Isaac Childres was 32 years old when he started designing what is widely considered the best board game in the world. Gloomhaven is a Brobdingnagian fantasy game that fits inside a 22-pound box the size of a microwave.
Isaac Childres was thirty-two years old when he started designing what is widely considered the best board game in the world. In 2015, he was living in Lafayette, Indiana, with his wife, Kristyn. Childres, who has a slight and somewhat owlish figure, and the squint of a medieval illuminator, had recently completed a Ph.D. in physics at Purdue University. He wanted to make a board game that felt like an adventure, with numerous stories and locations to explore.
Gloomhaven would become the seventh—a title it has held for an astonishing five years. Childres’s game incorporates about seventeen hundred cards, four hundred cardboard tiles, eighteen sculpted heroes, and zero dice—all of which he presided over alone. He did not meet—and scarcely even spoke—to the game’s principal artist and its sculptor , its map guy , distributor , or manufacturers . While Kristyn went to work at her office, Childres stayed at home, typing away on a wireless keyboard.
The Childres family only occasionally played board games—friendly bouts of Yahtzee or hard-fought games of Risk , in which Isaac locked horns with his dad. Video games such as Super Mario and Phantasy Star loomed more largely in Isaac’s early imagination, together with Choose Your Own Adventure books and sagas dreamed up with Joseph—first in Lego and G.I. Joe sessions, and later as stand-alone stories.
In January of 2015, Childres reached out to Elichev, an illustrator he had found on the digital-art Web site DeviantArt. He was only looking for Gloomhaven’s cover image at first; in exchange for a few hundred dollars, Elichev turned in a nectarine-tinted painting of mysterious figures walking through a fantastical medieval bazaar. That image, and others Elichev subsequently created, formed the banner on Kickstarter under which Childres proposed his vast and elaborate game, then half-completed.
“I hate capitalism—I guess we can start there.” I spoke to Childres over Zoom, on which he had the frayed tone—and rumpled look—of a work-from-home father to a three-month-old. “I’ve never approached my business from a perspective of, like, ‘Let’s make as much money as possible.’ I think it’s the root of pretty much all the problems of our society.
With Gloomhaven, Childres had taken pains to offer strong, realistic portrayals of female characters, and Elichev’s illustrations largely eschew high fantasy’s typical catsuits and cleavage. But over the following few years, especially after theof 2020, Cephalofair had been accused of reinforcing real-world prejudice with certain of its imaginary species.
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