Frosthaven is so big they hired a submarine engineer to pack the box

This is the original game-ina-box campaign. Gloomhaven, is a big, beefy boy — and I don’t just mean the 100-odd encounters that it comes with. It weighs in at just 18 pounds and is a hefty beast. 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 poundsOr roughly 16 copies Clue.

How did Cephalofair Games manage to pack in so many cardboards and plastics, such as more than 2,500 cards along with a stack of 27 punchboards measuring 2.5 inches tall?

A retired submarine engineer was recruited.

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 I then transferred to Electro-Dynamic. And what they were working on were very, very high-power, very low-RPM electric motors.”

These electric motors were specifically designed for submarine use and required Healey’s extensive knowledge of positioning large magnets and wire coils. So it is They must be made to work correctly. 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.

Healey retired years after his work in government contracts and started his own business, building boards game inserts. His company, Mess-AXP Game Inserts, has worked on some of the most complex games in the business — including Catharsis, Forgotten DepthsPlease see the following: Ancient World: City Builder.

But why didn’t they just make the box, you know… bigger? It turns out that international shipping costs are more affected by volume than domestic shipping. While most domestic shipping prices depend on the weight of the box, it is not so with international shipping. Cephalofair’s container ship was filled with the next board game hit, so a smaller shipment meant lower freight costs.

That made Healey’s skill set especially useful during the shipping container shortage that kicked off during the pandemic.

“At the height [of the container shortage],” Cephalofair founder Isaac Childres told Polygon, “prices went from $5,000 to $25,000 per container.” That caused many board game manufacturers to pay a lot more when shipping crowdfunded products to their customers — especially in 2021 and early 2022. But thanks to some good timing, and Healey’s engineering acumen, FrosthavenThe backers of the project were not affected.

“I think the most that we paid for a container was maybe $10,000,” Childres went on. “We just got lucky. We kind of waited, and the delays ended up working in our favor.”

I’ve seen a lot of board games in my day, and I can safely say that FrosthavenThe most dense, aggressively packed and dense of all the options. What? Legends of the Dark: Descent It arrived at my door half-empty. Not a centimeter of it was wasted. Frosthaven’s design. And it’s not lacking in amenities, either. FrosthavenYou will find plenty of tuckboxes as well as baggies to hold your cardboard bits. Also included are four handy plastic tray for moving the contents of the box from the box to the table.

Ever the perfectionist, Healey still isn’t completely happy with his final design. It does everything and delivers all the necessary information to the customer. It’s robust, making it less likely to get worn while sitting around your friendly local game store. But it’s not perfect, and that’s largely due to the economics of making a game that weighs as much as a large freeweight.

“I achieved every one of my goals within the constraints that I was given by price and Isaac [Childres],” Healey said. Healey said that he still would prefer 25 millimeters more box height to have more room for organizing the tiles. Also, if you want to sleeve your cards before you put them back in the box, that’s too bad. It’s just not gonna work. He knows this. Please don’t yell at him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just didn’t have the space.”