A few weeks ago, someone got the first Stonemaier-inspired tattoo in the history of my company. As Austin H. shared in the Viticulture Facebook group, he got the tattoo “to pay homage to my love of board games, and to symbolize what they mean to me, now and looking forward.” I told him in the […]
Yesterday we made our first new-game announcement in over 2 years: My Little Scythe. If you’re keeping track, we released a new game, Charterstone, 5 months ago. But I actually announced that game in spring 2016. Since then I’ve been honing how Stonemaier Games announces and releases new products. The My Little Scythe announcement and […]
Have you ever shared a referral link? When I was thinking about this post, my initial answer was no. I was thinking about it in terms of specific tweets or Facebook posts where I mention a project and share a referral link, which I don’t recall doing. But then I realized that I’ve definitely embedded […]
Earlier this week, we closed direct pre-orders for Visit from the Rhine Valley, a new expansion for Viticulture. So today I thought I’d talk about how this process went, as there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff that other creators might find useful. Announcing the Game I’ve been trying to significantly close the gap between when […]
In this series, I highlight some of the interesting choices made by creators regarding their project’s reward levels, stretch goals, and overall campaign design (the projects themselves, not the content or product). This isn’t an endorsement or promotion. GROWL Creator Joey Vigour implemented two really innovative things with GROWL, a small card game. First, he offered a $1 reward […]
Have you ever read a Buzzfeed list or filled out one of their quizzes? If you’re like me, you have. But if you’re like me, you may not have realized the overarching philosophy Buzzfeed uses to encourage people to share and interact with their content. That will change if you watch this TED Talk: The […]
Over the last year, we’ve received 207 game submissions. I don’t know the lifetime number of submissions, as the form we now use has only been live for a year, but in total I’d say it’s around 400 submissions. Of those 400, we have published (or will be publishing) 5 of them. A number of […]
If I had a time machine that I could use to fix mistakes I made when creating and growing Stonemaier Games, it would get a lot of use. But along the way I stumbled into a few things that set a foundation for future success. I’d want to tell my past self to do those […]
It’s video day on the blog! I’ve added 3 new short videos about Kickstarter, crowdfunding, and entrepreneurship to my YouTube channel. You can find the previous videos on our website or mixed in with my game design videos on YouTube. The corresponding written entries are in the description of each video (click through to YouTube to see them). […]
I’m surprised to see that I still frequently use pretty much every on the original list for this topic–15 tools (mostly apps and websites)–even though I wrote that post in 2014. In fact, many of those tools keep getting better. The tools from that list I still use are: Mozy, Box, Basecamp, Trello, Google Docs/Forms, […]
