In this Rule Breaker Investing episode, Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner welcomes back game designer and publisher Jamey Stegmaier for a lively conversation about scaling a creative venture, building a mission-driven culture, and fostering community in a niche that’s far bigger than most people realize.
Discover how Jamey’s focus on crafting delight, coupled with a transparent approach to both fans and collaborators, has fueled Stonemaier Games’ growth and influence. Whether you’re a dedicated board gamer or just interested in entrepreneurial insights, you’ll walk away with fresh perspectives on innovation, purposeful leadership, and the power of “fun” as a serious business edge.
To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool’s free podcasts, check out our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our beginner’s guide to investing in stocks. When you’re ready to invest, check out this top 10 list of stocks to buy.
A full transcript follows the video.
This video was recorded on Jan. 15, 2025.
David Gardner: Wingspan. In birding, it’s the tip-to-tip measure of flight. In the board game world, it’s a surprise mega hit logged on board game geek, more than 700,000 play sessions, dwarfing even classics like Katan, but our guest, Jamie Stegmaier of Stonemaier Games has soared far beyond wingspan from scaling a creative business and cultivating a passionate community, to becoming a prolific content creator on YouTube. We’re going to talk about the art of designing delight, the power of mission-driven culture, and how fun can offer big insights for entrepreneurs everywhere. Jamie Stegmaier of Stonemaier Games only on this week’s Rule Breaker Investing
Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing, which this week brings together a few of my passions, and I hope yours too. We’re talking about business, creativity, entrepreneurship, and games. I get to welcome back one of the people I admire most in the world of tabletop gaming, and that is Jamie Stegmaier, who last appeared on Rule Breaker Investing November 2nd, 2016. A lot has happened in his world, in your world, in the gaming world. Well, not just the world ever since. In fact, I think I’m going to make that my first question for him. This week’s conversation with Jamie isn’t just for board game enthusiasts. It’s free coaching. For you, from a world class innovator, it’s about building a passionate community, about turning a creative passion into a thriving enterprise.
Whether you love analyzing stocks or simply want to bring more delight into your personal or professional life, I hope you’ll walk away from my conversation this week with Jamie to pursue your own big ideas with renewed confidence and flare. Now, before we get started, I want to mention next week’s show. I’m already rubbing my hands together because I get to welcome Randi Zuckerberg, who is an American businesswoman. If you recognize her last name, you’ll probably realize she’s early on at Facebook as Mark Zuckerberg’s older sister. Randy has been on the Motley Fool Board of Directors for years now and is so talented across so many different dynamics. Very excited to welcome Randy together with Morgan Housel, long time Motley Fool employee, present day superstar writer, author of the Psychology of Money and past guest on this podcast. Randy, Morgan, and I are going to initiate a new episodic series that I’m going to call Three Fools. We’re each going to bring a story that educates, one that amuses, and one that enriches. Get ready for some storytelling next week with two fantastic superstar guests, Randi Zuckerberg and Morgan Housel next week. Now, before we get started, I want to give you this week’s page breaker preview. As I shared at the start of the year, my 2025 book, Rule Breaker Investing is available for pre-order now. After 30 years of stock picking, this is my magnum opus. It’s a lifetime of lessons distilled into one definitive guide, a playbook, if you will, for anyone who dreams of beating the market, living richly and having a laugh along the way. Each week until the book launches this summer, I’m sharing a random excerpt from it. We’re just going to break open the book to a random page, and I read a few sentences. Let’s do it.
Here’s this week’s page breaker preview. It’s two sentences from near the end of the book, and I quote, “At the end of his landmark work, Candide Voltaire offers a timeless reminder. In five words, he tells us that while we can’t control what happens in the world at large, we can shape our own circumstances.” That’s this week’s page breaker preview to pre-order my final word on stock picking shaped by three decades of success. Just type, Rule Breaker Investing into amazon.com, barnes&noble.com or wherever you shop for great books. By the way, thank you to everyone who’s already pre-ordered. You’ve made it Amazon’s Number 1 best seller in the investment portfolio management category. We’re still eight months from launch.
Stonemaier Games is a tabletop game publisher based in St. Louis and distributed worldwide, and Jamie Stegmaier is the president and co founder of the company. I want to read you his wonderful one paragraph mission statement. Not every tabletop board gaming company would even bother with this, but for me, going to the mission or purpose statement for any company is often the first thing I research on their website, and I quote, “We strive to bring joy to tabletops worldwide through memorable, beautiful, fun games. Our games seek to capture the imaginations of all types of people, as our goal is to build games and communities that include experienced gamers, new gamers, solo gamers, partners, larger groups, people of all ethnicities, genders, creeds, cultures, nations, sexualities, abilities, and ages. Through various content, we try to add value to our fellow creators in a way that extends beyond board games by sharing our entrepreneurial successes, mistakes, and insights, as well as our love for a wide variety of games. We also believe in constantly evaluating and improving our creation process to improve the environmental sustainability and accessibility of our games.” Based on more than 10 years of my own observations, Jamie and Stonemaier completely embody that mission statement every day. Jamie, it’s been eight years since you were last on my podcast. A lot’s happened for both of us since then, but in particular, if you could summarize your journey from 2016 to now, and this is completely unfair, just a sentence or two, how would you do it?
