Euro-inspired dungeon crawling sequel to the 2017 smash-hit Gloomhaven
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Breaking records as we cross the finish!
over 4 years ago
– Sat, May 02, 2020 at 12:12:14 AM
#1 funded board game.
#3 funded across all categories.
$12,969,162
We did it. We flippin' did it.
I cannot thank you all enough for making this happen. It was a fantastic journey, and I hope you all had a wonderful time taking it with us all here at Cephalofair Games. It was quite the epic finish, and I couldn't be happier with the results. We will be adding the 17th character to the game, and it will for sure be something epic as well.
So thank you.
This is the third update today, so I don't want to take too much of your time, but I just wanted to give you an idea of what will be happening moving forward. We'll be moving into a weekly update schedule for the near future. Next Friday I hope to have the results of the scenario and event design competitions for you. There are more entries than expected, but I'll do my best to get through them.
And then two weeks from now we will be launching the pledge manager through BackerKit, so I'll be here to talk you through that as well. In the coming weeks/months, we'll also have updates on sleeves, other add-ons, the development process, as well as game elements I didn't get a chance to talk about yet.
We've gotten through one journey, but there's a whole other journey we get to take where we make the game and ship it to you so that you can, in the end, take your own journey through Frosthaven. I'm looking forward to keeping you all updated on that process. But for now, I just want to say THANK YOU one last time!
And also thank you to Adam Poots and Kingdom Death: Monster for their classy shout out in the final hours that helped us get to the top of the mountain.
The threat competition results and final guest designers Adam and Brady Sadler
over 4 years ago
– Fri, May 01, 2020 at 11:39:24 PM
I don't want to jinx it, but this might actually happen! I guess I need to start thinking about what that 17th character might actually be!
But let's take a short break from the drama of huge, staggering numbers becoming more huge and more staggering to delve into the other drama of the campaign: the fight between the Algox and the Unfettered (and the Lurkers...kinda).
I give you now the FINAL TALLY!
And #TeamUnfettered takes it! It was a valiant fight to the very end, but really, who can compete with a real live bladespinner?
There were so many great posts over the month on all sides! I was very impressed by your creativity, and I really want to thank you for taking this to heart and really running with it in ways I didn't expect. It has been a blast, and I hope you enjoyed it too.
Yes, there are winners and losers here, but when it comes down to what it all means for the game in the end, I will use the entire saga as inspiration. Clearly the Algox and the Unfettered both deserve to be highlighted (with maybe the Lurkers cheering from the sidelines) with how close this competition has been throughout. So I will put in some extra content for both of them, and hopefully when you encounter it, you will recognize some of the story beats. What that content is exactly, well, you'll just have to wait and see.
-
And, yes, we do have two new guest designers for the last day: Adam and Brady Sadler! Adam and Brady are the heads of design at Blacklist games, where they have published great dungeon crawl-type games like Street Masters, Brook City, and Altar Quest, but they've also had a storied history before that as freelancers and working for Fantasy Flight, with games like Descent 2nd Edition and Warhammer Quest in their credits.
They also did some guest design already on a little game called Gloomhaven, so doing some work on Frosthaven shouldn't be too much trouble, and yield some great results for us! In addition, Blacklist is running a Kickstarter right now for sets of fantasy miniatures. Some of them match up pretty well to Gloomhaven monsters, including the dreaded ooze.
-
And I guess all that leaves us with is the final puzzle for the Brute, coming out of retirement for one last mission. With everything else going on, we had to shoot this one kind of fast. I will leave you with Stephen F's description of the situation, which I quite liked:
"In today's puzzle, he's throwing a big party and inviting all his friends over to celebrate the success of the Frosthaven Kickstarter reaching $10 million+! But oh dear, his house is such a mess, covered in over a dozen damage traps, and everyone will be here any minute! Thankfully he has some helpful Automatons that he can use to clean everything up before they arrive."
Oh, in case you don't know who Stephen F is, he has been on top of these puzzles all month, posting them on BGG and pointing out any mistakes I've made, so I recruited him last week to look at the puzzles ahead of time to make sure there weren't any mistakes. So big shout out to Stephen!
