Surprise: Gloomhaven creator announces new, revised Second Edition

polygon.com:

Gloomhaven, the wildly popular dungeon crawling board game from Cephalofair Games, will soon get a proper tabletop role-playing game, as well as a set of more than 600 new miniatures. Polygon has learned that, in addition to those headline products, the Backerkit campaign will also include an opportunity to pre-order Gloomhaven: Second Edition, a newly revised version of the original award-winning board game that has been in production for some time.

Polygon sat down with creator Isaac Childres to learn more about the ambitious, multi-product crowdfunding campaign, and to learn why it’s so important for him to make changes to his breakout hit. But first, some details on what fans should expect inside the new box.

According to Childres, the revision of the original game goes incredibly deep thanks to the help of project leads Drew Penn and Dennis Vögele. Starting with the modular map tiles themselves, longtime fans will see clarified, revised, and otherwise enhanced art and graphic design throughout. Mechanically speaking, the game’s many character classes have also been modified and, in several cases, completely rebalanced.

“There’s obviously been a lot of community feedback over the years,” Childres said. “We’ve kind of brought everything in line to make [classes] all feel about the same, but also still feel fun to play — even more fun to play in some cases.”

Childres called out the Nightshroud, long considered an overpowered character class, as just one example of the changes in store for die-hard players.

“It’s fun to be invisible and kill everything super easily,” Childres said, “but it gets old after a while, so we’ve made the Nightshroud fun and easy to play, rather than cheesy.”

But perhaps the most substantive