Leder Games staffs up after Buried Giant departures, brings in Johnny Dale to lead day-to-day operations

Root publisher Leder Games has unveiled four new hires as it continues to rebuild from a staff exodus earlier this year that included star designer Cole Wehrle and style-defining artist Kyle Ferrin.

The Minnesota-based publisher has brought in experienced operations director Johnny Dale as executive director, who will take on responsibility for day-to-day operations, and former Trick or Treat Studios graphic and production designer Jody Henning as senior graphic designer.

Jesse Wertz, who previously worked in operations and finance in the software and banking sectors, has been brought in as director of operations, while Adam Jury has been hired as a graphic designer.

The hires come four months after Wehrle, who also designed hits including Arcs and Oath while at Leder, and Ferrin left to launch Buried Giant Studios with Wehrle’s brother Drew and former Leder director of operations Ted Caya, who exited the company last December along with his design for the company’s now axed Kickstarter Take.

Leder agreed to sell Arcs and Oath to Buried Giant as part of the shake-up, while keeping hold of its huge-selling star title Root – a game which despite its complexity has broken out of the hobby game bubble and onto the shelves of major retailers such as Walmart and Target.

Other Leder staff who moved across to Buried Giant included Josh Yearsley, who designed the most recent Root expansion Homeland, senior graphic designer Pati Hyun, event coordinator and community manager Matt Martens and graphic designer Megan Ganey.

That left Leder with a design and development team comprising company founder Patrick Leder – the co-creator of its debut release Vast: The Crystal Caverns and co-designer of multiple Root expansions – Nick Brachmann, who has worked on expansions for Root, Ahoy and Fort, and solo game design specialist Liz Davidson.

Leder named Davidson as the company’s new creative director in February, while former customer support coordinator Andrea Francisco has become a junior game developer at the studio, and Alita Robertson has been promoted from production assistant to producer. The company also brought in Tyler Exsted as a game developer two months ago.

New Leder executive director Dale has had a long career in director roles across advertising, media and pharmaceutical companies – and has also spent many years running the popular Eize Basa social media account, in which he jokes about board gaming and other subjects.

Dale initially announced he had been hired by Leder on his Eize Basa BlueSky account on April 1, which given the nature of the account was widely laughed off as an April Fool’s Day prank.

Speaking of Dale’s hire, Patrick Leder told BoardGameWire, “Bringing Johnny on as executive director is a perfect fit. He’s spent his career building and leading teams like ours, he’s passionate about board games, and anyone who knows him knows how creative he is.

“Johnny has been a friend of Leder Games for almost ten years now, so having him join the team feels completely natural for me, Liz, and the rest of the team.

“For me personally, having Johnny take over day-to-day operations will be a huge benefit: it means I get to spend more of my time doing what I love most, which is designing games.”

Dale added, “I’ve been a fan of Leder Games for a long time, so stepping into this role is a huge honor. I bring nearly 20 years of experience leading creative teams, and I look forward to putting that to work alongside Patrick and this group.

“We have a great pipeline of games in development, and I think players are going to be very excited about what’s coming.”

Some of those in-development games were recently showcased by Leder on its YouTube channel, with Alita Robertson showing off backyard soapbox racing game Kart, and Nick Brachmann demonstrating a prototype of a Taylor Shuss dexterity-based mech and monster battle design with the working title Creature Control.

In the same video Patrick Leder revealed he had been working on a lightly-asymmetric economic euro game called Fish based around catching, canning and delivering fish, which he said might be renamed to Trawl – something which would break a long tradition of Leder games all having four-letter titles.

The company’s last crowdfunding campaign in late 2024 saw it raise almost $2.5m from more than 27,500 backers for Root: The Homeland Expansion, which is slated to come to retail this year.