Leder Games has axed its next Kickstarter campaign just a few weeks before its expected launch, after the game’s creator abruptly left the publisher and took his design with him.

The surprise cancellation comes four months after the Root and Arcs publisher unveiled the crowdfunding campaign for Take, a risk management and negotiation game which sees up to five players executing a series of heists.

Take designer Ted Caya had been employed by Leder for six years, previously as accounting manager and most recently as the Minnesota-based publisher’s executive director of operations.

The game is Caya’s first design, which he has been working as a passion project for several years outside of his day job at Leder.

A statement from Leder said, “Take’s designer, Ted, has decided to move on from the studio and onto his next grand adventure. He will be bringing Take with him. Due to this, we are canceling this crowdfunding campaign. We wish him the very best!

“As for the future of Take, that is squarely in the designer’s hands. We enjoyed our play tests in the studio, and will certainly celebrate if/when Ted takes that next step toward production.

“We are grateful for the enthusiasm you’ve all shown for Take. Nearly 8,700 followers is nothing to sneeze at! We look forward to returning to Kickstarter in the future with another amazing project. Stay tuned!”

Leder Games founder Patrick Leder told BoardGameWire he did not have anything to add beyond the official statement. BoardGameWire has also reached out to Caya, but is yet to receive a response.

The sudden termination of Take’s planned Kickstarter came less than two weeks after Caya took part in an almost hour-long interview about the game, its development and how it fits into Leder’s design principles on the Beyond Solitaire podcast, which is hosted by Leder Games solo games specialist Liz Davidson.

Caya told Davidson that while he didn’t consider Take’s original design as a ‘Leder Games’ game, it “was moulded that way, not because I was so intent on, like, I can only publish it through Leder, but because the kind of methods that we use to determine whether a game is working or not is kind of the only way I now know how to judge games”.

He added that the high player interaction in the game was “the part that was pitched and kind of went through the green light system”, adding: ” it’s not a deckbuilding game, its not a tile laying game, there’s a lot of the game that’s kind of floating in this weird ‘above the table’ space, in a way that if you couldn’t talk during Take it wouldn’t work.”

Caya also told the podcast, “I’m happy to involve myself as much as possible but [Leder Games senior game developer Nick Brachmann] is the main developer on Take, so he’s, like, organising the playtest, he’s been doing the things in the evening, he had his final call on making changes on stuff, and I’m more than happy to cede that power.

“I said like a year and a half ago, [Leder Games editor and game developer Josh Yearsley] came to visit and they were doing a card review of Oath, of all the new Oath cards, and I said… I didn’t even talk, I just listened, and I was wiped at the end of the day… it is exhausting work, and I would not want to sign up to do that.”

He added, “I would never want to be a full-time developer. I think part of that is I wouldn’t necessarily want to work on a game that anyone put in front of me – that’s like a selfish desire of not wanting to turn your hobby into work, right now it can still exist in kind of a weird hobby space that, you know, now I have like a responsibility to do certain stuff with this one.

“But development is hard work and it gives me a headache at the end of the day, and I wouldn’t want to do that day in, day out. I love the business side of things, I’m interested in it and it animates me to kind of do operations-sized projects in a way that… games are fun, but will never truly animate me in that same way.”

Leder Games is now looking for a new executive director of operations, an in-person role at its St Paul, Minnesota office.

The publisher’s last Kickstarter campaign, the Homeland expansion for Root, raised almost $2.5m from over 27,500 backers in November last year.

Leder raised just over $900,000 for Oath’s New Foundations expansion earlier in 2024, and over $1.4m for Arcs, the hybrid trick-taking wargame from Root and Oath designer Cole Wehrle, in 2022.

The publisher has not yet revealed any further plans for its 2026 releases or crowdfunding launches.

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