This weekend, just a few days before yesterday’s Braided Skies reveal, Stonemaier Games hosted its 13th 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, here, here, here, and here.

Why We Run This Event

On paper, the event doesn’t make much sense. We’re not promoting anything. There’s really no focus on Stonemaier Games at all. 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 four games that appeared at Design Day), 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 80 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 2027). We added a few extra people this year, though there are space and noise limitations we are mindful of. We charged $45-55 per ticket, which accounts for about 40% of the total food/beverage/space cost for the day (Stonemaier covers the rest).
• Joe sent an email each month containing new information and an actionable step for attendees. 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 around 30 people participated on a hot afternoon at Crestwood Park. Designer Ben Rosset also ran a Q&A about game design and manufacturing in the morning, and Paul Salomon (Gamehead Games) ran a playtesting event on Saturday evening.
• Pieces Board Game Bar and Cafe provided the space, food, and drinks (and access to their huge game collection). This was our second year at Pieces’ new, bigger location, and it’s still great! The tables are much more spread out, and nearly every table is wheelchair accessible. Pieces serves their delicious homemade cookies throughout the day, and attendees optionally enjoyed their delicious gaming-themed mocktails and cocktails. Pieces has its busiest day on Saturday (and Saturday is a very 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 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, and we ask designers to share rulebooks in advance for attendees to peruse). It’s very structured. We never 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 unsigned prototypes, to-be-published/crowdfunded prototypes, and a few 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.
• Playtesters optionally filled out a short form (created by Hilda Vazquez) after each playtest to give to the designer.
• I spent most of the day observing various games, checking in with designers and playtesters, 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 a 1-6 scale indicating how close a game is to being publishable.

Based on this rating scale–basically, how close they are to being a successful publishable game–here are the top-rated games of Design Day 2026, with brief descriptions in the words of the designers:

1. Alchemists of Avalon by Tyson Gajewski (5.8): Mancala, resource manipulation, drafting, contracts
2. Among Mortals by Brendan Hansen (5.5): Card game with a shared board. Area Control, Hand Management, Variable Powers, Hidden Affinities
3. Puzzle Factory by Ben Rosset (5.5): Worker Placement, Puzzle-making, Partial Simultaneous Play
4. Moominos by Hilda Vazquez (5.4): Card/Tile drafting, Thinky-puzzle, Set Collection
5. Delvers of Deepgate by Clayton Smith (5.17): Tower Defense Dungeon Dive
6. The Royal Tent by Heather Dixon (5.17): Shared Engine Building, Rondel, Contract Fulfillment, Variable End-Game Trigger
7. Treat Street by Jacob Gentrup (5.11): Series of mini card games
8. Top Flight by Kyle Boyer (5.07): Push your luck racing
9. Aragonite by Wes Kendall (5.06): Pattern block-laying, trick-taking, bag-building, engine-building
10. Synchrony by Austin Bailey & Jason Jones (5.04): Ephemeral engine and tableau-building, asymmetric set collection, time-as-a-resource

Other games rated 5.00 on average were Dice Rogue (Joe Totherow), Franchise Wars (Pete Wissinger), Magic Tricks (Chris Porter), and Pips (Ben Morayta).

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

If you want to attend Design Day next year, you can use this year’s listing to get a notification for 2027, and if there are any extra slots, we’ll likely announce them in our April e-newsletter.

Have you found value in running or attending events related to your industry? As alternatives to Design Day, there are Protospiel, Unpub, and other playtest events around the country, including some at Geekway to the West in St. Louis in May.

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My favorite way to market our products is to facilitate and encourage them to get to the table more often. Your table, my table, the tables of reviewers, ambassadors, etc–any table will do. The more our products get to the table, the more they’re exposed to people, and hopefully the more fun people can have with them.

One of my favorite ways to accomplish this goal is through play-and-win donations for game conventions and 100+ person gaming events.

