The Lab Notebook and the Dungeon

In 2013, a physics PhD candidate at Purdue University began prototyping a board game in his spare time. Four years later, Isaac Childres published Gloomhaven. It held the number-one position on BoardGameGeek for five consecutive years. It sold over half a million copies. Its Kickstarter sequel, Frosthaven, raised nearly thirteen million dollars. And the mechanic at its heart was a simple, radical substitution: instead of rolling dice to determine whether your hero’s sword connected, you played cards. Two cards per turn — the top of one, the bottom of the other — each representing an action your character could take. The catch was that every card played brought you closer to exhaustion. Your hand was your life.

The Euro-Crawl Synthesis

When Childres entered the hobby in 2013, the dungeon crawl market was split along a familiar fault line. Euro games offered deep strategic decisions but stripped away thematic immersion. Dungeon crawlers offered theme and adventure but outsourced critical outcomes to dice. Childres identified this as the “mean turn” problem — the moment when randomness negates agency. His solution was to import the resource-constraint philosophy of Euro design into the thematic framework of the dungeon crawl.

The card system was the mechanism. Instead of a flat probability distribution, he gave players a modifier deck — a small stack of cards ranging from -2 to +2, plus a miss and a critical hit. The deck has memory. Draw several weak modifiers and the probability of drawing a strong one rises. Better still, players improve the deck as their character levels. Progression isn’t just thematic; it’s statistical.

No prior dungeon crawler unified pacing, stamina, and mortality in a single mechanic. Gloomhaven’s interlocking subsystems — cards, modifiers, elements, initiative, items, experience, gold — interact the way variables interact in an equation. Change one input and every other output shifts. The system is elegant the way a well-designed experiment is elegant: every variable accounted for, every interaction mapped, every result reproducible.

The Franchise Question

The most honest thing to say about Isaac Childres’s career is that it is, so far, the story of one game. Forge War (2015) was the first release — a dense Euro-style resource management game. Gloomhaven (2017) was the breakthrough. Jaws of the Lion (2020) showed a designer learning from his audience. Frosthaven (2023) addressed the original’s known weaknesses while expanding the scope.

Five designed games over twelve years. One franchise world. One core mechanical system. The question the methodology must answer: does extraordinary depth within a single system compensate for limited breadth across the hobby? The depth is undeniable. The breadth is unwritten.

What Remains

The system. A cooperative tactical dungeon crawler where hand management replaces dice rolling, where every action decays toward exhaustion, where failure belongs to the player and never to probability. Five years at BGG number one. Over half a million copies sold. A sequel that raised thirteen million dollars on crowdfunding. A digital adaptation. An RPG adaptation in development.

One franchise. One system. Five years at number one. The depth is undeniable. The breadth is unwritten.

Total: 26 points. Year: 2017.