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Gloomhaven Grand Festival

Created by Cephalofair

We invite you to join the celebration and check out the latest in the city of Gloomhaven. From Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs, Gloomhaven: The Role Playing Game, Miniatures of Gloomhaven, Gloomhaven: Second Edition and more, there is something for everyone.

Latest Updates from Our Project:

Timeline update
about 1 year ago – Fri, Nov 17, 2023 at 02:57:32 PM

Good day! I hope you are doing well this week. As promised last time, I wanted to get into an update today that gave you a better idea of where we are with all projects. The first thing I want to share is a graphic we've whipped up that will be included in each update:



This gives you a simple view of what stage of production we are in for each project so that you can have a better idea, at a glance, of where your stuff is. Checks are for what is already finished and stars are what we are currently working on. As we make progress, we'll update the chart. But for this update, let's go into more detail on each of these items!

Buttons & Bugs

We are in production on Buttons & Bugs! This process began early last week, and so now we wait for the games to come out on the other side. This means we'll be able to begin freight shipping next month and fulfillment will ideally be happening early next year, depending on the availability of our fulfillment partners. As with all of the timelines I'll be sharing with you, everything is of course just an estimate, as there is always a chance of unforeseen delays.

Forgotten Circles

Forgotten Circles has actually already finished production, but because we will be shipping it in wave 1 along with Frosthaven, it is waiting for Frosthaven to be finished before both are shipped out together.

Frosthaven Second Print

Here again we are in production, with a very similar timeline to Buttons & Bugs above. We just got word that the games will be ship ready in two weeks, so we will be able to start freight shipping next month, with, again, fulfillment ideally happening early next year, depending on the availability of our fulfillment partners.

Frosthaven Play Surface Books

Same story here. The last piece of this was designing a box to put all the books in, because the books were too big to package any other way. So that is finished, and the play surface books are now in production and will be shipped alongside Frosthaven and Forgotten Circles. These will likely be the last piece to make it out of production, but Chris and Price are working on our shipping plan next week and will be eliminating as much unnecessary waiting and downtime as possible.

Gloomhaven Second Edition

Admittedly, this is where we are most behind. Design and development are done, but there is still a lot of outstanding art and graphic design. And while we will be doing some layout and editing this month and next on the project, the rest of the year will be mostly dedicated to finishing putting the systems and infrastructure in place to fulfill all art and design needs we are going to need on both this project and the RPG in the coming year.

To provide a very rough timeline, our goal is to finish all art and design by the end of March next year, then spend April proofing, May-June in production, and June-July in freight shipping. This puts our fulfillment sometime around July or August. Again, I just want to emphasize that these are rough estimates. We're confident that we can meet these goals, but complications can always arise.

Gloomhaven Role Playing Game

I know we haven't communicated much on the timeline of the RPG since the campaign. We wanted to give Danielle a chance to get settled and get everything into place. But with the design done and writing assignments for all the lore deployed, we are finally ready to start talking about this more.

First drafts for all the writing assignments are due in January, and in the meantime, we'll be doing further play testing and development on the rules. Once the drafts come in, we'll also start ramping up artwork for the book.

We will be getting in final drafts of the lore writing in February, by which point we'll also be finishing up any modifications to the rules sections of the book. It will then go into editing in March and layout in April, meaning we should be able to get final files sent off to the printer in June. From there, we can expect ocean freight two months after that in August and fulfillment starting in September.

I just want to stress again that this is an optimistic estimate that assumes everything comes together without delays, which hardly ever happens. But we'll do our best to stick to that schedule, and we'll let you know if anything changes.

Miniatures of Gloomhaven

With the miniatures, we aren't quite ready to give a more concrete timeline. Progress is certainly being made here as we finish up the sculpting, but there are so many variables with the factory revisions and mold-making process. Plus the production time can be variable, depending on what our final order quantities end up being. We will have more info on this later!

