When I meet with Cole Wehrle to talk about his new studio, Buried Giant, he is wearing a shirt that says, in basic, block capitals, 'Board Games'. It's an amusing role reversal, to see the man whose name has launched some of the hobby's best board games don such a label. A 'Cole Wehrle board game' is a brand of itself. When Cole Wehrle moves, all of board gaming is watching.
That's why it was such a surprise to see him announce his departure from publisher Leder Games - another name he shared close ties with for so long. The first question I put to Wehrle is 'why?'. How does forming an entirely new studio serve the games that Buried Giant Studios wants to make?
Then and now
According to Wehrle, the answer seems to be the age-old break-up classic: creative differences. He gives more context via a brief history of Leder Games.
"The first game that Leder Games published was this small card game called Trick or Treat. Patrick [Leder] was working on different games, and through that process, he met David Somerville, and they collaborated on Vast. Vast was already a departure from what Patrick had wanted to do originally, and Root was a second departure."
Root may not have been on Leder's original vision board, but it ended up being the board game that launched a thousand Leder ships. In the original blog post announcing his departure, Wehrle says "Root's success helped us move offices twice and allowed Leder Games to triple its staff, creating one of the most remarkable teams in the tabletop industry."
From there "every success allowed us to work on bigger titles", Wehrle tells me. "Root took a year, which allowed us to work for two years on Oath, which allowed us to work for three years on Arcs." "We kept building this out, but within the company, it started to emerge that folks who were supporting the titles that I was working on with Kyle [Ferrin, Buried Giant co-founder] were somewhat insular."
"It just didn't make sense for us to remain in the same studio", he says, "especially because I think Patrick really wants to do his own designs." "It makes perfect sense, and I'm really happy for him to do it, but when we were thinking about the sort of games the studio should publish, there were disagreements about what those sorts of games should be." Wehrle tells me that his projects were so resource-intensive for Leder Games "that those titles were stopping the studio from growing into something Patrick wanted it to be."
He stresses that "there was never any animosity" behind the decision to split. "I think Patrick was right to feel like 'I want to find space for my own creative work at the studio'", he tells me. He praises Leder for fostering "a very free and open studio where people could have other projects".
Wehrle describes Wehrlegig Games, the studio he co-founded with his brother Drew, as "a testament to that openness", which he says "allowed for a tremendous amount of innovation". Wehrlegig will now be a semi-independent imprint of Buried Giant.
Bringing these two aspects of Wehrle's design work together is one of the numerous benefits of Buried Giant. "While at Leder, my creative life has had blockers to it", he tells me. "So, for example, when I'm working with Drew on historical games, he only gets me on nights and weekends. He might have a question to ask me, and if it's more complicated than a yes or no, it's waiting for the evening. Then, if I'm tired, or if I'm traveling with Leder, it's really going to slow the historical work down." "All that work is now commingled, so that blocker is free, and we are able to move so much faster."
Similarly, Buried Giant employs two graphic designers, meaning Wehrle "gets to do less graphic design, and we get to make games faster". "We can be working on two historical games at once instead of just one - that just simply wasn't possible before", he explains.
Buried Giant's co-founders bought the rights to two of Leder's Wehrle-designed games before they left, Oath and Arcs. The efficiency Wehrle mentions means that no time has been lost on these existing projects. The Kickstarter for Oath: New Foundations has, he estimates, suffered a one-to-three-week delay at best. "It's not slowing down that much, and we may make up that difference."
Buried Giant already has a stacked schedule, and Wehrle says "it will take three to five years for us to just realize our initial ambitions". First on the agenda, though, is not one Arcs expansion, but several.
"Once we got everything figured out, I threw myself into Arcs", he says. Wehrle compiled the notes he'd made on content that didn't make it into the Blighted Reach expansion, and "we had maybe three expansions worth of material for Arcs already". "It's in really good shape", he adds.
Wehrle hints that the future Arcs expansions will be heavily influenced by "two years of the game in public perception". "There are tons of really good ideas in the fan variant community", he tells me. "It's exciting to re-engage with that community and see what people actually want us to build."
