Gloomhaven costs $140 and weighs 20 pounds (for now)

The hit board game Gloomhaven is getting a sequel called Frosthaven. It’s the biggest Kickstarter of any kind in recent memory, but it won’t be shipping to backers until at least March 2021. Have faith, however, because the next game in the franchise will be out much, much sooner than that.

Gloomhaven proper is essentially a role-playing game-in-a-box weighing in at roughly 20 pounds. That includes a modular game board, a world map, cardboard standees for virtually every enemy in the game world, and a bevy of plastic hero miniatures at 28mm scale. Designer Isaac Childres tells us that Frosthaven could be even bigger, accounting for the additional cardboard components that he included in his build.

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Turns out he’s also been working on Gloomhaven-style game that fits into a box closer in size to something like Catan, but with all the same RPG goodness on the inside. It’s called Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion. He says it’s the result of big box retailers, especially Target stores, wanting in on some of the action that Amazon has been enjoying since Gloomhaven was finally able to ramp up production in 2018. Childres credits the online retailer with helping get most of the game’s roughly 210,000 non-Kickstarter units into player’s hands.

“I’m just curious to see how it does,” Childres told Polygon in a March telephone interview. “I mean, it was definitely a significant undertaking to kind of take the ridiculousness that is Gloomhaven and actually pare it down into something reasonable that could actually make it onto a store shelf.”

Childres expects the game to be available at Target stores nationwide by July or August, tucked in next to the Dungeons & Dragons Essentials Kit. Suggested retail price will be around $50.

So what will be inside the box? Less cardboard, to be sure. Childres says he’s adopting a style akin to the AdventureBook format pioneered by Plaid Hat Games’ Stuffed Fables. Expect a fold-flat, ring-bound game manual just like the original Gloomhaven but with upscaled graphics. Players will put their miniatures directly onto the page, using the book itself as a game board.

“I’d like to think of it as relatively casual,” Childres said. That might be an overstatement: While the original Gloomhaven has nearly 100 scenarios, Jaws of the Lion will have 25 scenarios. Players won’t necessarily be able to play them all in a single campaign, due to the branching nature of the narrative. Nevertheless, Childres estimates there’s something in the neighborhood of 30-40 hours of content in the box.

That’s enough to keep most tabletop groups meeting once a month busy for a full year.

Meanwhile, the crowdfunding campaign for Frosthaven continues its meteoric climb. A little over 24 hours after it began it’s now up over $5.3 million. Polygon reached to Childres on Wednesday, a few hours after he reached his $500,000 goal, to find out how he was holding up.

“Today has definitely been one of the wildest in my life,” he said in an email. “But all in all, it’s gone as well as we could have expected. And ultimately I just hope that the project campaign and the game itself will bring people a lot of joy.”

Gloomhaven

Gloomhaven is just about the closest you can get to playing D&D without actually playing D&D. The huge tactical strategy board game can even be played solo.

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