Other exciting things

Our friends at Glass Cannon will be streaming a play through of the RPG tonight! Back at Gen Con, they recorded a podcast where the team went through character creation, which you can find here.

But you don't need to have watched that to enjoy them playing the game tonight at 8pm ET on Twitch! Joe O'Brien is Gloom Mastering for Sydney Amanuel, Paula Deming, Skid Maher, and Josephine McAdam, and we are all very excited to check it out!



And if you want more RPG live plays, we will also be doing one at PAXU. This will be on Saturday, Dec. 2 at 11am ET and will be streamed through Penny Arcade's channels. We'll be getting the PA crew that you saw during the campaign back together for another wild mission that will most assuredly involve Winkies. Alexander Theoharis will be Gloom Mastering for myself, Jasmine Bhullar, Jerry Holkins, and Laura Stringer.



You can also come hang out at our booth at PAXU (#2936), where we will be running demos of the RPG, Frosthaven, Gloomhaven Second Edition, and Buttons & Bugs with production samples fresh from the factory. It's gonna be a great time!

Next update will likely be a smaller one, as we'll all be at PAXU, but you can expect another designer diary from Danielle about the RPG, so look forward to that, and I'll catch you then!

Big news for Buttons & Bugs and the RPG
about 1 year ago – Fri, Nov 03, 2023 at 12:16:33 PM

Good day! Progress on all projects continues to move along as communicated in previous updates, but today I wanted to focus specifically on Buttons & Bugs and the RPG to talk about some major strides we've taken in both.

Before we get to that, though, I want to let everyone know that waves 1 and 2 are now closed in the pledge manager and all charges have been processed. Anyone who is still having issues with their order should contact [email protected] to get it resolved.  Wave 3 will be opening on Monday 11/6 and will remain open into January of next year (possibly later depending on when GH 2.0 starts printing). Any backers who had wave 1 or 2 items in their cart that didn't complete their pledge had those items removed and converted to store credit where applicable.

Buttons & Bugs

First off, all of the files are done! Most have already made it to the factory and back to us in the form of digital proofs, and the team has been pouring over those to ensure everything looks right. This means we can press print very soon.

We know there were a handful of questions surrounding the final rules—and what exactly comes inside the box—so we wanted to share the completed Learn to Play guide with you to give you a better idea of exactly what that entails. You can take a look at it here!



We hope that this rules document can better set expectations about what the game is going to be (though there were many playthrough videos we made during the campaign as well). While the game is simpler and easier to set up and play than Gloomhaven, many of the rules are the same, so for those not familiar with Gloomhaven, teaching the rules can be a bit complex.

The team, most notably Nikki the designer/developer, Jason the layout artist, Arch the art director, and Jaym the editor, have put a tremendous amount of work into crafting this learn to play guide that distills all of those Gloomhaven rules nuances into an easily digestible document. It doesn't cover everything, but it will get you through the first scenario with a good understanding of the game. And from there, if you have any questions, you can reference the full rules document available on our website.

Even though this won't need to be finished until the game has been delivered, again, the team has worked tirelessly to get a preliminary version up right now for you to peruse.

This is a plain text document that is intended to be easily searchable with lots of hyperlinks for all cross-references. You will also be able to easily print it out if you want a physical version. And if the length of this document is intimidating, just remember that it is meant to be fully comprehensive and exhaustive. And it is also a living document that can be changed and added to if we discover additional clarifications are needed about anything.

Some other caveats for the document:
  • It is obviously not finished, we just wanted to have a solid draft of something to show you.
  • We haven't done a comprehensive editing pass. If you see typos, don't worry, we'll fix them.
  • Many of the component visuals are missing or aren't final. Don't worry about that either.
  • The document is also missing an index, but we'll get that taken care of too.

Hopefully these two documents give you a better idea of the rules and how we'll be communicating them to you!