Play-and-win is a convention concept where people can check out a game, play it, and then enter their name in a lottery to win that specific game at the end of the convention. If I donate a play-and-win game to a convention, it can be experienced by dozens and dozens of people in a short amount of time. Only one of those people will win it, so if other people liked the game, they’re now informed in their decision to purchase it later.

The play-and-win room at the recent Geekway to the West convention was a bustle of activity right until the end of the convention. Geekway solicited and invested in over 140 different play-and-win titles, each with multiple copies. In total, these games had nearly 15,000 reported plays over the course of 4 days.

Geekway does play-and-win exceptionally well, but they aren’t alone. There are over 250 conventions listed on the 2026 tab of the play-and-win Google Sheet I maintain, so publishers have lots of options when choosing events to target. But which games should you send to these conventions?

Geekway play-and-win coordinator Jeff Hiatt was very kind to send me the data from the Geekway 2026 play-and-win, and he gave me permission to share and analyze it. The sheet is here. I’ll focus on the first four columns, but you’re welcome to contribute your thoughts to any data in the comments.

I’ve highlighted the most-played games in blue (1-30), the highest “desire to win ratio” in yellow, and the crossovers in green.

Number of Plays

The top 5 games that were played the most were Hot Streak, Magical Athlete, Bomb Busters, Moon Colony Bloodbath, and Hummingbirds. All of the games in the top 10 were released in the last year.

For this and the other categories I’ll discuss, I’m hesitant to draw blanket conclusions or stretch to find commonalities among the top 5. For example, there are 2 racing games here, but not every racing game will garner 250+ plays at a convention.

Average Player Count

Around half of the games with the highest average player count are among those that reported high numbers of plays: Hot Streak, Magical Athlete, French Toast, Bomb Busters, Trinket Trove, and Spooktacular.

However, sorting the data this way doesn’t seem to indicate that higher player counts equate to more convention plays. I think player count flexibility is more indicative of a game’s popularity at an event like Geekway–if you grab a game off the shelf, it’s nice if you can just play it with one other person or if you can invite a few others to join too.

Desire to Win

I calculated this by dividing the number of player who wanted to win a game by the total number of plays, indicating that people had a great time with the game. The top 5 were Hot Streak, Magical Athlete, Pinched, 12 Rivers, and Spooktacular. Some games with fewer plays but a high level of desirability were Sprocketforge, Mission: Red Planet, Rebirth, and Pergola.

The main pattern I see here is great table presence, whether it’s component hooks like in 12 Rivers or Sprocketforge or eye-catching art.

Rating Delta

This is perhaps my favorite data point. Which games rate significantly higher at a convention than their BoardGameGeek rating suggests? I think this is so important to pay attention to, as the top-rated games BGG would lead us to believe that people value heavy, complex, long games over everything else. But a vast variety of games bring joy to tabletops, including lighter games.

The top 5 rating delta games were French Toast, Purrramid, Tembo, Australis, and Catan.

Granted, the boisterous environment of a convention is atypical for gaming. Some games shine at events and may not have the same luster when it’s just you and a few friends at home. Also, you might take a look at the games that actually left a worse impression at Geekway than their BGG rating would indicate. Those are the types of games a publisher might avoid contributing to play-and-win (I mostly see longer, heavier games here).

Anecdotal Analysis and Conclusions

Here I’ll look at the games with the both the most plays AND the highest desire to win ratio:

1. Hot Streak
2. Magical Athlete
3. Bomb Busters
4. Moon Colony Bloodbath
5. Trinket Trove
6. Formaggio
7. Fate of the Fellowship
8. 12 Rivers
9. Spooktacular
10. French Toast
11. Sanctuary

• ease of learning: Most of these games skew towards easy to learn and teach.
• game length: Most of these games are played in under an hour.
• game weight: Most of these games are on the lighter side.
• price: Most of these games are less than $50.

Overall, the types of games I see exceling in play-and-win are those released in the last year, have player count flexibility, feature great table presence, and are on the lighter side.

