a co-op summer job for the Department of the Navy, and I did all sorts of underwater acoustic research to find ‘large submerged metal cylindrical objects.'”
“It’s not easy to find people with underwater acoustics skills,” Healey continued. “And so I have two years [General Dynamics] Electric boatand then I switched to Electro-dynamic. And what they were working on was very, very high horsepower, very low rpm electric motors.
Those specially designed electric motors were intended for use in submarines, and Healey had to spend a lot of time positioning giant magnets and coils of wire. just like that to make them work properly. Towards the end of his time as a military contractor, he said his team’s design could potentially “reduce the submarine’s length by between 10 and 20 feet,” leaving more room inside for… you know … other things .
Years later, well into his retirement, Healey turned his government contracts into a side business building board game packs. His company, Mess-AXP game insertshas worked on some of the industry’s most complex games, including Catharsis, Forgotten depthsAnd City Builder: Old World.
But why didn’t they just make the box bigger? As it turns out, while most domestic shipping is largely based on weight, the price of international shipping is more dependent on volume. So when Cephalofair filled its container ships with copies of its next popular board game, a smaller box meant a lower overall bill for freight.
That made Healey’s skills especially useful during the shipping container shortage that began during the pandemic.
“Informed [of the container shortage]”Prices went from $5,000 to $25,000 per container,” Cephalofair founder Isaac Childres told Polygon. and early 2022. But thanks to good timing and Healey’s technical acumen, Frost harbor donors were not adversely affected.
“I think the most we paid for a container was maybe $10,000,” Childres continued. “We just got lucky. We waited a bit, and the delays eventually worked to our advantage.
I’ve seen a lot of board games in my day, and I can safely say that Frost harbor is the densest and most aggressively packaged of the bunch. Where Descent: Legends of the Dark half-empty came to my doorstep, not an inch was lost Frost harbor‘s design. And there is no lack of facilities either. Frost harbor contains lots of storage boxes, lots of pockets for cardboard pieces and four handy plastic trays to go from the box straight to the table.
Healey, ever the perfectionist, is still not completely satisfied with his final design. Yes, it brings everything safely to the customer. It’s rugged, making it less likely to wear out while sitting in your friendly local game store. But it’s not perfect, and that’s largely due to the economics of making a game that weighs as much as a great weight.
“I achieved all my goals within the constraints that Price and Isaac gave me [Childres]’ said Hely. Still, he would have appreciated about 25 millimeters more box height for more space to arrange the map tiles. And if you want to sleeve your cards before putting them back in the box, that’s too bad. It’s just not going to work. And he knows that. Please don’t yell at him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just didn’t have the space.”