Mission Statement – Stonemaier Games

Mission Statement

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.

Stonemaier Games is a tabletop game publisher based in St. Louis and distributed worldwide. Stonemaier Games’ brands include Viticulture, Euphoria, Between Two Cities, Scythe,  Charterstone, My Little Scythe, Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig, Wingspan, Tapestry, Pendulum, Red Rising, Rolling Realms, Libertalia, Smitten, Expeditions, Apiary, and Wyrmspan.

Guiding Principles

  • Personal attention to customers: treat customers as people, not numbers
  • Make every game a unique, fun, engaging social experience
  • No exclusive content–we want to include people, not exclude them
  • Focus on strategy and event games
  • Extensive playtesting, both in-person and blind
  • Top-notch graphic design and art
  • High-quality components
  • All games playable and enjoyable with as few as 1 player and at least 5 or 6 players
  • Create stories and memorable moments through our games
  • Focus on accessibility and eco-friendliness

12 Tenets of Board Game Design for Stonemaier Games

  1. Quick beginning and organic end: We appreciate a streamlined setup with (at most) minimal pre-game choices.
  2. Intuitive to learn and retain. The design of the game takes into account the accessibility and learning experience–ideally, new players can be presented with a few core rules and start to take turns due to the presentation and order of operations. Retention is also a factor, enabled by few to no rule exceptions.
  3. Ability to plan ahead before taking your turn (you shouldn’t have to wait for the previous player to complete their turn to be able to decide what you’re doing on your turn).
  4. Limited analysis paralysis with choices displayed on player mats, game board, etc. There is a reasonable amount of information on display, not dozens of cards and tiles with detailed text that players need to read from across the table.
  5. Tension and positive player interaction, not hostility. We like to limit the potential for spite while still encouraging various forms of interaction and tension.
  6. Interesting choices and strong agency (with only a dose of luck). We love agency in games; it means that players have control over their fate. Random elements are largely there for variability; if there is luck involved, players are opting into it or are at least able to make decisions based on random input (e.g., instead of rolling dice to determine an outcome).
  7. Rewards and forward momentum, not punishment and backwards movement. Our games help players feel like they’ve progressed during the game to a superior position than at the beginning (i.e., engine building).
  8. Strong connection between theme and mechanisms. Mechanisms are designed to around a theme to keep players immersed in the experience instead of the structure of the game constantly reminding players that they’re playing a game (e.g., we avoid phases and action checklists).
  9. The potential for dramatic, memorable moments in a game is difficult to achieve, but it’s a huge plus when the game allows and encourages them to happen.
  10. Distinctly tactile experience. We love games with appealing, exciting components, ideally accomplished in an eco-friendly manner. It can be as simple as the cardboard Tetris-style pieces in Patchwork or as complex (yet important) as the wheels in Tzolk’in.
  11. Variable factors that create replayability–you can’t play the same exact game twice, even if you try.
  12. Multiple paths to victory. Various game subsystems are balanced through playtesting and data analysis to be equal in their ability to reach the winning criteria.