Cole Wehrle and Kyle Ferrin, the Creative Director and Lead Artist of the board game studio Leder Games, have just left to form a new board game company called Buried Giant Studios. Leder Games is responsible for several popular board games such as “Root,” “Oath,” and “Arcs,” which have been recognized by several game awards organizations.
The split was announced by a letter from Wehrle, and although it came as a shock to the community, it seems that this split has been in progress for a long time behind the scenes. Part of the split involved Buried Giant Studios purchasing the rights to Oath and Arcs, although in turn Leder Games still maintains rights to their most popular game, Root.
Root is most known at Terrace due to Root Club, an MTHS club which used to meet weekly to play and discuss Root. When questioning Robert Jenson–a former member of Root club–he stated “It’s[the work on Root] mostly been Nick Brachmann recently, so since he’s still at Leder Games I don’t think much will change honestly.”
Additionally, Ferrin has stated that he will continue to work on art for Root in the future, which makes it unlikely that Leder Games will change very much from this split. However, what is much more likely to change is the future of Oath and Arcs. Oath is currently at the end of production from its new expansion, New Foundations. While Cole stated that New Foundations will be affected minimally except for a brief delay, we can expect that new content for both future expansions and original games will have a lot more room for creative freedom now that they’re working in a smaller knit group.