When asked what features Arcs fans have been clamoring for most, Wehrle produces a long list. "Everybody wants more plot lines in the campaign, which I can confirm we will be doing." "Right now, we're trying to decide if we want to do alternate guild decks, or if we want to build guild boosters, or a court deck with the same number of cards so that you can swap." "There are interesting questions about scalability that we're trying to figure out, like 'Can the game tolerate a fifth player?'"
"I'm hoping for a faster crowdfunding turnaround than I've done in the past, because we have a much firmer sense of what we're building - but while we know the size of the house, we haven't decided how many rooms it has."
Beyond this, Buried Giant plans to publish Take, a former canceled Leder project by Ted Caya. That's estimated to release in 2027, though Wehrle hints that the game's current form - and even name - may be subject to change.
The future
After that, the world is Buried Giant's oyster, and Wehrle already has baby birds that he's ready to push out of the design nest. One is a magical school murder mystery that "didn't exist anywhere on paper until recently".
"There is something so compelling about a mystery at a narrative level, yet when you sit down and play Clue, it's more similar to doing a Sudoku puzzle. You're doing these deductions that might capture the mind of Sherlock Holmes, but they don't capture the uncertainty and the drama of reading a mystery. I thought 'What happens if you build a mystery game, and your objective is not to make the characters into brilliant sleuths, but instead to make them feel like they are participating in the narrative?'"
The first mystery that Wehrle himself has to solve is one of scale. This, apparently, is where the magical school enters the mix. "Most of the time, when these crimes happen, the motivations are much older than the mystery show's 60-minute window", he says. "A lot of these mystery stories actually take place over a decade, and I thought 'A school drama can work in a 10-year chunk'."
Wehrle's current concept takes a lot of inspiration from Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea, as well as social deduction games like Mafia and Blood on the Clocktower. "The core frame of this game is that everyone is committing crimes, covering them up, and trying to discover other crimes that were committed", he says. "I think that allows players to be fully fleshed out characters." "And what's nice about using a fantastic setting is you can let players get killed, but they can still operate as ghosts."
Wehrle is also working on a game set in the United State's Reconstruction era, which he considers "a great gap in historic knowledge". After a decade of research and tinkering, he has settled on placing the players in the role of 'carpet baggers', "a class of people who moved into the South to take advantage of what they perceived to be economic opportunities". "What's interesting is they are coming into a very unsettled political situation that they then have to navigate to advance their own aims."
Once again, Wehrle is still mulling over the game's scope. "I thought about just making it about Louisiana, or the whole South, but now I'm imagining it as a sequence of games that work regionally."
Beyond this is a project he refers to as the 'Geopolitics' board game, which was conceived in response to Oath's nature as a chronicle game. "Many years ago, I realized almost all of my fantasy political games are really about one kingdom", he says. "Heck, that's even true of John Company, which is really about just one business." "And over the past year or so, I've been playing traditional political games like Virgin Queen, where players are managing dynasties against other states, and they're 50-year stories that are fundamentally about geopolitics - trade agreements, treaties, powers, blockades." "They're fascinating, and I realized this is a genre I would love to work in."
Wehrle says that his final design will stand out from other mainstream geopolitical games, as "basically every geopolitical game is actually an empire game - and empire games are completely different from geopolitical games." "They're engine-building, they're about synergies and navigating funny tech trees. Geopolitical games might give marginal upgrades, but you need to navigate the political crisis with what you have." "I think there's a huge amount of space in the hobby right now for a really good geopolitical game", he adds.
Buried Giant is certainly going to be busy in its initial years. I ask Wehrle to sum up the company's mission statement, to which he says: "These are games that are sandboxes. We design interactive games where players are the engineers of their own stories, and the games exist to give their ambitions narrative resonance. These are games where the play emerges organically from how players interact with each other. We're trying to do player-centered narratives that are open and flexible, within expressive systems that reward players for investing in them."
This mission evolved from games like Oath, Arcs, and Root, games that shook the industry when Leder Games shared them with the world. If Buried Giant can maintain that momentum, then the future of board games is looking sweet.
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