Leder Games is a board game developer owned by Patrick Leder and based in Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is best known for publishing asymmetric games such as Root and Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile, which were both designed by Cole Wehrle. As of 2023, board games released by the company have usually been illustrated by Kyle Ferrin.
Leder Games was founded by Patrick Leder in 2014. Leder had been involved in board game design in his free time since 2001, obtained degrees in English and psychology at Hamline University, and quit his database programming job at Macalester College in 2016 to work on the company.[1][2]
Leder Games relies on the Kickstarter platform as both a funding and marketing tool. It focuses on releasing fewer, larger games in order to build anticipation, rather than releasing a large amount of games each year. Distinct from many board game companies, the business does not use a contract worker model, instead building a team of more permanent and higher paid employees.[1]
In 2015, the company released their first game, Vast: The Crystal Caverns. In the game, a knight attempts to slay a dragon in a cave, with players able to play as the dragon, knight, an army of goblins, a thief, or the cave itself. It was the first game by the company to be funded by a Kickstarter campaign, initially asking for $40,000 but eventually raising $150,000. A second printing of the game raised $500,000 on the platform.[2]
The original game was followed by Vast: The Mysterious Manor, Vast: The Fearsome Foes, and Vast: Haunted Hallways.
In 2018, Leder Games released Root: A Game of Woodland Might and Right, the first to be designed by Wehrle. It was followed by four main expansions from 2018 to 2022:
A digital edition created by Dire Wolf Digital was released in 2020,[6] and a role-playing game based upon the original game was released in 2021.[7] Patrick Leder's Path, an open world board game that takes place in the same universe as Root, was in development in December 2022.[8]
Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile is a game about intergenerational power struggles, developed by Wehrle since 2018 and released by Leder Games in 2020.[1] In 2022, Wehrle announced that Leder Games was designing an expansion for the game.[9]
Designed by Grant Rodiek, Fort is a deck-building game themed around children competing to build the best fort.[10] It was rethemed from the 2018 game SPQF published by Rodiek's Hyperbole Games, originally depicting a kingdom of forest animals inspired by Ancient Rome.[11]
The game was nominated at the 2021 SXSW Gaming Awards for Tabletop Game of the Year.[12]Dicebreaker noted that it "fosters social interactions and emotions above everything else."[10]
A pirate themed board game designed by Greg Loring-Albright, Ahoy involves four separate factions, two of whom fight over control of the expanding ocean map, while the others gain points by picking up and delivering cargo.[13]
Dicebreaker touted the game as a "beginner-friendly" version of Root, being significantly faster and lighter but "lack[ing] the brutal politicking and long-term strategy that made Root such a standout."[13]Game Informer listed the game as one of the best board games of 2022.[14]
An upcoming release from the company is Arcs: Collapse and Conflict in the Void. It is a space opera themed 4X campaign game designed by Wehrle in which players compete to rebuild a dying empire.[15][16] During design, a focus was placed upon quick games that each procedurally generate the next, creating an arc of three acts in which player powers begin symmetrically but diverge over time.[16]
The Kickstarter campaign for the game earned over $532,000 in its first five hours and was expected to be delivered to backers in December 2023, with a retail version to follow.[16]Polygon noted that Arcs is part of a trend of attempting to streamline board game campaigns for more rapid play, alongside games such as Legacy of Yu.[15]
