Cole Werhle

Cole Werhle is a board game designer, known for titles such as Root, Pax Pamir, John Company, Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile and Arcs.

Born in 1986 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Werhle gained a degree in Journalism and English at the University of Indiana.

He has since gained an MA from the University of Texas in 2012, and a PhD from the same institution in 2017.

Wehrle designed the 2015 game Pax Pamir, part of the "Pax" series of historical board games.

Wehrle designed the 2016 game An Infamous Traffic about the opium wars of China, in which he "believes he achieves the payoff by juxtaposing sobriety with absurdity."

Shortly after earning his PhD, Werhle joined Leder Games, as a designer.

Root, his first game with Leder, was crowdfunded in 2017 and published the following year, to much acclaim.

Wehrle designed Root as a "simulation of political and economic warfare of a struggle for the hearts and minds of the people" which is "radically asymmetric" in which "Each side plays by different rules and aims at different goals; they virtually play different games. Root is based on the COIN series of war games-a series of extremely complex simulations of counterinsurgency warfare."

A reviewer for the New York Times said that "I'm going to make this sound really weirdly intellectual, but let me just say that Cole Wehrle has a designer diary where he explains how the idea of this game came from his graduate studies into Foucauldian biopower."

In 2018 he founded Werhlegig Games with his brother, Drew, which manages the publication of his historical games.

He continues to work at Leder Games as Creative Director.

His dissertation concerned how the experience of empire altered the way British writers imagined distances of time and space in 19th century.

Wehrle earned a doctorate in the literature of British colonialism.

A new version of Pax Pamir was released in 2019, as a reboot of his first game design, as the first release from Wehrlegig Games.

The company next published a second edition of John Company.

Wehrle designed the 2021 game Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile.

Matt Jarvis in a review of Oath on Dicebreaker said that "Unlike designer Cole Wehrle’s breakout hit Root, all of the players have the same set of options and actions - for the most part - at their disposal. ... Cole Wehrle has added another masterpiece to his already gleaming collection of games that are as interesting around the table as they are on it."

Dan Jolin in a review of Oath said that "Those drawn in by Kyle Ferrin's awesomely evocative and characterful artwork – think The Dark Crystal by way of Richard Scarry – might be put off by designer Cole Wehrle's almost highbrow yet generic terminology (that wordy subtitle is a big tip-off)."

Wehrle with artist Kyle Ferrin launched a Kickstarter in 2022 to publish the swashbuckling space opera strategy board game Arcs through Leder Games.

Wehrle explains his feels that board game aesthetics, "like the rules that structure their play, are essentially political in that they organize the relationship between the players. [...] For, if games structure play, so too do they structure feeling."