Jamey Stegmaier: First, thank you for having me back after eight years. I really appreciate that. Over eight years, the biggest things that have changed are that we stopped using crowdfunding. We published two of our biggest games, Scythe and Wingspan. The company went from being just me as its only full time employee to having seven full time employees, and all those things were done in the spirit of the mission that you just stated, to do a better job of serving our customers and bringing joy to tabletops worldwide.
David Gardner: You had just come off when we last talked, November 2nd, 2016. You just come off of raising $1.8 million on Kickstarter for Scythe, which has gone on to become one of the top games of the last decade, just a phenomenal success, not just commercially, which I know it has been and was, but of course, critically, this is a game that has influenced many others. Jamie, like so much of what you do. You create, you innovate, and then you share it out. That’s something I want to talk about a little bit more, but thank you for bringing us back to 2016 briefly. That shift from Kickstarter, why?
Jamey Stegmaier: There are a number of different reasons, but really at the forefront, how can we better serve our customers, our customers being consumers and retailers, because the retail infrastructure is still really important to us. Really at this point, looking back, the Number 1 reason why we haven’t even considered going back to crowdfunding is because I feel like I can better serve our customers. If we make a product, we put all of our time and love and resources into a product, we actually make it. We ship it to our fulfillment centers, we ship it to distributors and retailers, and then we announce it and share it with people. They can get excited about it and buy it and then have it in their hands within a few weeks instead of buying it on a crowdfunding platform and then waiting 1-2 years before having it in their hands.
David Gardner: That has been a wild home run. As an inveterate gamer, I think I own at least 10 of your titles. I so appreciate that. It is so customer centric of you. Obviously, Kickstarter and crowdfunding has been integral to the creation of so many good things, some bad things, too, but lots of games and video games, etc. Once you mature enough and know your clientele well enough and build your business well enough, Jamie, and you have, you have the funds and you know the demand. You’re already pre-printing games. The experience of me as a Stonemaier fan, you’ve got a whole list of champions, people who subscribe and pay you a little bit extra to get discounts off your games, but the experience is, you get an email, and you find out the new game is out in three weeks, and you can have it. Not a whole year, not waiting for 37 updates on Kickstarter, etc. Just such a customer friendly innovation. I do love me some Kickstarter, but I would love to see more publishers copy you in that way because it’s a better world where we don’t have to wait a year.
Jamey Stegmaier: Really, I’m glad you said it that way, because it isn’t a knock on crowdfunding or Kickstarter. I’m still an avid backer. I appreciate that there’s reasons that many crowdfunders use it. Some of my games wouldn’t exist without Kickstarter, but like you said, I think there are advantages for certain companies to put a focus into moving on as well to other ways, and we’ve found success in doing that.
David Gardner: Well, it creates customer delight, which almost always wins in business. Jamie, board games on the surface might seem niche to some of our listeners. What do you think board gaming can teach us about business, it’s not too grandiose about life that goes well beyond what many people think about games, which is, it’s just a hobby or a silly pass time.
Jamey Stegmaier: Games have brought me a lot of joy, but I think they’ve also helped me in a number of other ways, among them, critical thinking skills, communication skills at the table, whether it’s a cooperative or competitive game, and also the idea of self exploration and expression in a low stakes environment. Games include ways for us to build farms, to build empires, to backstab our friends but in a way that’s safe and self contained, or we can explore those things and experiment with them and see, I don’t want to backstab people in real life. I’ll keep this to the game itself. I think games provide that nice low stakes environment to work on those skills and experiment a little bit with things that may not be as wise to experiment with in real life.
David Gardner: In addition to being a publisher and a designer, both of which we’ll talk more about, you obviously are also an inveterate gamer, and referring to some of the experiences that we have enjoyed, board games bring us. This is in the words of Thi Nguyen. I don’t know if you’ve ever met him, but the University of Utah philosopher about games. I think he’s maybe in academia, the person who understands and appreciates tabletop games by far the most. The way that Thi described it on this podcast last year is, games give each of us a new form of agency. We’re trying on a new hat. We’re in a new place. We’re doing things we never thought of before, and it’s temporary. Each time you play a new game, you’re trying on new forms of agency. I see you head nodding. I’m not sure you’ve come across Thi, but does that accord with your own experience, and do you want to say anything more about that?
