I’m a big fan of the games in Cephalofair’s Gloomhaven series. If you’re deep in the board gaming hobby, you probably know of them. If you’re not as versed in these particular games, don’t worry, I’ve got you covered.

In a nutshell, Gloomhaven, Frosthaven, and the other “X-Haven” games are cooperative adventure board games, and they’re HUGE. In every way. The boxes are the size of those office paper boxes that hold a dozen packs easy. They weigh about as much too. The games themselves are deep adventures, broken into dozens of chapters, with a ton of tactical decisions and literally thousands of parts – cards, plastic miniature figures, maps, tiny little tokens, books, etcetera. It’s like somebody deconstructed a full adventure video game and rebuilt the whole thing out of cardboard.

“Complex” maybe scratches the surface. These games are beefy.

Learning how to play these games is equally intense. There are six different characters you can choose to play as to start, with more that become available as you progress through the story. There is an entire “auto-pilot” system that you need to understand in order to make the game’s monsters fight against your heroes. It can take over an hour just to set up the game boards and pieces for any given play session, and two to three times that to play (and then you still have to put it all back into the box when you’re done). Completing just the core story will typically take 70-75 sessions.

The price tag on Gloomhaven, at the time that I’m writing this, is around $160 US (If you can find it), and the preorder for 2nd edition is $200. Frosthaven, if found at retail, is about $200, and preorders for the 2nd edition of that are running $250.

I fell in love with these games a few years ago. They have depth, challenging decisions, variety, consequences, growth, and so many other great attributes. It can be hard to get them to the table though, even playing through them solo. And that’s sort of why I’ve found myself designing my own adventure game, Project Disco Candybar.

My son is about 10 years old. He’s been diving into the board game hobby along with me and my wife pretty enthusiastically, when he’s not running around the yard with the neighborhood kids, armed with Nerf blasters. The Gloomhaven games (specifically) fall well outside his attention span, but he’s still curious about adventure board games in general. So I decided I needed to make something we could all play together, that approximated the depth and variety in Gloomhaven, while stripping out just about everything that makes the game feel intimidating to newcomers — price tag, complex auto-pilot systems, physical scale, session duration, components, and so on.

What I’ve come up with is close enough to my target that I’m really excited about it.

This blog is going to be intentionally vague at times, but it’s here to help give some background on Disco Candybar’s purpose and goals, and to be a running exploration of my game design process. This isn’t about crowdfunding its production even a little bit, it’s just me sharing what I feel I can in the moment. Maybe somewhere along the way I’ll be inclined to open up the garage door all the way and let people really play around with it, but for now, it’s still in the “secret script” stages.

Anyway, thanks for coming along for the ride.

---