Gloomhaven Role Playing Game

We've been letting the RPG stew for a while, but now that we are confident in where the game design is at this point, I think it is finally time to start talking about it more. And the first step in doing that is introducing you to the RPG project manager, Danielle Lauzon!

Danielle Lauzon is a freelance game designer, writer, developer, and gamer living in Austin, TX with her husband, two dogs, and three cats. When she isn't writing, developing, designing, or otherwise occupied in getting games organized, she is playing games instead. She has been working in the TTRPG industry for over a decade and has over 50 credits to her name from companies such as Onyx Path Publishing, Magpie Games, and Green Ronin.

Danielle joined the team about two months ago because we needed an RPG industry professional to come in and make sure everything was getting done in a timely manner. At this point, she has fully taken over the project and is currently contracting out lore writing to all our awesome authors. And one of the other things Danielle will be tackling is writing monthly blog entries on our website about the whole process. So every other update or so, Danielle will fill you in on her work. Here is the first entry:

Hello Mercenaries!

I’m Danielle Lauzon, the new project manager for the Gloomhaven RPG, and this is the start of a new series I’m going to do monthly in which I unpack some of the design decisions behind the RPG. Each month I’ll pick a topic about the design to discuss. The purpose of this design diary is to give you a little sneak peak at what’s coming from the RPG, and also give insight as to why things will look the way they do.

This month, I’m going to cover the very basic concept of turning a board game into an RPG. In a lot of ways, a board game is already pretty similar to an RPG. That’s especially true for Gloomhaven, where you pick a mercenary, go out on missions, earn rewards, level up, and learn a whole story about the town of Gloomhaven. Honestly, it’s the most RPG-like board game I’ve ever played. So how do we ensure that we preserve the great elements Gloomhaven already brings while making it more like an RPG with open narratives, more player agency, and connective tissue between combat?

The great thing about Gloomhaven is that it already has a pretty robust tactical combat system in the form of ability cards. The modifier deck similarly already provides an excellent randomizer system. So the goal is to keep these two elements and make them work both in and out of combat. The modifier cards are the easiest. Every time you take an action in which the outcome is uncertain, you flip a modifier card and add its value to a score. In the board game, this is always attack values, and it makes sense for negative numbers to bring your attack value to 0 or less. It makes less sense for that to happen on a check to pick a lock or calm down an outraged Vermling. We solved this problem by slightly tweaking the modifier deck to have two numbers present. One number is the familiar -2 to +2 from the board game, and the other number ranges from 1 to 6. This isn’t a perfect fix, but it allows the same cards to handle both attacks and other types of checks at the same time without needing two decks or to over inflate stat numbers.

Speaking of stat numbers, the other thing we needed to do was to ensure that there was some way to stack that card flip in your favor. Just like in combat when you want to do a big attack vs a small attack, your attack value will be different, we realized that we needed the character to have another set of non-combat stats to handle other types of encounters. So, characters have  a set of Attribute scores, rated 0-3. When you flip a modifier card, you add the value to the appropriate Attribute score and compare it to a difficulty. Our Gloom Master (GM) sets the difficulty level, anywhere from 3 on up depending on how difficult it is to accomplish, and you see how well you did compared. There’s more ways to get bonuses to your checks, but we’ll cover that in another design diary.

Now we come to the role of Ability Cards. In the board game, Ability cards are both how you take actions and a measure of your character’s stamina. If you run out, you are out for the count. In an RPG, it sucks to run out of resources and suddenly be completely out of the action. While Ability cards are still an expendable resource, if you run out, you can still take actions, just at a small penalty. Ability cards are still how you take most actions, although only big or stressful actions will require a card expenditure (discard or loss) outside of combat. So while sweet talking a guard might not require a discard, calming that Vermling probably will.

A lot of the Ability Cards will look familiar to those who have played the board game, but there will be a few changes that I’ll chat about later in future design diaries.