Jamey Stegmaier: I think I’ve read a little of their work, but I love that idea of trying on new hats and that it’s temporary. That echoes this idea of experimenting with a magic circle of a game, and that circle gets to end after you walk away from the table. I love that. That’s a great quote.
David Gardner: Over the past eight years, you’ve published many titles. You’ve expanded your team, as you mentioned, you built a major presence online. What’s been the biggest challenge of scaling the creative business that you’ve helped start, Jamie, while staying true to your personal ethos in that mission statement I shared?
Jamey Stegmaier: One of the biggest difficulties that I’ve experienced over that time over scaling because, a lot of the scaling has worked out pretty well, but from the very early days, from the first day that I launched Viticulture on Kickstarter in 2012, I realized that it was really important for me to treat customers as individuals, not just a lump sum of numbers. That is difficult to scale, to continue to treat each person individually, and to give each person individual customer service when you have millions of customers instead of under 1,000 customers. That’s a challenge, but one that we have tried to maintain over the years. We try to respond to every comment, every question, every email, even with so many more games on different social platforms and communities that we’ve built. One of the big ways that I’ve tried to address this is to really, encourage people to ask questions publicly, if they can. Oftentimes, people send an email to me with a rules question or they’ll message to me on Instagram and ask me a rules question. I will try to politely and kindly encourage them to ask that rules question in a public forum because that way the answer can help more than one person. That way I’m serving one person directly, but I’m also hopefully serving more than one person at the same time.
David Gardner: When you focus on treating each person as an individual, and again, that’s my experience of you. I thank you for responding yes to join me on this podcast I just emailed you. I felt treated that way. Once you’re starting to scale to millions of customers, games, etc, with a staff of seven, I think there are some superheroes, I assume, that are on your team that enable that scaling. Why is that important to you, Jamie, just trying to click down one level. Why do you even have that as part of your mission and part of your ethos?
Jamey Stegmaier: A big part of it is that it’s treating people how I would like to be treated if I were to support a company, support a game, support any product, it feels right to me, and I think on a business level, I think it really helps build loyalty where people know that they can reach out and get a real person when they contact us and get the official answer to something or get an answer or get help when we have the opportunity to give them help. I think those are among the reasons. There are probably other reasons I’m not thinking of off the top of my head, but those are among them.
David Gardner: Thank you. Well, one of my fascinations is how leaders like you think about values and culture. It was a delight just to read that one paragraph off of your website, your mission statement. You’re so good at sharing out how you think about things and what you think works and doesn’t. On that same mission statement page in your website at stonemaiergames.com, Jamie, you list guiding principles.
If we had time, which we don’t this week, I’d almost ask you to talk us through each of the roughly 12 that are there, but the point is, they’re there. You put them right up there. The first one is personal attention to customers. Treat customers as people, not numbers. You’ve obviously already spoken to that. You also put up on the same page, your 12 tenets of board game design for Stonemaier Games. You are obviously a mission driven person, and you’re somebody who transparently likes to share, and I assume learn a lot from what people share back, because the best way to learn is by sharing what we’re doing so that we hear what other people think of it so that we can design accordingly. Are you familiar with conscious capitalism? Is that a phrase that’s come across your transom before?
Jamey Stegmaier: I’ve heard it in a few different ways, yes.
David Gardner: Well, it is one of those movements that I think is really important in our society today, especially for people like me who believe that capitalism is a beautiful thing. Yes, it’s responsible for many wrongs, and yes, it’s responsible for so many rights. When I see a mission-driven, human-centered approach at Stonemaier, I think that you are a fellow traveler there. Your mission statement page is a great example. Let me just throw out a couple more of your guiding principles and just have you react for the fun of it. No exclusive content. We want to include people, not exclude them.
Jamey Stegmaier: Yeah, this is something that I see a lot in the gaming community in particular, trying to push people to buy something now using fear of missing out as a tactic. I don’t want to use fear as a tactic to drive people to try something new. I want to use joy and excitement and enthusiasm to do that.
David Gardner: That’s a great reflection. One more, Jamie, focus on accessibility and eco-friendliness. Can you give a couple examples. As a customer of yours, I know what you’ve done, but I’m not sure everybody in the world knows, and a lot of us are looking to follow good examples.
Jamey Stegmaier: Well, this idea of conscious capitalism, it’s all about an ethical pursuit of profits. When we’re manufacturing things, we’re game companies, we are having an impact on people, the people who are laboriously putting together our games and the environment from which we’re drawing the resources to make those games, and then we’re putting just tangible things out there in the world. I think the more things that we make and we’re up to millions of games at this point, I think maybe five million games in circulation, I feel a pretty large responsibility to not only the people who are playing those games, but also the world that we’re impacting as a whole as we make them. You mentioned eco-friendliness. We’ve tried to do a lot of little things in our games to improve the types of materials that we use and the types of materials that are thrown away when you open a game and to minimize them, while also thinking about the number of different people who play our games. You mentioned this in the mission statement, but thinking a lot more about vision friendliness, thinking about what types of people, what table sizes. Even recently we’ve been thinking about the table space that our games take up. How can we reach more tabletops of different sizes and different shapes, different cultures, ethnicities, different abilities, like vision friendliness? We think about all these things a lot more than I did when I started out in 2012.