FINAL DAY!
over 4 years ago
– Fri, May 01, 2020 at 11:27:06 PM
We can do this! It's going to be close, but I believe we can hit that final goal of $12.4 million! I was advised to give you just a short, punchy pitch about how you can help us get there instead of hitting you with another wall of text, so here goes:
1. Increase your pledge by whatever makes sense. This just means paying for add-ons and shipping ahead of time instead of in the pledge manager. Eyeing those metal coins? Or maybe some pins? Or maybe you want to try out the digital version of the game? (It's great!) Or maybe your friend needs a copy of the game too! All you need to do is:
Look at the add-ons.
Look at the shipping tables.
Calculate what to add to your pledge.
Hit the "Manage your pledge" button, then "Change your pledge".
Adjust your pledge amount without changing your pledge level.
And that's it! Any money you pledge now will carry over to the pledge manager, where you can spend it however you'd like. Just as an example, if every backer went in on the digital game, we would easily cross that threshold. Every little bit helps here, so, you know, just think about it.
2. Spread the word! Tweet about it, post on Facebook, Instagram, wherever. Shout it from the rooftops. Like I said, it is going to be very close, and every little bit will help here. This isn't some silly stretch goal that we are guaranteed to reach, and we can just sit back and watch happen. We're going to have to work for it.
And with that said, I will be back later today with the final guest designer(s?) and the results of the threat competition. Just remember that I am eternally grateful to all of you. You have already made this campaign an amazing, unprecedented success. This is just something extra that would be great to see happen - to nab that #1 spot. We've got 7.5 hours left, and we can do it!
And here's something a little extra for motivation (I'm at the end):
Stretch goals! And guest designer Richard Ham!
over 4 years ago
– Fri, May 01, 2020 at 02:54:46 AM
10 MILLION DOLLARS!
This is an absurd amount of money! When we were planning this out, I may have wistfully mentioned that it would be nice to hit $10 million, but it was a pipe dream. And then once the pandemic hit, I thought it for sure wouldn't happen. But we threw the party anyway, and now look where we are! Thanks to everyone for making this pipe dream come true (the game as well as the absurd funding level)!
And we still have about 28 hours left! What other numbers can we reach? Well, I'm going to be perfectly honest with all of you: I want to hit $12.4 million, a number that would make us the #1 most funded board game project of all time.
Being the #1 rated game on Board Game Geek has brought Gloomhaven into so many more homes and allowed it to bring so much more exciting adventure into the world. Being at the top of a list just brings so much more visibility to something, and it I think it would be great to bring that visibility to a game like Frosthaven. Plus you'd get the bragging rights of being a backer on the biggest board game Kickstarter.
Obviously, I don't want to diminish the accomplishment of reaching $10 MILLION, and there'll be more on that in a second, but I think the goal of $12.4 million is achievable. And so, I'm going to do something I said I wouldn't do, and I was not at all planning on doing until I woke up this morning. I'm going to give you a stretch goal.
If we hit $12.4 million, I will add a 17th character class to the game. I have no idea what that character will be, but it will happen, and I will be sure to make it awesome. I really want to emphasize that this will only happen if we hit $12.4, though.
So, how do we hit that number? Well, let's get back to that $10 million achievement, because I want to give you something for that as well (consider it a stretch goal we've already passed). By far, the two most numerous requests we've gotten from backers are for monster minis (which is still outside the scope of this project), and something that we can do for you: components for envelope X.
If you don't know what envelope X is, it is a secret in Gloomhaven that I encourage you not to look up, but discover on your own. Just know that there are many people out there who want proper components for it, and so we will be making them available as an add-on in the pledge manager for $15 (for wave 2 fulfillment).
(And yes, that thing about standees for all summons will apply here as well.)
So, if you want to help hit $12.4 million, and you are interested in envelope X, we encourage you to add $15 to you pledge now. Or if you were planning on getting any other add-ons like the metal coins or the wooden organizer, adding those funds now will also help hit that magic number. All you need to do is just hit the "Manage Your Pledge" button at the top of the page, and then any money you add will carry over to the pledge manager, where you can allocate it to whatever add-ons you want.
And for those curious about the sleeves discussion from yesterday, unfortunately it is going to take more than a day to make a decision and price everything out, so we won't have an update on that before the end of the campaign. I can tell you that we will be doing a sleeve add-on, based on the overwhelming feedback, but I can't give you a price for it yet.