                                     

Phew! I know it has taken some time, but I am really excited about the direction Cephalofair is headed with all these projects, and the momentum we've now built up. Expect more good things, and I'll see you next time where we plan to have some updated official timelines for everything for you!

Introducing new staff!
about 1 year ago – Fri, Oct 20, 2023 at 02:44:19 PM

Good day! Happy update Friday, and I hope everyone is doing well. Essen Spiel ended up being a great success for the team, while we also continued to plug away on all the projects back home. Before I get into updating you on that progress, though, I'd like to announce the addition of two new staff members here at Cephalofair Games!



I am happy to inform you that Monica Paprocki has joined us as the new marketing manager, while Aaron Hoyt is coming on as the new community support specialist. They are both very intelligent and capable people who have already helped us out tremendously at conventions and elsewhere, so I am super-excited to have them officially join the team!

An introduction from Monica:
You’ve seen me as the Banner Spear, or the Geminate, or the Deathwalker. Now see me in my new form - Cephalofair Games new Marketing Manager. Working for Cephalofair as a cosplayer since 2019 has me dreaming of working for the company full-time. And I am so happy and excited that they have given me this opportunity. I have gotten to know the folks at Cephalofair over the years and our team has a lot of hard working employees that I have enjoyed being around with at conventions. Not only am I bringing my creativity to my position, but also more than 10 years of experience being an accountant and business experience for running my own company.

And an introduction for Aaron:
Aaron has been a long time Cephalofair event staffer, regularly acting as sales and event lead at numerous conventions each year with our team, just recently backing up Chris Kessler on support tickets over the last couple months, and countless other "gopher/go-for" jobs over the years. It certainly didn't hurt he wraps a mean convention pallet either! Chances are if you've seen us at a show in the last 4 years, you've seen Aaron too! With over 20 years of customer service experience and a passion for each and every fellow gamer in our community, he'll be a great addition to our team!

As marketing manager, Monica will be helping to craft updates and make sure you are informed about everything that is going on over here. And Aaron will be on the front lines as the community support specialist, answering requests sent to [email protected], but also being more present on this page to make sure your questions are answered here as well. We're hoping that as we move forward, both of them should help improve communication with all of you.

And that's not even all the staffing we've been doing over here. Next update, we will finally have some more concrete information on the RPG and some other announcements pertaining to that.

                           

On the scheduling front, Price provided some excellent summaries of where we are with all our projects in the last update, and there haven't been any changes to any of that except for Buttons & Bugs, so let's talk about that.

To be completely transparent, we have hit some additional delays here. Some of the graphic design work we were expecting to be finished by now required some additional revisions, and then will need to go through an additional editing pass. In addition, the learn-to-play guide that we are including in the box turned out to be a little trickier to put together than we anticipated, given the small size and how much information we wanted to include. It is being finished up for an editing pass as well, but is a bit behind. Our current plan is to get the files to the printer by the end of the month.



With that said, I did want to talk a little more about what to expect when learning to play Buttons & Bugs. Included in the box will be a learn-to-play guide that should jump-start you into the first scenario of the game, so you can get started as quickly as possible and learn as you go. This won't be the complete set of rules, as there are a lot of them and it's a small box. Instead, we intend to have a much more comprehensive rules document online that is easily searchable and referenceable as you play if you have any questions.

In addition, we are also working closely with Dized to also create an interactive learning tool for the game. We should have more information about what that entails later when that work gets closer to completion, but we really wanted to provide learning tools for you that cover multiple different learning styles to further reduce the barrier to entry.

Once again, I'd like to welcome Monica and Aaron to the team, and I will catch you next time with more news from the project!

Micro Mercenary Proofs & Essen Spiel
about 1 year ago – Fri, Oct 06, 2023 at 07:52:55 PM

Happy Friday Backers!

This week our team is split in two completing objectives of multiple sizes:

…exhibiting at SPIEL, in Essen Germany - the world's BIGGEST annual tabletop event…

...and wrapping up the FINAL bits and bobs on GLOOMHAVEN: BUTTONS & BUGS - the world’s SMALLEST Gloomhaven game!

