Design Day 2023 Recap

This weekend, Stonemaier Games hosted its tenth annual Design Day. On Sunday, the Design Day itself featured designers, playtesters, and gamers from St. Louis and around the country for 12+ hours of playtesting and gaming at Pieces Board Game Bar and Cafe.

The purpose of Design Day is to bring together designers, playtesters, and content creators 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 here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Why We Run This Event

On paper, the event doesn’t make all that much sense. We’re not promoting anything. There’s really no focus on Stonemaier Games at all. Attendees pay a fee to cover the 3 meals provided by Pieces, but we lose money on the event.

To put it simply, Design Day is just something we like doing. We like doing it for the designers, the playtesters and gamers, and the content creators. The creative energy is palpable and inspiring, and it seems to be a worthwhile, joyous experience for attendees. I’m also on the lookout for future Stonemaier products (so far we’ve published three games that appeared at Design Day, and a fourth is on the way in 2024), but I’m mostly just trying to be helpful to other creators and maybe help them find the right publisher.

How Does Design Day Work?

• We opened most ticket sales in the spring to past attendees (around 70 tickets), then sold the remaining 30 tickets to people who signed up for a back-in-stock notification (you can use this year’s listing to get a notification for 2024); space is limited at Pieces to around 100 people. We charged $45-50 per ticket, which covers about 40% of the total food/beverage/space cost for the day (Stonemaier subsidizes the rest).
• We sent a email each month 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.
• We share and participate in casual, optional activities on Saturday. People travel great distances to Design Day, so we try to offer a full weekend of activities for those who want it. One local attendee, Melissa, is always very kind to open up her home for a gaming evening, and some attendees visit friends or sightsee in St. Louis. It’s also become a tradition to introduce attendees to disc golf; this year over 20 people participated!
• Pieces Board Game Bar and Cafe provided the space, food, and drinks (and access to their huge game collection). We have Pieces serve their delicious homemade cookies throughout the day, and attendees enjoyed their delicious gaming-themed alcoholic beverages. Pieces has its busiest day on Saturday (and Saturday is just a busy day in that area of St. Louis), hence why Design Day is on Sunday. We use a buffet format for meals: Bagels and muffins for breakfast, poke bowls for lunch, and a nacho bar for dinner. There are fruits, veggies, and gluten-free options at every meal.
• The schedule of the day is preset. People sign up for tables in advance (we guarantee that each designer who signs up in advance will get to playtest their game at least twice). It’s very structured. We never have to interrupt the day with announcements, and 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.
• A mix of unpublished prototypes and published games were played, with the intent being that each can inform the experiences of the other. There’s this great mindset of talking about game design from all angles throughout the day.
• I spent most of the day observing various games, asking leading questions to designers, and trying to have a few minutes of quality time with each attendee.

How Were the Games?

I truly am inspired and awestruck by the creativity, innovation, and vulnerability of the designers at this event. Everyone puts a lot of work into these games, and I loved listening to the constructive interactions between designers and playtesters.

Design Day isn’t a competition, but as a way of helping designers see how far along their games are, we ask attendees to rate each game on the following scale:

Based on this rating scale–basically, how close to a successful publishable game are they–here are the top-rated games of Design Day 2023:

1. Crits & Tricks by Pete Wissinger (5.88): dice fueled trick taking
2. Cheap Trick by Paul Salomon (5.75): trick-taking
3. Apistocracy by Heather Dixon (5.71): action selection + set collection + trick-taking
4. One Good Apple by Ryan Davis (5.55): drafting, tableau-building
5. Sirenas (working title) by Hilda Vazquez (5.44): dice-based worker placement, set collection
6. Mycophile by Brandon Patton (5.43): card stacks + map + hidden incentives
7. Hearthland by Piotrek Chojnowski (5.38): set collection exploration game with a dynamic scoring criteria and hidden info
8. Dimensional Rift Mining Company by Matt Spurgeon (5.33): unique action + delivery system, tactile collection
9. Children of Mytheria (working title) by Liz Gattra (5.25): cooperative
10. Temporal Trash by Molly Bozarth (5.15): polyomino, set collection, secret goals

If publishers are curious to learn more about some of these games, I’m happy to talk to you about them and connect you to the designers (if they’re looking for a publisher)!

Next Year

I think we’ve found a good groove for Design Day, so other than probably shifting back to September so visitors can attend a Cardinals game, next year will probably look very similar to this year. We always send out a survey to attendees after the event, and I see some good feedback about temperature, providing the option of a more robust feedback form for playtesters, and clearer communication about how the Saturday events are open to everyone.

Have you found value in running or attending events related to your industry? If you want to attend Design Day next year, you can use this year’s listing to get a notification for 2024, and if there are any extra slots, we’ll likely announce them in our May e-newsletter.

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