Gloomhaven’s sequel is so big they hired a submarine engineer to fit it inside the box
The original campaign game-in-a-box, Gloomhaven, is a big, beefy boy — and I don’t just mean the 100-odd encounters that it comes with. The thing weighs a ton, coming in just shy of 18 pounds. The sequel, Frosthaven, has just finished shipping out to backers, and it’s even bigger. Well, I should say heavier: While the box is only slightly taller than the original, it weighs nearly twice as much — an impressive 35.6 pounds, or roughly the same as 16 copies of Clue.
So how did Cephalofair Games cram in all that cardboard and plastic, including more than 2,500 cards and a 2.5-inch-tall stack of 27 punchboards?
They hired a retired submarine engineer.
No, really.
“I did my undergrad work at [Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute],” said Matt Healey in a recent interview with Polygon. “When I was at RPI, I got a co-op summer job for the Department of the Navy, and I did all kinds of underwater acoustic research trying to find ‘large submerged metallic cylindrical objects.’”
“Finding people who have underwater acoustic engineering skill is not easy,” Healey continued. “And so I did two years at [General Dynamics] Electric Boat, and then I transferred to Electro-Dynamic. And what they were working on were very, very high-power, very low-RPM electric motors.”
Those specially designed electric motors were destined for use in submarines, and they required Healey to spend a lot of time positioning giant magnets and coils of wire just so in order to make them work right. By the end of his time as the military contractor, he said that his team’s design could potentially “shrink the length of the submarine by between 10 and 20 feet,” thereby leaving more room inside for… you know… other stuff.
Years later, well into his retirement, Healey
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