Whether you attended Gen Con with us, or are subscribed to our INSIDER NEWSLETTER, you may have heard we’ve announced our next brand new game, MERCENARIES WANTED!
MERCENARIES WANTED ($24.99 USD) is a drafting game for 1-6 players designed by Cephalofair’s very own Dennis Vögele (Jaws of the Lion, Frosthaven, Gloomhaven (2025), Mercenary Packs, etc), and takes ~45 mins to play!
In Mercenaries Wanted, players won’t play adventurous Mercenaries this time around. No. Instead, you get to step into the shoes of an adventurous Mercenary HR Manager.
That’s right! Because what is running a company of freelance mercenaries OTHER than one giant human resources puzzle?
After showcasing it all week at Gen Con, I'm personally really excited to share where this project is coming from and what it means for Cephalofair Games. So let's dig a little deeper!
Q. What’s it about?
A: There are a series of high-profile tournaments happening in the city of Gloomhaven in the coming week, and your Mercenary Company (one of six in-world groups, such as the Jaws of the Lion) need to hire a batch of fresh new recruits to train, equip, and enter into after 3 rounds of drafting and menial work around town.
Q. How does it play?
A: 1) Each round, players will pass around decks of Mercenaries drafting one at a time until they have a fully drafted team.
2) Unfortunately, your eyes are always bigger than your coin coffers. So after drafting you ALWAYS have to find one sorry freelancer to “cut loose”.
3) You’ll then cross check your training team’s “job requirements” with those found posters on the town job board, each company selecting one job to perform for the most amount of coin possible.
4) Your team will return to HQ, bring back some loot, and you will have to determine which of your Mercs to officially “hire” , sending them off to get ready for the end-game tournaments…and which to send off into their hard earned “retirement”...leaving your party permanently.
5) Rinse and repeat for 2 more rounds, slowly growing the size of your team of trainees, gaining points, equipment, and building that end-game tournament team.
6) All players prepare their tournament teams activating all mercenary abilities and gear, then proceed to compete head-to-head in all three end game tournaments.
7) At the end of the game - the Mercenary Company with the most points wins the game, and more importantly, bragging rights for being the most premier Mercenary Company in Gloomhaven.
Q. Why Do I Love It?
A. First, it was really exciting when developer Dennis Vögele approached Isaac and I a couple of years back with a game he’d been working on in his free time. Dennis has worked, intimately, on so many of our tent-pole games such as Jaws of the Lion, Frosthaven, and Gloomhaven (2025). He clearly had thought a lot about what other genres of games could fit into the Gloomhaven catalogue while still feeling heavily inspired by our dungeon crawling themes. At the same time, everything about the game is designed to be welcoming to those unfamiliar with Gloomhaven or dungeon crawlers and just want to play a strategic drafting game full of cool and unique characters.
Secondly, it just fits our world SO well! One of the biggest things that excited me about the original Gloomhaven was the concept that your group wasn’t necessarily a group of best friends here to see an entire adventure through. No. In Gloomhaven you are a group of, rather selfish at times, freelance agents here to do a job, get paid, and eventually get out of the game entirely.
And MAN, does Mercenaries Wanted capture that core thematic element. Every round you are forced to make difficult decisions about who to cut from your team, who to well-wish into retirement, who gets to borrow what gear, all while constantly keeping an eye on your ever shifting team dynamics and goals. With 61 unique Mercenaries there are so many different ways to “build your machine”, creating and finding synergies you haven’t deployed before. Every game has felt like a fresh puzzle to be solved.
You'll have mercenaries that you drafted in round 1 because they were great in day-to-day jobs, but then you'll have to say goodbye to them before the final tournament because they just aren't bringing anything to the end-game table...it's a fun, bittersweet feeling. It’s very similar to how I felt when I had to send Crag Ferguson (my Savvas Cragheart) off into retirement while unlocking “Cthulhu Face” as my second class in my Gloomhaven campaign. I was sad to see him go…but soon I was excitedly overwhelmed with learning how to leverage new abilities and synergize with the rest of my team! This is the heart of Mercenaries Wanted.
Finally (and honestly, not even final, just final for this blog entry), the gameplay is tight and consistently playing at 45mins despite group size as the majority of gameplay (aside from job selection & scoring) happens simultaneously across all players. This means that Mercenaries Wanted is not just a great option for fans of traditional hobby card-games, but especially great for Gloomhaven players who can’t fit another whole scenario into game night but still want to scratch a familiar Gloomhaven itch in a fraction of the time and without long-term commitment.
Q. When to expect it?
A. Pre-orders will be opening next month, and this will be a late Q4 release for us (Dec 4th), the plan being to have it at PAX:U for its official release. This is a direct retail release from Cephalofair, so there will be no crowdfunding campaign, nor are you required to pre-order as it will be widely available in hobby retail as well.
Q. Why is it important?
A. Many of you have, graciously, have asked over the last year how to help during tariff and import volatility. Well…after seemingly running into global emergencies every ~4-5 years (looking at you Covid & U.S. Tariffs…) one thing has become clear to us, a small publisher of some really big games….it really helps to diversify your catalogue! A small $24.99 card game is, to no one’s surprise, a much smaller logistical problem than shipping containers of 40lb board games and helps significantly with business needs/goals in between the larger project releases.
This is not something we do just to do though, internally there are a lot of considerations to projects we take on. Most importantly, but not limited to:
1) We want new games to make sense for the Gloomhaven community, and excite you!
2) It helps when they ALSO really excite us too :)
3) They satisfy a demand we aren’t currently fulfilling (genre, game mechanics, playtime, player count, etc)
4) They should not tie up resources dedicated to our larger tent-pole projects (euro-inspired dungeon crawlers)
5) They should uphold Cephalofair’s commitment to minimizing luck and maximizing “Epic Strategy”.
(prototype depicted)
We’ve heard lots of requests over the last few years for smaller pieces of Gloomhaven (dungeon crawling) content as well as new ways to explore the lore, world, and characters of Gloomhaven (new games/genres).
So I really hope Mercenaries Wanted is a great glimpse at some smaller, and different, types of content you should expect from us in the future!
If you STILL want to know more, here is some coverage it following our Gen Con preview:
- Board Game Beat w/ Eric Martin
- Meeple University w/ Stella Jahja
- GamingTrend w/ Andy Giovanni
- ICv2 w/ William Niebling
- Comicbook.com w/ Matthew Aguilar
- BoardGameGeek Blog w/ Steph Hodge
- ACD Distribution (Retail info)
You can sign up to be notified when Pre-Orders open on our website HERE.
-Price Johnson, CEO
