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Cephalofair ditches dungeon crawling for a ruthless mercenary staffing agency.
Cephalofair just announced the thing nobody was asking for and everybody’s curious about anyway.
At Gen Con 2026, the studio unveiled Mercenaries Wanted, a game that takes the Gloomhaven universe and strips out the two things that define it: the dungeon crawling and the multi-year campaign commitment. What’s left is a 45-minute box about running the business that sends adventurers into those dungeons in the first place.
That’s a genuinely strange pivot for a company whose brand is built on legacy boxes so heavy they need their own shelf reinforcement. But it’s also not a random cash-in. Dennis Vögele, one of the lead designers on the original Gloomhaven team, is behind this one, and the premise has actual teeth: instead of playing a hero, you’re managing a rival mercenary outfit in the city of Casskia, competing against other players doing the same thing. You’re not descending into the dark. You’re the person profiting off the people who do.
Cephalofair is explicitly framing this as two different pitches at once: an accessible on-ramp for people who never touched a legacy box, and a quick strategic side dish for veterans who already burned a hundred hours on Frosthaven’s campaign.
That’s a harder needle to thread than the press release makes it sound. The player who ground through Frosthaven’s late-game scenarios and the player who’s only ever cracked open the Jaws of the Lion starter set are not looking for the same 45 minutes.
The Pitch: Staffing Agency, Not Dungeon Crawl
The core loop, as Cephalofair describes it, has you recruiting, equipping, and deploying a rotating lineup of freelancers to complete open contracts for gold. You don’t control one hero across a campaign. You control a roster, and the roster is the whole game. That’s a meaningfully different kind of tension than “did I bring the right loadout for this scenario,” and it’s the part of the announcement worth paying attention to, because it means success is going to live or die on drafting combinations of mercenaries whose skills actually complement each other rather than optimizing a single build over dozens of sessions.
The mercenary pool is the fan-service hook: 61 characters pulled from across Gloomhaven, Jaws of the Lion, and Frosthaven, illustrated by Yanis Cardin, Phan Tuan Dat, Alexandr Elichev, and Phil Stone. If you’ve put time into any of those games, you’ll recognize faces on that roster, which is presumably the point. It also means the draft pool is genuinely uneven by design: a Jaws of the Lion starter build sitting next to one of Frosthaven’s grimmer late-game specialists is not a fair fight on paper, and how Cephalofair balances a rookie’s kit against a veteran’s kit is the actual design question here, not just how many portraits they crammed onto the box.
Whether 61 characters actually feel distinct in a 45-minute game, or whether most of them collapse into interchangeable stat blocks once you’re not spending an entire campaign learning their quirks, is exactly the kind of thing that won’t be answerable until people have actually played it.
Between missions, the game apparently gets its teeth into roster management directly: deciding who stays on the payroll, who gets promoted, and who gets cut to make room for new blood.
That’s a resource-and-personnel management layer bolted onto a Euro-style contract-fulfillment engine, which is a different genre entirely from anything Cephalofair has shipped before.
Rounds race toward fulfilling jobs for gold, and the whole thing closes out with a series of tournaments where your best, most-promoted mercenaries fight rival companies for what the announcement calls “ultimate fame and fortune.” So there’s still combat in here somewhere, it’s just been demoted from the main event to the finale.
Quick Facts
| Designer | Dennis Vögele (Gloomhaven, original design team) |
| Players | 1 to 6 |
| Playtime | 45 minutes |
| Setting | The city of Casskia |
| Character pool | 61 mercenaries from Gloomhaven, Jaws of the Lion, and Frosthaven |
| Retail price | $24.99 |
| Preorders open | September 2026 |
| Hands-on preview | Essen SPIEL, October 2026 |
| Official launch | December 4, 2026 |
Why the Price and the Runtime Are the Real Story
Two numbers here matter more than the theme does. First, $24.99 is a budget price for anything wearing the Gloomhaven name, and it reads like a deliberate move to catch people who bounced off the mainline games’ cost and time commitment.
Second, 45 minutes for up to six players is an aggressive claim, and it’s the one I’d want to see proven at a table before taking at face value. Plenty of “quick” competitive games with that many seats at the table quietly turn into ninety minutes once everyone’s actually thinking through their turns, and a drafting-and-contracts game with six people fighting over the same open jobs has real potential to bog down exactly there.
What Cephalofair is really doing with Mercenaries Wanted is testing whether its audience wants more Gloomhaven lore without more Gloomhaven homework. The franchise’s biggest asset has always been the sunk-cost pull of a persistent world and a box full of secrets you unlock over months.
This throws that model out entirely in favor of something you can teach and finish in one sitting. If it works, it’s a smart way to widen the funnel for people intimidated by the legacy boxes. If the 45-minute claim doesn’t hold up at six players, it’s going to feel like a solid Euro wearing borrowed IP. Either way, Essen in October should tell us a lot before anyone has to commit money in September.
