Design Day 2019 Recap – Stonemaier Games

Design Day 2019 Recap

This weekend, Stonemaier Games hosted its sixth annual Design Day. On Saturday, various hosts in St. Louis (myself and a few others) held day-long game days at our homes. On Sunday, the Design Day itself featured designers, playtesters, and gamers from St. Louis and around the country for 10+ hours of playtesting and gaming at Pieces Board Game Bar and Cafe.

The purpose of Design Day is to bring together designers and playtesters to give and receive feedback on game prototypes, expand their network within the gaming community, and learn from clever mechanisms in published games. If you’d like to know details about how the day is structured, you can read about previous Design Days hereherehere, here, and here.

Why I’m Writing This

To put it simply, Design Day is just something I like doing. I like doing it for the designers. I like doing it for the playtesters and gamers. And I like doing it for me–it feels good for me to host something fun and useful for others, and I get to play games for a day with awesome people. Plus, it gives me an opportunity to scout potential Stonemaier Games publications.

So I thought it might also be helpful for you to hear a little bit about this year’s Design Day, just in case you’re interested in hosting your own event someday.

How Does Design Day Work?

We hit a sweet spot last year on a number of levels after taking a big leap forward, so we pretty much just replicated the same thing this year. I’ll share those core elements here:

  • I opened ticket sales in the spring to past attendees, then any remaining tickets went to e-newsletter subscribers who signed up before they sold out (space is limited at Pieces to around 100 people). I charged $40 per ticket, which covers about 70% of the total food/beverage/space cost for the day (Stonemaier subsidized the rest).
  • I sent monthly emails each month for 6 months, each containing new information and an actionable step for attendees. Probably the most complicated step is creating the calendar of events, which requires us to consider game length, player count, table size, etc. I have a friend who is very good at sorting through this puzzle on a Google Doc, which we share with attendees so they can sign up for specific games.
  • I hosted a casual Saturday game day (along with a few other hosts in the St. Louis area) at my home, mostly geared towards out-of-towners.
  • Design Day itself was hosted by Pieces, which provided the space, food, and drinks (and access to their huge game collection).
  • The schedule of the day is preset–people sign up for tables in advance. Past attendees know this system really well, so I never had to interrupt the day with a single announcement, yet every game ran on schedule. Attendees were also flexible for games that ended early or when the designers didn’t show up–they simply picked another game to play.
  • At Design Day, we play a mix of unpublished prototypes and published games, with the intent being that each can inform the experiences of the other.
  • My co-founder, Alan, and I spent most of the day observing various games and trying to ensure that everyone had a game to play whenever they wanted.

10 Highest-Rated Games of Design Day 2019

After playtesters tried out the 36 prototypes at Design Day), they wrote down a 1-10 rating on a little card. Design Day isn’t a competition; rather, the ratings are meant to help designers figure out how much work their games need (and perhaps they can offer those designers a boost of confidence or something quantifiable to show to a publisher or their Kickstarter backers).

  1. Crimson Dawn by Alex Schmidt (8.75)
  2. Feudal Flick by Tyson Gajewski (8.43)
  3. Legacies by Jason Brooks (8.13)
  4. Hadrian’s Line by Matthew J Van Howe (8.11)
  5. Valkyrie by Kathleen Mercury (8.00)
  6. Best Laid Plans by Travis Jones (7.83)
  7. Dimensional Rift Mining Co by Matt Spurgeon (7.83)
  8. Zookeepers by Drew Duke (7.71)
  9. Raven Rock by Adam Holt 7.67)
  10. Judgment of Ma’at by Ben Ennes (7.10)

Honey Buzz also finished with a great rating (8.89), but the designer and I decided in advance that, as a finished game, it wasn’t quite fair to include it among the prototypes (he was intending to bring an incomplete game per Design Day guidelines, but it fell through at the last minute). It’ll be on Kickstarter in a few weeks.

Have you found value in running or attending events related to your industry? If you want to attend Design Day next year, feel free to enter your e-mail on our “back in stock” notification, and we’ll announce any additional slots in our April e-newsletter.

13 Comments on “Design Day 2019 Recap

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  1. […] way back in 2009, with heavy revisions and implementation ramping up in 2018. Abe even took it to Stonemaier Design Day in 2019 (a cool event Jamey Stegmaier hosts in St. Louis for prototypes and unpublished games), where it […]

  2. […] Day Attendees (2019 event): The creative energy and generosity of time and talent at our fourth annual Design Day was truly […]

  3. Hello Jamey, can you tell me more about how the schedule is preset? Do designers post their schedule and people just sign up?

    1. Tony: I set the entire schedule in advance, assigning prototypes to various times/tables. People then sign up to play the games (also in advance).

  4. Hi Jamey! I hosted a similar, smaller sized prototyping day event in my store last month (10 games and maybe 20 playtesters). That bit about the hassle of coordinating the game length / table space / player count really struck a chord with me. Is it possible to get a copy that google doc that you used to organize all these game sessions? I’ve looked through the previous year Design Day and I can’t seem to find it as well. Cheers!

  5. As a fan of stonemaier games and one who catches alot of how to design content that Jamey puts out, I would love to attend this some day. Being on the west coast in near Vancouver, BC means this would be quite the expense. Maybe when I’m done a few of my prototypes I’ll try to make it. I look forward to meeting Jamey in person. Also would like to meet Morten Peterson too.

  6. I was on the waitlist and was disappointed that I wasn’t able to get in this year, especially after my game did so well at the Geekway game design contest in May. Here’s hoping for next year!

    I’m also excited to see a few names I recognize in that top ten list — very cool! I’m eager to play some of these in the future.

  7. Wow! This seems like such an incredible event. Thank you for sharing. And congrats to all the top 10 designers from this event!

  8. Hey! Good to see Best Laid Plans on the list. I have had a lot of fun playtesting it! Looks like you forgot to list the designer though – Travis Jones. I would love to make it to a design day sometime. This looks like such a blast.

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