Avoiding Solitude

Published: Mon, 10/21/19

Hey !

I'm back! I've spent the past couple weeks traveling in the Pacific Northwest and it was great, but it was also pretty exhausting. Last week I was holed up in a cabin outside Seattle play testing Gloomhaven stuff, and the week before I was attending SHUX in Vancouver, demoing the Return to Dark Tower and also revealing some new bits of Gloomhaven (that we'll get to in a minute).

And what I realized is that two weeks of travel is just too long to be away from my wife and my home and my computer. So, first of all, I'm pretty sure that's the longest time my wife and I have been apart since we got married, and it was not easy. She likes to tell me I don't miss her when I'm at conventions, because I can be a little emotionless at times, but I most certainly missed hanging out with her after two weeks!

Also, as we all know, introverts need alone time to recharge, and I'm pretty sure I wasn't alone in a room more than a short handful of times over those two weeks (outside of a bathroom, I guess). I love every single person I was hanging out in that cabin with - this is certainly not a knock against them - but, especially after being at a convention the week before, at some point I was just done talking to people. I had just reached my introvert limit, which was an interesting revelation, because I'm not sure that's happened before.

But anyway, let's talk about this:

All these jokers have really grown on me.

Ahh, a new Gloomhaven game! You may have already heard of it. For reasons not worth going into, we haven't settled on a title just yet, which has been a bit frustrating because people seem to think there is a possibility that "Subtitle" will stick, which is just silly (though I guess that's the point). We've got a few candidates on actual names, and one will likely be settled on in the weeks to come. For now, though, it's already got a BGG page for people to speculate in.

So the play testing that happened last week was for this title, and, despite my introvert mania, it went incredibly well, and I am super-optimistic that it will be the perfect product for teaching more casual gamers how to play and love Gloomhaven when it comes out next fall.

I don't want to go on too long about this here, because I recently wrote a whole blog post about the development process. I will say, though, that I feel compelled to let you in on the new class that will replace the Necromancer. (If you didn't read the blog post, essentially, we determined that the Necromancer was too complicated a class for this type of product, and so a new class was created to fill the same role, but without all the complicated summoning.)

I don't actually have artwork for her yet, because she was only born last week. And maybe that's an indication that it's too early for this, and maybe I should have learned my lesson after announcing the Necromancer and having to walk that back, but, hell, I'm going to do it anyway.

The reason I am doing it is that I would like to make all of the new classes from this new product available to demo at Essen Spiel this week, and so this new class is bound to get revealed one way or the other eventually.

Yes, you heard that correctly. If you come by the Cephalofair Games booth at Spiel (4F102) to demo Gloomhaven, you can try out the four new characters. So that's the Demolitionist, Hatchet, Red Guard, and (drum roll)...

Voidwarden! This will be another human female (like the Necromancer), who, at an early age, came in contact with the Void (a nasty area in Gloomhaven that turns everything that enters it into black sand). She was lucky to have survived the encounter but one of her limbs was withered as a result. Ever since, she has resolved to protect others from the same fate, and stands at the edge of the Void, warding people away. Because of that initial encounter, and her continued proximity to the Void, she has inherited some of the powers of whatever sinister force is behind the Void. Powers of suggestion and dark pacts. She can provide healing and other powerful abilities to her allies, but they often come at a cost. And she can also exert some influence over the weak-willed foes she comes across.

I hope that sounds cool! Hopefully we'll get some art together before too long, and I'll see you at Spiel, or PAX Unplugged, or somewhere else in the future!