While studying at the University of Texas, Wehrle began developing his first game,
Pax Pamir, about
Afghanistan during the fall of the
Durrani Empire, inspired by
Pax Porfiriana, set during the
Mexican Revolution (1910–1920).
Pax Pamir was published in 2015 under Sierra Madre Games, with Wehrle working with Phil Eklund to do so, as he did for the first edition of
John Company in 2017. 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." A new version of
Pax Pamir: Second Edition was released in 2019 as the first release from Wehrlegig Games. Wehrlegig then published a second edition of
John Company, and Wehrle cofounded the
Zenobia Award in 2020, intended to highlight and support underrepresented designers in the industry. Wehrle designed the 2021 game
Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile after first pitching the game in 2018, inspired in part by
Reiner Knizia's game
Medici. 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)." Leder Games launched a
Kickstarter in 2022 to fund Wehrle's space opera strategy board game
Arcs. In 2024 he released Zenobia Award runner-up
Molly House under Wehrlegig Games, about
molly houses and
queer culture in
Georgian England, for which he aided Jo Kelly in design. On January 13, 2026, Wehrle announced his amicable departure from Leder Games to found his own tabletop game company Buried Giant Studios together with Kyle Ferrin (illustrator of
Root,
Oath, and
Arcs, among other games), Wehrle's brother Drew, and Ted Caya. Leder Games also decided to sell
Oath and
Arcs IPs to Buried Giant, but retained the ownership of
Root. == Design philosophy ==