David Gardner: It is that awakening to greater consciousness without getting too frou frou here, but it is that, you know, what you can see now at the age of 44 that you may not have recognized at the age of 34 or even younger than that when you started the company. That’s a reminder that we’re all progressing. We’re all evolving, and we’re all, I hope, evolving toward more and more awareness of the wake that we’re leaving behind us. When you have five million games printed out there, it’s not just those components and those boxes, it’s all of the people that made them and all of those who bought them.
Well, anyway, obviously, as a fan boy, I love your wake, and I congratulate you on designing for delight, which is what I want to go to next, because, Jamie Stegmaier, your games are known for top notch components. I let off big with Wingspan at the top of this week’s show and one obvious example immersive themes, strong replayability. We in our household have played your games dozens of times, not just once or twice. Can you share a principle of delight or design that might help anyone? We’ve got teachers listening. We’ve got managers, we’ve got investors that might help anyone create experiences that truly engage people.
Jamey Stegmaier: It’s tough to pick something universal that applies to everyone, but something that I’ve seen that works well just in general, that does apply directly to tabletop games specifically, is we always try to include one component hook in our game, something that is fun to look at on the table, fun to pick up with and actually tactilely use at the table. I think this really does carry over to a lot of different, like you mentioned, teachers, managers, investors. When you have something that is appealing to look at and sometimes touch and hold, if that is part of the experience that you’re trying to provide, I think that can really connect people to that experience. I don’t have specific examples for every field for that, but I think it can apply to a lot of fields, and I’ve seen it be successful in a lot of other fields as well.
David Gardner: Let’s just take a few examples of your games. Again, not everyone’s a gamer listening this week, but we have a lot of gamers listening this week. From Wingspan, what is that component? From Viticulture, what is that component?
Jamey Stegmaier: A couple of different examples from those games. For Viticulture, we have a bunch of little wooden tokens, and we could have made them cubes, but instead, we made them look like the buildings that they’re meant to represent in the game. There’s some dice that you’re rolling in Wingspan, as you know, these dice that you roll to generate food. These are kept in a dice tower, and you could have just rolled them on the table. But instead, we put together this dice tower that looks like a bird feeder or bird house, in a way, and it just has this really nice table presence that makes the game stand out. Is something, if someone early on was walking by a table at a convention and they saw this, they often would stop and say, what’s going on here, because of that component that really stood out visually in 3D on the table.
David Gardner: Genius. Jamie, you’ve become a consistent presence on YouTube. Over the last eight years or so, you put up top 10 lists, you break down game mechanisms, and a lot more. I didn’t even realize because I haven’t tapped in all the time to your website. I tend to show up when a new games there, but you are a very regular steady blogger, as well. You are constantly content creating. I’m getting to talk to a world class game publisher who’s also a world class game designer and a constant and impressive content creator. What inspired you to go all in on content creation, and how does that feed your core business?
Jamey Stegmaier: Well, I appreciate, especially coming from you, someone who podcasts on a regular basis and has for a long time. I appreciate you mentioned the word consistent because consistency, I think, is the most difficult thing. Once you get it and you keep going, consistently can really help, and that’s what I’ve experienced. With the blogs, I’ve blogged twice a week every week for the last 12 years on the Stonemaier Games.
David Gardner: Incredible.
Jamey Stegmaier: The blog posts aren’t about me promoting Stonemaier Games. They’re about me trying to share information or things that I’m processing with people. Same thing on YouTube, but you’re right. It’s been around eight years that I’ve started doing videos on YouTube, where I talk about games from other designers and other publishers and what I love about them. Largely, it’s a combination of two things. I do this partially because I feel like I have value to add to other people, not always because I know the right answer or the right thing, but because I might just be processing something or I might have made a mistake that I want others to learn from. I also get to learn from just processing something out loud on a video or in writing and from the ensuing discussion. Like I mentioned earlier, the idea of fear of missing out tactics exclusives. I just did a blog post about that a few weeks ago, and the discussion was really helpful and enlightening to see where people are right now about those types of tactics. I learned just as much from other people from the discussions that ensue from the content that I create itself.
David Gardner: I really appreciate how personal it is as well. I would never say self indulgent. I would just say transparent and sharing, and a great example would be just a couple of days ago where you celebrated National Adoption Day, and I learned something about you. Would you share? It was a beautiful post. Without asking you to summarize it in two sentences, would you just share a little bit of that?
