Interview: Jamey Stegmaier from Stonemaier Games

This interview is an excerpt of an interview with Jamey Stegmaier from Stonemaier Games. To catch the full interview, check out Outside is Overrated Episode 26 – Stonemaier Games. 

What is the biggest change to Stonemaier games in response to the pandemic?

I talked about this in our blog but it hasn’t happened yet. It is what our holiday sales will look like. I think a lot of our industry relies pretty heavily on holiday sales. It’s a big sales period for us, for retailers, for distributors. I think we are going to see a long-term economic impact of this pandemic and it might be felt very strongly during the holiday season. That’s the biggest variable for me as we move forward.

What did you learn from publishing Wingspan?

Wingspan is now our best selling game. Elizabeth Hargrave is the designer and I had a great time working with her as the developer of the game. My main contribution to the game is the player mat system. Elizabeth had designed all these birds and we tried out all these action systems and different engine-building systems. I wanted some sort of progression in the game and I suggested to her that we start putting birds on a mat. And the birds themselves, some of them would activate for abilities kind of like how they ended up doing. And by placing birds in different habitats you would improve those abilities in each of those habitats, the core abilities. 

This was inspired by Terraforming Mars, a lot of Wingspan is. I just love the sense of progression in any game. You can probably see that in any Stonemaier game, there’s a sense of progression from beginning to end. I was really excited to give Elizabeth a little bit of a spark to add that player mat to the system. 

Viticulture started with a successful Kickstarter campaign. What was your life like before that campaign, and what is it like now that Stonemaier Games has launched a number of successful campaigns?

Well nothing really existed before Viticulture in terms of Stonemaier Games. I count the moment the company came into existence as the moment that Viticulture funded on Kickstarter. Technically we did have the company before then, if it had not funded probably nothing would have happened. That’s kind of the great thing about Kickstarter. You can put some resources into it, but if it doesn’t work out, that’s ok. You can go in a different direction. 

But it did work out, and I had a full-time job at the time. I continued working that full-time job through the fulfillment for the Euphoria Kisckstarter campaign. And that’s when I knew that I had enough resources to pretty much make it a year working full-time just running the company in case things just didn’t go well after that. It was pretty soon after that when we had the Tuscany Kickstarter campaign which did very well, especially for its time, and I had a pretty solid foundation to move forward and stay full-time. I’ve been running the company full-time by myself for many years and this January I hired our first other full-time employee Joe, who is our director of communications.        

What are a couple of games that inspired your design style? What do you admire about them? 

One that has influenced several of our games is Terra Mystica, a wonderful and pretty heavy Euro game. It influenced Scythe and Tapestry quite a bit. It uses a system that you’ve probably seen in other games where you are pulling things off your player mat, putting them on the board and the things that are exposed – the icons that are exposed by putting those things on the board – gives you better income or improves your actions on an ongoing basis. That’s influenced a lot of my games.

Tapestry was inspired at least partially by A Feast for Odin, which is an even heavier Euro game that does actually have like 61 different worker placement action spaces. I love the idea of having all those actions but I wanted to distill it into a more streamlined action system in Tapestry. 

I mentioned Wingspan, Wingspan did have a lot of  influence from Terraforming Mars. Those are all heavier games, but I do play a lot of lighter games too. I especially love lighter games that offer a ton of replayability and help to onboard people into the game very easily. I love a game that is easy to learn and easy to teach but offers a lot of complexity and strategic decisions.     

Jamey Stegmaier runs the day-to-day operations of Stonemaier Games, located in St. Louis, Missouri. Jamey designed Viticulture, Euphoria, Scythe, Charterstone, and Tapestry, and he has had a lifelong passion for playing and designing board games.