Anyone hoping for more Gloomhaven-flavoured monsters has reason to be cheerful. Isaac Childres, the designer who built Cephalofair Games around Gloomhaven and Frosthaven, has stepped down as CEO to return to game design full-time. Long-serving COO Price Johnson takes the chief exec role, while Julie Ahern joins from Van Ryder Games as the new COO.
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Start organising for freeCephalofair is a small studio with an outsized footprint. The 2017 Gloomhaven second-printing Kickstarter raised around $4 million and the dungeon crawler held the BGG number one spot for years. Frosthaven followed in 2020 with a Kickstarter close to $13 million from over 83,000 backers, the biggest tabletop campaign on the platform until the Cosmere RPG bumped it in 2024. Frosthaven is a heavy cooperative campaign for 1-4 players sitting around 8.8 on BGG.
Johnson has been at Cephalofair since 2017 and helped land Jaws of the Lion in mass market retail (the Target version turned a fiddly campaign monster into a starter most groups can actually finish). Ahern arrives from Van Ryder Games, makers of the Graphic Novel Adventures range and Detective: City of Angels.
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See how it worksChildres, meanwhile, gets to do the thing he is best at. The studio said he will work as lead designer across the entire range, which presumably means more time on the secret follow-up that was teased after Frosthaven's release and less time on shipping logistics. He has been candid in past interviews that the CEO hat slowed him down.
If your group has been eyeing the Frosthaven backlog, the new structure could mean more reprints and add-ons land smoothly while Childres tinkers in the design corner. Got a Gloomhaven crew that's been chipping away at the campaign for two years? Now's a fine time to find more players for the next session.
Sources: BoardGameWire | Cephalofair | BGG Frosthaven