Let’s talk about what’s going on:

-BUTTONS & BUGS-

I want to give a HUGE thank you Nikki Valens, Arch Anderson, Jason Kingsley, & Jaym Gates who have been working together super diligently rounding the final corners on Buttons & Bugs! Things are coming together quickly and we’re still on target for our self-imposed deadline of October 15th to have full production files turned in and the proofing process started.

MOST EXCITEDLY, today we have some MICRO MERCENARIES to show off in their final glory! I’m SO pleased with how these have come out, and Arch did a great job working with our incumbent sculptor Chris Lewis, shrinking, but retaining, each class's core aesthetics. Doing 10mm miniatures was a first for all of us - but we’re incredibly pleased with how much detail and character we were still able to capture in these little buggers - and we hope you are too!



With Miniature proofs approved, those are now heading into production ahead of all the papery bits.




-ESSEN SPIEL-

It’s that time of year again when Cephalofair makes our way to the quaint little town of Essen, Germany where the world’s largest board gaming convention is taking place - Essen Spiel!

Chris flew our on Monday of this week to get things setup with our returning and ever ready Essen Booth Crew, who did a great job getting things setup in time for the first day of the show on Thursday. 

This is a first year for me, personally, not attending Essen. Which is weird. But what felt weirder was trying to justify going when we are honestly the busiest we’ve ever been “back in the office” and with some family priorities at home. It’s one of many little unforeseen “growing



-FROSTHAVEN-

Frosthaven Playsurface 
Files have been fully submitted, and we are currently on our second round of proofing - which means we should be green-lighting production sometime in the coming days (weekend pending)! 

Frosthaven (2nd Printing)
Proofing is almost complete, with SOME parts already in, and other heading, into production. With a game as big as Frosthaven, certain components are assembled directly “in house” while others (like miniatures) are often made in a separate district or area and brought in for assembly. Unlike the new “little sibling” it is expecting later his year with Buttons & Bugs, which really requires us to have 100% of everything approved before we can safely get started running the machines .

Forgotten Circles (3rd Printing)
Not much to say here other than the print run proofs were all approved and the game is in production for shipment alongside Frosthaven (2nd Printing) once it is ready to set sail. 

-GLOOMHAVEN-

2nd Printing / RPG/ Miniatures
No updates on these projects today as the first two waves of production have had our primary focus, but our staff is diligently moving things along in parallel with those things above being sent to print. We’ll hopefully have some more exciting updates for you in the near future!

-CUSTOMER SERVICE-

We thank everyone for your continue patience as we navigate post-campaign & pledge manager support. As we’ve been hinting we’ve been scaling up our customer service resources and are excited to share that we'll have a new crew member joining our team in the coming week - along with a couple other new Cephalofair team members we’re excited to introduce to you as well. Exciting things are afoot at Cephalofair - thanks for hanging in there for us!

-RETAILER PLEDGE MANAGER-

Retailers! We are continuing to hear from those of you who are submitting your retailer verification forms and documents, thank you! We appreciate your patience as we onboard so many first time partners, and assure you we will be allowing ample time for order completion. Please email us at [email protected] if you still haven’t received your verification form or Backerkit survey and we’ll be happy to help upon our return from Essen!

THAT'S IT....FOR NOW!

That’s it for this week - we’ll catch you in another 2 weeks once everyone is properly back from Essen and back behind their respective wheels. 

Have a great weekend!


Charging cards for wave 1 on Friday, retailer pledge manager, plus where we're at
about 1 year ago – Wed, Sep 20, 2023 at 10:22:29 AM

Good day! I'm dropping the update a bit early this week because we are planning on charging cards in the pledge manager for waves 1 and 2 on Friday (the 22nd), and just wanted to give everyone a bit of a heads-up before doing so.