Despite those patterns, I still think it’s completely fine to send a variety of games to play-and-win conventions. Take a look at the Google Sheet and you’ll see games of all shapes, sizes, weights, prices, player counts, etc. I think this speaks to the diversity of gamers at events like Geekway.

What did you learn from this data? Are there certain types of games you seek out at conventions?

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If you gain value from the 100 articles Jamey publishes on this blog each year, please consider championing this content! You can also listen to posts like this in the audio version of the blog.

I spent the last 4 days at Geekway to the West, an absolutely incredible game convention in St. Louis. Today I’ll share some of my highlights and observations through three lenses: Jamey as a publisher, designer, and gamer.

Publisher Jamey

Stonemaier Games participates in a few ways at Geekway: We donate a lot of games to their play-and-win section, which has proven year after year to be a great way to share our games with people who haven’t tried them.

We also have a booth in their vendor hall (Geekway primarily focuses on casual gaming, but they do have vendor space too) run by my coworker Dave and staffed by an amazingly generous demo team. Our main intent at the booth is simply for people to have fun and learn about our games, and it’s a nice bonus if we sell some games too (this year it looks like our booth revenue was around $16k, and people could also place orders on our webstore and pick up their order at Geekway since our warehouse is located in St. Louis).

I like that Geekway provides publishers a lot of different options. You can have a booth if you want, but you could also have a demo table through Double Exposure, you could just put games in play-and-win, or you can just wander around and connect with people (or scout games to potentially publish).

I’ll also add that having several years of t-shirt and hoodie sales provides a really nice way for me to look around any room at Geekway and identify people who know Stonemaier Games. The warm hoodies were particularly helpful, as the main hall at Geekway was quite cold this year.

Designer Jamey

There are two sides to Designer Jamey at conventions: past and future. For games I’ve already designed, it’s immensely gratifying to see people playing them. I don’t think I’m alone, as I saw other designers checking in on people playing their games (this happened to me while playing the card game Oopsy Poopsy). I taught and played Euphoria Essential and Origin Story, and I had a great time learning the game Dark Heists from the designer, Moe Poplar.

Then there are the games I have yet to to design. I love playing a variety of published games at Geekway to learn from them. This year I played 14 new-to-me games and 6 games I already knew (it’s nice to revisit games to look at them from a fresh perspective).

Geekway provides several opportunities for designers to get feedback about unpublished games, including the clever Playtest to Win area.

Last, I’m so grateful for everyone who either played a game with me or just came up to me to say hi. Those moments and that time means the world to me. As someone who has social anxiety about approaching people, seeing others do it to me gives me the courage to do the same for others. Thank you for the inspiration!

Gamer Jamey

While Geekway is part work for me, it’s also part play. I love playing games with delightful people, and Geekway is full of them. In total I played 20 different games at Geekway (plus a round of disc golf) with around 60 people. I spent most of my time in a smaller ballroom in the first floor of the connected hotel–it was a much quieter in there (and warmer) than the main convention hall. Thanks to everyone who took the time to play with me!

I appreciate play-and-win as a gamer too, as it helps me narrow down which games to play out of so many options (though I did also check out both Blood Rage and The King Is Dead from the main library to revisit them). Without play-and-win, I wouldn’t have discovered the delightful game 3 Chapters, experienced the whimsy of the cat game Oopsy Poopsy, or delved into the strategic cleverness of Galileo Galilei.

While Geekway does have a few events people can sign up for, the vast majority of the convention is casual gaming. This, I’ve found, is my preferred structure for a convention, as I like the fluid nature of going from game to game at my own pace, remaining flexible as to what I play and how long I play. I’m grateful to Geekway for embracing this format, and I’m always open to suggestions for other similar conventions!

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If you were at Geekway to the West this weekend (or you’ve attended a gaming event in 2026), I’d love to hear a few of your highlights!

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If you gain value from the 100 articles Jamey publishes on this blog each year, please consider championing this content! You can also listen to posts like this in the audio version of the blog.