Jamey Stegmaier: Yeah, that was actually on my personal blog. That was also very public. It was tied to a post that I posted on the Stonemaier blog a little bit, which was about people who have made proposals and announcements using cards from our games or custom cards. But the personal post was how I was adopted when I was three days old, and I was celebrating the idea of adoption, those who make the tough and generous decision to give a child up for adoption to a family that might love them and to celebrate those who adopt kids, or pets even. I’ve adopted cats over the years, and just celebrating the idea of adoption.
David Gardner: I would say from day one, and I wasn’t there, but I’m assuming this was the case. From day one, you’ve been looking to build a tight knit community. Obviously, those kick-starter updates back in the day, your current newsletters today, live streams, and your Stonemaier Champions. I want to call that out briefly because as a fellow businessman in the subscription business, my favorite business model, I congratulate you that you managed to, in a small but meaningful way, parlay a subscription business model right inside of a tabletop game publishing company. How has cultivating that community culture in your mind benefited Stonemaier not just in sales, but in genuine mutual support?
Jamey Stegmaier: We talked about scaling a little bit earlier, and I think this ties back to that topic really well because one of the biggest ways that we’ve been able to scale is from community building. The community building that we’ve participated in that we’ve been a part of over the last 12 plus years has helped people who are in that community, both champions, ambassadors, people who just know our products well, they are just as able to answer many questions that people ask publicly as we are. Even though I have a great customer service team, Joe and Dave are my customer service people, and I help out as well. We often show up in a forum where a question has been asked, and people have already answered it correctly and given great examples and great support because they know the answers and because they feel like it’s worth their time to provide those answers. Also, on the flip side, people know that when they comment or when they ask a question or post something in the comments that we are going to see it, and we’re either going to respond or we’re going to make sure that the correct response is there. I think it works both ways there for the community.
David Gardner: I really appreciate those points. Early kinship, too, because the Motley Fool started really on AOL, America Online Discussion Boards, and we noticed early on, my brother and I, we couldn’t answer everybody’s stock market question, but if we could find great people that would answer each other’s questions, that really does scale, and you’re experiencing that live today. Congratulations. Has there been a game or project that didn’t pan out the way you expected? If so, Jamie, how did you pivot?
Jamey Stegmaier: There was one thing that we tried a few years ago, where we try to push the envelope with different things, especially with our method of not using crowdfunding, which is very common in the board game space to launch new products, or we tried something different and went a little bit against that a few years ago, and it didn’t quite work out. It was for the sequel to Scythe. Scythe, one of our most successful games, the sequel to it was expeditions. I was really worried with expeditions that we weren’t going to make enough copies, that we needed to make sure that we really made enough copies in the first print run. When the game was completely ready, instead of just going to print, we announced it before going to print and started accepting pre-orders that we were expecting to fill much faster than a crowdfunding campaign in about three months, four months. But still, there was going to be a delay between that announcement and when the game actually came out.
It went fine, but we ran into a whole host of problems on the back end because we needed more copies than we expected for retailers, and so the retail print run took longer than expected. There was a big gap between when we delivered to web store consumers, and then retailers, a much bigger gap than normal. All these little things added up to make the release really not as good as I was hoping that it would be, even though we were trying our best to serve customers by having enough copies in the first print run.
David Gardner: Well, that’s a great example of just learning on the fly. I think every start-up, every entrepreneur, and you’re not a start-up anymore, although you probably have that mentality, but we’re building the plane as we fly. It’s kind of a cliche and often things are cliches because they’re true. Do you have any other examples from either the early days or even yesterday of building the plane as you fly it? [laughs]
Jamey Stegmaier: You’re right. It’s a great way to put it, because I am constantly doing it. I just did it [laughs] like one week ago. I decided on a whim, and this is one of the nice things about running and owning a company, I can do things on a whim if I want, but they don’t always work out as intended. I decided on a whim to offer champions a special discount, you mentioned our subscription program, on a few products that we were hoping that they would try out, products that haven’t sold as well, but I wanted to give them a try. I put together a promo code, and my tech guy was off for the week when I decided this on the spur of the moment, and the code didn’t work as well on different web stores. We have four different web stores based on different filming centers. Just one of those things where I had a whim. I tried something that the intent was good, but the code didn’t work as well. It worked in the US for you, but it did not work as well in other regions. I didn’t have the tech guy there to fix it at that moment. We had to wait a week before it was fixed. Things like that can happen where the intent is good, but the execution doesn’t always work out as planned.
David Gardner: We’ve mentioned Stonemaier Champions once or twice. Would you just lay out explain what a Stonemaier Champion is and how that works?