-
And with all this excitement, we still need to talk about our newest esteemed guest designer, Richard Ham! Richard was one of the first big proponents of Gloomhaven back in the day. On his Youtube play through channel, Rahdo Runs Through, he was very passionate with his praise of the game during the original Kickstarter and no doubt helped significantly to launch it into the success it has since seen. In fact, I wouldn't even be making games at all if Richard hadn't thrown such massive praise on my first game, Forge War, during its Kickstarter.
Richard has played Gloomhaven more than any other game in his collection, and it is one of his top games of all time. And if that isn't enough qualification for making awesome Gloomhaven content, before he ran a Youtube channel, he was also a prolific video game designer, working on the Siphon Filter and Fable series. I'm looking forward to working with him on Frosthaven!
#TeamUnfettered creeps farther ahead in the competition. It was a hard-fought battle yesterday, with massive points going to #TeamAlgox for Reddit user VirtuallyJason's 3D rendering of an Algox Archer, but the Unfettered launched salvo after salvo with InfinityOverPi's Spirit Island crossover and Trevor Leitner's Pathfinder monster stats. And, in the end, what really put them over was that I stole BGG user Beyoken's superior puzzle solution again, and he has pledged allegiance to the Unfettered.
But it is not over! I will be announcing the final results tomorrow, so keep on fighting!
-
So here is the Mindthief puzzle solution, stolen from Beyoken, who kept everyone alive for four rounds (Mindthief, monsters, and the rat swarm).
And now onto the FINAL PUZZLE! We end with the Brute, naturally. He got a long rest after having to stand in for all the Frosthaven characters, but we need him once again to bring us home in style. I wanted to do something special and different with this puzzle, so I hope you like it!
Guest designer Vlaada Chvatil and some card sleeve questions
over 4 years ago
– Thu, Apr 30, 2020 at 02:28:18 AM
Hello! Things are getting exciting as we approach the end of the campaign, and I don't think I could personally be more excited to announce our next guest designer, VLAADA CHVATIL!
You may already know this, but Vlaada is my hero. His ability to create varied, engaging, and thematic game designs is unmatched, in my opinion. The fact that games like Mage Knight, Through the Ages, Galaxy Trucker, and Codenames all came from the same designer just blows my mind. Not only that, but he is an incredibly humble and down-to-earth guy, despite his massive success.
And I was absolutely floored when he approached me at Essen last year and told me how much he was enjoying playing Gloomhaven with his family. The fact that I could give some joy back to someone who has given me so much joy over the years, it's just... yeah, there aren't really words for it.
And then he also agreed to guest design a scenario! Vlaada could give me a used napkin with scribbles on it, and I'd be happy, but I am sure he'll do something much, much more awesome than that!
-
Al right, now I'm going to talk about card sleeves to calm down a bit. We've been talking to a manufacturer about making a batch of card sleeves for Frosthaven for those interested in that kind of thing. Basically, the idea here is convenience. If you want to sleeve your cards, we want to add into the pledge manager some options to do that that should be at a lower cost (relative to the quality) and just allow you to not have to math it out and purchase them from another source.
So this is just a preliminary discussion right now - something we are exploring for the pledge manager. And I really wanted your feedback on some aspects of this.
First of all, I just wanted to gauge interest in the idea and whether you'd be interested in getting sleeves directly from us.
Second, would you want enough sleeves to go with every card in the game or just the cards that are shuffled/handled often? Note that we don't have a set-in-stone card count at this point, but we'll have a pretty good approximation. So we'll let you know around how many sleeves you will be getting, use that to price it out, and then make sure you get the correct number when things are finalized.
Third, would you be interested in just basic sleeves, or sleeves with some sort of non-invasive "frosty" design that would run a little more expensive?
So let me know, and we'll talk more about it once we've gotten a little farther along. Keep in mind we will probably only have this option available for Frosthaven and not Gloomhaven, as the timing wouldn't work out on that.
-
And #TeamUnfettered once again surges ahead! There was about equal activity on the Kickstarter page, but #TeamUnfettered was doing more interesting things elsewhere, including making an STL file for the boltshooter. Plus they're getting more gains in the polls! (Maybe they have...bots?)
-
Here is a puzzle solution for the Scoundrel. We're closing in on the end of the puzzles, but remember that you can find all of them in this Google drive if you missed any or want to revisit them.
Second to last, we've got a puzzle for the Mindthief. She's missing her most powerful attack card, so her best hope is just to use her other augments to survive as long as she can.