Previously, it was communicated that would be happening last Friday (the 15th), but in order to make sure we had addressed all backer emails and concerns, we wanted to take an extra week and get caught up on our support inbox before closing. I apologize for any confusion that caused when no charges took place. We are firmly set for this Friday, though, so if you would like anything from waves 1 and 2 (Frosthaven, Frosthaven playsurface books and other accessories, Forgotten Circles, Buttons & Bugs), please adjust your pledge manager this week!

With that said, I am happy to report that we are all caught up on customer service requests. I want to give a huge shout-out to Chris, Aaron, and Ted for catching us up on that. I will also note that we are not very present in the comments these days. We're still working on staffing someone to help out there, but in the mean time, if you have a question, the best way to get it answered is just to reach out to support: [email protected].

                             

This Friday will also be the launch of the retailer pledge manager - thank you to our ever patient Gloomhaven merchants!

A few important notes:

  1. If this is your first time backing as a retailer, you will be receiving a Retailer Verification Google Form to complete with your store's information and business documentation.
  2. If you are a returning backer, you should receive immediate access to the Retail Pledge Manager. 
  3. Products will be pre-priced at 50% off MSRP.
  4. As this project contains multiple product lines and fulfillment windows, we will only be providing access to products currently in production and destined for shipping in the near future. 

You will have opportunities to order all products during the following Pledge Manager windows as they make their way through development and production:
  • Wave 1 and 2: Gloomhaven Buttons & Bugs / Frosthaven Second Printing / Forgotten Circles - NOW SERVING
  • Wave 3: Gloomhaven Second Edition - Q1 2023 Pledge Manager
  • Wave 4: Gloomhaven RPG - Q2 2023 Pledge Manager
  • Wave 5: Miniatures of Gloomhaven - Q4 2023 Pledge Manager

                             

So now I'd like to spend the rest of the update giving you the news on where we are with everything. And first off, I just want to acknowledge that we are behind on everything in waves 1 and 2.

We communicated during the campaign that we'd enter production on Frosthaven at the end of July, but we are unfortunately still finishing up proofs. This was due to a lack of bandwidth during the campaign to get this rolling, so now we're playing catch up. We should be done with proofs within the next week, and so entering production at the end of this month puts us at freight shipping in early November.

Importantly, this means that we can't guarantee anything will ship by Christmas, so please take that into consideration when managing your pledge.

The Frosthaven playsurface books are on a similar timeline, which is good, since they will also be fulfilled in wave 1. Admittedly, editing the books took longer than we expected, but we have gotten through that now, so they are off to the printers for a proofing process that should be much shorter than Frosthaven. In addition, the production time should be shorter, too.

And then that brings us to Buttons & Bugs, which we have made tremendous progress on in the last few weeks due to Nikki's project management and Arch's art direction. We are on track to get files submitted to the printer at the beginning of next month. Admittedly, our original communication was that the would be submitted at the beginning of September, so we are still a month behind. In addition, the production process is going to take longer than we originally anticipated. We'll need a couple weeks for proofing, and then another month and a half to account for all the components, including the molded dice, which means we probably won't start freight shipping on Buttons & Bugs until the end of November.



I feel like I keep saying this, but we'll have more substantial RPG updates in the future. We're headed in a good direction with the design, but it still needs to be nailed down before I talk about the process. Our goal is to get that done by the end of the month as well.

So that's where we're at. I don't enjoy writing these updates any more than you enjoy reading them, but we want to keep you informed on what is going on. It's not fun to be two months behind on these initial waves, but the good news is that we've got a firm handle on moving them forward at this point. I can't promise there won't be any more delays, given the mercurial nature of shipping, but we're feeling very good about these new estimates.

As a final reminder, we will be changing cards in the pledge manager on Friday, so be prepared for that! Also we are looking for booth staff for New York Comic Con (application form) and Essen (application form) if you will be in the area and would like to help out. Thanks, and I'll catch you next time! Have a good week!