By Tom Marks

Gloomhaven is a big game. Weighing in at 22 pounds and costing $140, it’s so big that creator Isaac Childres wasn’t sure anyone would even buy it. But roughly two years after its first release, not only has Gloomhaven sold roughly 120,000 copies, it’s has proved that people aren’t afraid to buy expensive board games.

That’s opened the door for lots of other designers to offer bigger boxes tagged with $100+ prices. You’d think Childres might be thrilled about being a trailblazer, but he actually has mixed feelings about it all. Why? Because he thinks some people are abusing this newfound market.

“I just have mixed feelings about being at the forefront of the $100+ board game, because I feel like a lot of them maybe shouldn’t be priced that,” Childres explained to IGN while at Gen Con 2018. “They’re just overproduced, whereas Gloomhaven is about getting a lot of content in the box, as opposed to a lot of useless plastic and stuff.”

Childres said that he feels many board game creators have gotten the wrong message from Gloomhaven’s success, saying they may think “oh, I can sell my thing for $140, so I’ll just take this normal game and just put it in a giant box.” The difference, he says, is that “Gloomhaven has to be that because it’s just so full of content.”

In fact, there’s so much content in Gloomhaven, that Childres didn’t know how they would sell it in stores at all. “The concern was ‘how are we going to do this in retail?’ Because there’s really no precedent for it.”

“At the time, I was walking around board game stores and nothing in there was over $100, except maybe [Warhammer] Age of Sigmar, which is full of miniatures.” Childres knew he needed to price Gloomhaven above $100, but was nervous about going too high. So he started at $120, but raised it to $140 when he realized it wasn’t as much of an issue as he had feared.

Childres told me $140 “should have been the retail price originally,” but it seemed crazy at the time. “I was trying to fit this old model, that I guess I’m sort of at the forefront of changing now — board games over $100.”

It’s not hard to see what he means. Cthulhu: Death May Die, for example, is currently selling an expansion with a $150, two-foot tall plastic Cthulhu statue that acts as a board. Star Wars: Armada has a newly announced $200 Super Star Destroyer ship that’s almost as long as my arm.

Whether or not you like these sorts of things, it’s hard to imagine $150+ game add-ons being this common today without Gloomhaven’s popularity. Expensive games and components certainly existed before (especially in wargaming) but board game developers are clearly getting more ambitious, pushing the limits of both scale and price.

Gloomhaven continues to grow too, with its first expansion, Forgotten Circles, arriving relatively soon. An even larger expansion is on its way after that, and a Gloomhaven video game is currently in the works. Gloomhaven is also miraculously available on Amazon right now, and a fourth printing is coming with more copies near Christmas.

For more of our coverage from Gen Con 2018, check out IGN’s tabletop page, where you can see everything from the show and more.

Tom Marks is IGN’s PC Editor and pie maker. You can follow him on Twitter.