Jamey Stegmaier: Currently, we have around 14,000 Stonemaier Champions. What it is is it’s people who pay $15 a year to save 20% on everything that they order from our web store and they get prioritized shipping. If we’re shipping out 1,000 games and 800 of them are champion orders, we’ll ship those 800 first, and then we’ll ship the other 200 orders after that. It’s also partially in support of our content. Instead of having a Petron or something like that, if people want to support the YouTube videos, the blog articles that I write, they can become a champion of that content.
David Gardner: Jamie Stegmaier, people sometimes undervalue, in my experience, anyway, fun, the fun sector. Well, that’s not really an industry sector, but I’m often looking for the fun in every industry. I think often we don’t realize how important that is in people’s lives, and I would say also profitable, as well. Who is the fun brand in almost any category you can think of, they’re probably succeeding, not every time, but well enough that I think the business of fun really matters? Have you had any personal epiphanies, entrepreneurial epiphanies about the business side of gaming that might surprise many of the investors listening in right now?
Jamey Stegmaier: I thought of two things for this that are somewhat relevant, two things that might surprise the typical investor about the business side of board games. One is a bad thing, the bad thing are the lead times. We have pretty long lead times on board games. We’re releasing Finspan. We made a bunch of copies of Finspan, but if we don’t have enough copies, it’s going to be 5-6 months, even if we hit the reprint button tomorrow before we can get new copies in stock. That’s a long lead time, I think, for other industries. The good thing that might surprise some typical investors, back to crowdfunding a little bit, is that crowdfunding is so visible. You can go online, you can see that a project raised $1 million on crowdfunding.
But I think what is harder to see is the impact on revenue and profit on the number of games that we sell to retailers, both online and brick and mortar retailers, so this is what I call the Evergreen category. If you can make a game Evergreen retail is the backbone of that. As big as that million dollar number looks on crowdfunding, the vast majority, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The vast majority of that comes from retail and distribution on the back end.
David Gardner: Thank you for a look into your industry. I really appreciate that. I love learning, it makes sense. I didn’t think about lead times. When you’re selling at the scale you are, your follow up to Wingspan and Wyrmspan this time we’re going to the oceans, part of me wonders what the next span is, but we don’t have to talk about that unless you want to, Jamie, but congratulations on Finspan. But to try to project ahead of time, how many copies are going to be bought? I know you’re data driven. I know you’ve got a lot of understanding of your market, but that’s still stressful to know that if you run out, you have to wait six months.
Jamey Stegmaier: Yeah, it puts a lot of pressure on forecasting and forecasting even with the experience that we’ve had and the connections that we have, we talk a lot to retailers and distributors and customers to try to forecast. It’s still in the end, a guessing game. We just try to reassure them, we can always make more. It’ll take a little time, but we will make more. We are not going to use those FoMO tactics that we talked about earlier.
David Gardner: Yeah, absolutely. Well, something else that I often think about in business is the collaboration that is necessary. It can be tough. You’re describing right there how you have to collaborate with distributors. You have to collaborate with producers, etc. What did you learn? In this case, let’s go to co-designing because this is the game designer, Stegmaier I’m talking to now who partners with others also adds value to the designs of independent designers that you work with. What have you learned from co-designing or working with external partners that you could share with anybody, again, a wide variety of listeners right now wondering how they can collaborate better in their life?
Jamey Stegmaier: Yeah, I like that you asked this because project management is a huge part of my job. Working with other people to enhance the fun, the balance, the quality of our products is a huge part of it. Co design is a big part of it. These days, I would say development is a bigger part. Development and game design is where if I work with an outside game designer, the outside game designer has come up with the idea they’ve built the game. They’ve made a fun, intuitive, fairly balanced game. The developer, me, I come in. I work with them, and I try to make the game even more fun and even more balance. I try to have it reach its full potential. I’ve learned that at Stonemaier Games, we are the most successful when I’m able to bring out the best in someone else. I’ve really learned that about the development process. I want to make the best game possible, but by doing that, I can try to bring out the best in these designers who work really hard and put so much time and effort and love into their games. I try to do the same with my coworkers too, but especially when I work with other designers and other people.
David Gardner: Elizabeth Hargrave, who’s joining me on this podcast as well, to discuss I think it’s your most successful game ever. Really, I was checking [inaudible] stats. You probably aren’t keeping up day to day, but when I checked the day we’re recording, which is Tuesday, January 14th, people who’ve self logged on BoardGameGeek that they’ve played Wingspan 704,996 times. Now, to be clear, the game has been played a lot more than that. This is a small percentage of the public that takes the time on one of them to log games that we’ve played and put it up on BoardGameGeek. My second favorite website, and Katan, which is pretty famous and has been around a lot longer, 390,000 logged sessions. We’re talking about games that are not just selling well, Jamie, but that are being played and played again. It’s clear. I think it’s come through in this discussion, and thank you for joining me. Let’s not let eight years pass again before we taught, but it’s clear that you love both the business side and the creative side. What keeps you going day after day, especially during those plateaus, those six month wait lead times or creative slumps, if that ever happens, what personal habits or perspectives keep you energized?
