Isaac Childres

Gloomhaven is currently ranked #4 on BoardGameGeek, rated 8.53 by over 67,000 players, and widely considered one of the greatest cooperative games ever made. It also sits unplayed in more collections than almost any other game in the hobby. You probably know this because yours is one of them. The box is enormous. The rulebook is 56 pages. There are hundreds of punch-out components. And every time you’ve thought about setting it up, something has come up or something less daunting has gone on the table instead. ...

Isaac Childres: The Man Who Turned Dungeon Crawls into Euro Puzzles There are designers who make good games. Then there are designers who accidentally build subcultures. Isaac Childres is firmly in the second camp. He started with Forge War in 2015, founded Cephalofair Games to publish it himself, and then did the sort of thing that sounds ridiculous until you remember this hobby loves ridiculous ambition. Fresh off finishing a PhD in Physics at Purdue, he went all in on Gloomhaven, a box so absurdly oversized it became a meme, and a design so successful it changed what people expected from campaign games. ...