It was the year 2017, and a small publisher house, called Cephalofair, that we could define as “indie” at the time, launched a crowdfunding for a game with an evocative name, based on the world created ad hoc by Isaac Childres. It promised a mountain of content and revolutionary gameplay, and those ones who had spotted the title at the time of the first Kickstarter campaign, were more than intrigued by the mix of Eurogame, Dungeon Crawling and role-playing game style. I asked myself several times if such premises were too exaggerated: I felt like I was hearing an American president in the early 1960s talk about how man would go to the moon.
Well, man then went to the moon. And Gloomhaven entered the Olympus of board games.
And after years at the top of the Boardgamegeek rankings, after countless played scenarios that went well, badly, or very badly, and after having convinced everyone, absolutely everyone, that it was a masterpiece (except for the innumerable quantity of components and the need of our organizer, because afterall a game cannot be immense in quality and hours of campaign without having a few tons of cards, tokens and pieces in the game box), Gloomhaven had to hand over the baton.
And so, 3 years later, the most successful campaign in the history of board games on Kickstarter to date was launched. We are talking, of course, about Frosthaven!
More scenarios, more monsters, more characters, more choices: we are faced with the heavyweight champion of board games. This giant of dungeon crawling, eurogame, legacy and management hide, not too well indeed, in a box weighing 15kg with a volume comparable to a bedside table. Are we perhaps faced with the ludic singularity, the game beyond nothing will ever be the same as before?
Maybe yes maybe no. Only time will tell if Frosthaven will manage to maintain hig the reputation of Cephalofair and Childres: if this mountain of scenarios, stories, components and hours of gameplay will enjoy us in the same way as Gloomhaven. What is certain is that the effort on the publisher’s part was monumental: 49 different monsters, scenarios, references, regulations, thousands of cards and hundreds of different tokens.
We at The Dicetroyers certainly couldn’t stand by and watch as chaos took over dice after dice, deck after deck, map after map. The efforts were epic, designing this organizer was as beautiful as it was challenging, but after months of work we succeeded.
The Frosthaven mountain has been climbed, tamed in a handful of trays, organized in a rational way and made playable by everyone. Our organizer for Frosthaven will make this mammoth title accessible and, we hope, will make his immense campaign less chaotic. Seeing is believing!
Discover also the other games in our catalog and contact us for any request or question!