Jamey Stegmaier: I’ve learned about myself over the years that the thing that keeps me fresh and excited to go to work every day is variety. I really, really love the variety of my job. I love that. Sometimes I’m designing games. Sometimes I’m developing games. Sometimes I’m doing the project management side or marketing side or content creation. I wear a lot of hats, and I really, really enjoy that. By having a variety of tasks and having overlapping projects, that brings a lot of joy to me and keeps me excited to really work seven days a week. I like to do that. One thing that I found over the last few years that has really helped ensure that I have that variety is by compartmentalizing my day loosely. I don’t keep to it too strictly, but in the morning, I do certain things. I focus maybe on emails and responsiveness and content creation in the morning. The afternoon is often about the project management, the development side of things. Then I usually spend a few hours after dinner with the creative side of things. By having those different focuses at different times of the day, I ensure that I get that variety every day when I go to work.
David Gardner: Do you still host Wednesday game nights?
Jamey Stegmaier: I do still host Wednesday game night. Yeah, actually, I still get a lot of joy from playing games, even though I spend every day working on games too. [laughs]
David Gardner: Well, it’s not just Wednesdays. I know you do it a few times a week and that’s another fun thing for those who follow Jamie in social media or on his website. He’s always sharing what games he’s been playing. Usually, maybe it’s at the end of the month you’re listing and you’re listing a dozen plus titles. You are a very active gamer and not just your own game, self promoting at all, you’re playing other people’s games and learning a lot from them.
Jamey Stegmaier: Yeah, you said that perfectly. I love playing games just in general, but I learned so much from them from the product design, from the game design. It really, I think, helps me as a designer as a developer to play other games rather.
David Gardner: Well, and we won’t go there because we’re running out of time this week, but when I tat to you eight years ago, anybody you’d like to go back and relisten, you’ll hear Jamie talk about Neil Born, how he grew up playing some Monopoly, as well as we all did and the gamer, the young gamer Stegmaier. Jamie in 5-10 years, how do you hope people describe Stonemaier Games or Jamie Stegmaier the person? If you could share, this is a two part question, so that’s part number 1. Part number 2, if you could share a single piece of advice to creators or investors who want to break the rules in the way you did, going from Kickstarter, all of a sudden and say, hey, my new games out? Not in a year. It’s out in three weeks. Do you want to order now? People who want to innovate. What would that be?
Jamey Stegmaier: Well, for the first question about how do I hope people would describe Stonemaier Games and me, and really I think in 5-10 years, it would make me happy if anyone who has tried one of our games could look back and say, that game helped me connect with someone else, connect with another human being, another person, whether it’s a specific person or a group of people or their friends, that’s why I make games to bring Joya tabletops and to connect people with other people. If someone could say that specifically about any game that we’ve made, that would be incredible for me to hear. As for a single piece of advice, you gave me this question in advance. I really love the question. I thought of a bunch of different ways I can answer it, but I’m going to answer it in perhaps maybe a more controversial way for people who listen to your podcast. My answer is to stop posting and attending meetings. I run a fairly meeting free company, and looking back, really, one of the things that I do looking back, is if I had filled the last 12 years of my life with meetings, I would have gotten so much less done. I know there’s value to meetings. I know there’s value to them, but that would be the challenge that I would put out there that I think that you will gain so much more time and creative time to reduce the number of meetings that you host and attend. That would be the thing that I toss out there to the world.
David Gardner: I was just reading a wonderful book called Talking on Eggshell, Soft Skills for hard conversations by Sam Horn. At one point, Sam rocks this quote from humorist Dave Barry, the Miami Herald columnist, and it’s about meetings. I think you’ll love this if you don’t already know it. Jamie and everyone listening. Here’s Dave Barry, “If you had to identify in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved and never will achieve its full potential. That word would be meetings.” [laughs] I think you’re helping your company and perhaps all those around you, your stakeholders, toward fuller achievement. Jamie with your for, I’m not going to say that’s a fair word for meetings. Thank you for calling them out. Well, Jamie has graciously consented to close it out with a game, of course, it’s the game we play on this podcast by seller Hold. He doesn’t know what’s coming. I’ll be asking just a few different things. These are not stocks Jamie Stegmaier, but if they were, would you be buying, selling, or holding, and a sentence or two as to why? You ready? Excellent. Let’s start with buy, sell, or hold cats?
Jamey Stegmaier: I would say buy. I adore my cats. I love my cats. Honestly, they’ve taught me how to love another creature more than myself, and so I think there’s a lot of value in that. In pets in general, but specifically for me for cats.
