Mercenaries Wanted at Gen Con 2026

My first meeting at Gen Con 2026 was with Price Johnson, CEO of Cephalofair Games, who wanted to show off Mercenaries Wanted, a drafting game designed by Dennis Vögele, who was one of the developers of Frosthaven and who worked on the design of the second edition of Gloomhaven.

Mercenaries Wanted features 61 mercenaries from the company's -haven game line, with you hiring these mercenaries to complete jobs for you before the chosen members of your group compete in tournaments at game's end. Your overall goal: End up with the most money.

In each of three rounds, you start by drafting four mercenaries, after which you ditch one. Who are you going to draft? People who will excel at one of the available jobs, such as these:

If you choose to take on the "Siege Assault" job, you'll earn 3 coins per mercenary with an attack value of at least 5, while "Join the Traveling Circus" requires one merc with attack or shield of at least 3 and a second merc with move or heal of at least 3. You can also earn coins from the two secondary aspects of the job, such as 2 coins per light element on your mercenaries or 1 per different tag among your entire crew.

Here's one of my line-ups from the sample game we played:

Mercenaries have special abilities, so you're trying to draft for a particular job or two in order to maximize how much you can earn. (I didn't do a good job here, but learning games at conventions are for learning, not for playing well, so I try to choose quickly.)

Once you have your team, players take turns choosing jobs. In the first round, whoever has the total move on their team chooses first; in the next two rounds, you choose in order based on who has the worst score.

You can choose the same job as another player, but you'll subtract 1 coin from your total. With the crew above, I made 10 coins by joining the traveling circus: 2 from the main requirement, 2 from a pair of mercs with element symbols, and 6 from a half-dozen tags.

To end the first round, you place one merc in the "Challengers" section of your game board, keep one among your "Trainees", then discard the rest. You also receive three items, then choose one that you can use next round. After round two, you'll keep two "Trainees" and save another merc in "Challengers", and after round three, two more mercs join the "Challengers" pile, after which you see well this team fares in the tournaments, such as these three in our game:

For the "Grand Festival", you want more element symbols on your challengers than anyone else (or at least the second most symbols), while "Sewer Cleanup" counts Control and Duelist tags and "Helper Hand" rewards the two teams with the most total heal. (In a solo game, you score coins depending on whether you meet the number listed in parentheses.)

Mercenaries Wanted is for 1-6 players aged 14 and up, with a playing time of 45 minutes and a US$25 MSRP. Pre-orders will open in September 2026, with a release date of December 4, 2026.

Price Johnson also showed the current state of the Gloomhaven and Frosthaven miniatures that were crowdfunded in 2023. These white-box samples, which collectively occupy 1.5 Kallax shelves, show how the figures will look inside the boxes, with the outer packaging still to be completed ahead of the estimated release date of Q1 2027.

Cephalofair also displayed various elements from the Gloomhaven RPG Deluxe Box, along with the RPG book itself, of which I did not take a photo.

Finally, here is Cephalofair Games CEO Price Johnson, who kept interrupting his description of Mercenaries Wanted to relay little stories about the performance of this character or that in various games he's played. He was clearly excited about these characters moving out of the fixed -haven environments and having players interact with them in new situations that suggest their ability to inhabit a larger world beyond what already exists.