David Gardner: That was a softball, because I know some about your background. That’s an important thing to you. Cats, sometimes crawling across on your YouTube videos, etc. By the way, side question. What about the musical cats?
Jamey Stegmaier: I have not delved into the musical cats. I’ve heard it’s a little out there.
David Gardner: Good. Let’s move on. Next one. Change gears here. Buy, sell, or hold Virtual reality as a social gaming platform. If it were a stock, are you buying, selling or holding?
Jamey Stegmaier: I am holding on Virtual reality. I am hopeful that it could reach a pretty amazing potential someday, but I don’t know if it’s there yet. I think it needs time.
David Gardner: Yeah, sometimes shutting ourselves off to the world with headsets, it doesn’t feel that connected to me, ironically, but it could also be amazing. I’m there with you on the hold. Next one up. AI in Game Design. Are you buying, selling, or holding?
Jamey Stegmaier: I am selling instantly. I know that AI is the buzzword right now. You’ve probably talked about some positives on your podcast. I might have to look at some of your archives for that, but from the creative side of things, I am not excited at all about any aspect of Generative AI.
David Gardner: Wow. I’m just going to give a for instance here. I do notice some games these days, and I enjoy them. You probably do too. Incorporate some technology. For example, you might have your phone. Maybe it’s narrating things to you or it’s randomizing random events off your iPad that does enrich the game environment. AI powered storytelling seems like an interesting area of potential growth. Would you also be strong selling that on principle or is that an exception?
Jamey Stegmaier: I agree with you that there is some value in some games of having a screen used in some way. A storytelling. I don’t know if that would jump out at me. I think the one thing I’ll give you an exception though. The one area of AI that intrigues me a little bit is for play testing, not to replace human play testers, but to bulk play test a game. If I could plug the rules of a game into an AI and have that AI play test the game 100,000 times the next week and then pump out a bunch of data for me, that is something that humans cannot replicate it without spending years on it. I would be curious about that data while also complementing it with human driven play testing.
David Gardner: Appreciate that. Thank you. Last two. Jamie, movie adaptations of popular board games. I’m thinking about clue think about Dungeons and Dragons. The trend of turning board games into blockbuster films, buy, sell, or hold?
Jamey Stegmaier: I’m buying. I actually just re watched the clue movie the couple weeks ago at a movie night. It was delightful. It held up. I love the Dungeon Dragons movie.
David Gardner: It was great.
Jamey Stegmaier: Video game, yeah, it was a lot of fun. Even video game movies recently have gotten pretty good. The fallout series on Amazon Prime, I think the quality of them are doing pretty well. I would love to see some other versions of that. Minecraft, the Minecraft movies coming out this year.
David Gardner: I’m buying as well. Now, the natural follow up is which Stonemaier game goes to the silver screen first.
Jamey Stegmaier: I’ve had so many producers reach out to me about scythe over the years. I’m not the holder of the scythe IP. I just have the tabletop rights, and so I’ve referred them to Yacab the creator of them. I’d love to see scythe on some screen, whether it’s my home screen or a movie screen someday.
David Gardner: That would be phenomenal. Are movie and streaming rights when you build these new worlds and package them up in a board game box, are these things being auctioned or owned today around popular tabletop games or is that still not happening?
Jamey Stegmaier: I think it is worth including in any contract for clarity at the very least.
David Gardner: Last one for you, Jamie. Legacy game, of course, popular these days. You’ve done a little bit in that regard. I’m not going to ask you about Legacy games. I want to briefly explain before I ask this question to those who don’t know what we’re talking about. There’s definitely a new trend, and it started with Rob Davo and Risk more than 15 years ago. There’s a trend toward games where you play the game once, and then what happened in that game affects the second play of the game. For example, whoever won might have some handicap, but also get to write their name and name the new continent on the board. From one game to the next, it effloresces and evolves along with your play group. Those are legacy games where there’s a legacy to the play of your game. That’s all along wind up for a simple buy, seller hold. Jamie Stegmaier buy, sell, or hold Wingspan Legacy? [laughs]
Jamey Stegmaier: That’s a fun question. Either sell or hold? I’ll go with sell. There is a successful fan made campaign for Wingspan, just a fan made thing that’s fun. It’s out there anyone can play it. But Legacy specifically refers to not just stuff carrying over, but also permanent changes that can’t be undone. I think people would really struggle with that with the beautiful art in Wingspan. Like tearing up a card, and no one’s going to do that with a Wingspan card.
David Gardner: You’re right. It doesn’t feel right. I regret even asking that. Jamie Stegmaier, you’ve been so gracious with your time and insights, and I thank you for joining with fellow Rule Breakers this week. Fool on my friend.
Jamey Stegmaier: Thank you so much.
Mary Long: As always, people on this program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don’t buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. Learn more about Rule Breaker Investing at rbi.fool.com.
